Category: learning curve

On high

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Wi-fi on planes is another one of those technologies which, like Falcon rocket boosters landing on drone ships in the middle of the ocean, will never cease to amaze me.

I’m currently 11,203m above the Free State, traveling at 905kph and I’m still getting 16Mbps.

The fact that I can even upload images onto the blog to show you this by pinging the pixels off a satellite tens of thousands of kilometres up above us is absolutely crazy.

To me, at least.

Now if they could just stop the plane bouncing around so much, and find some flight attendants who could smile, we’d be golden.

Long haul

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We’re flying today. Total time in the air should be around 18½ hours (Cape Town is long way from anywhere), but then when you add check-ins and door to door stuff, you’re probably looking at nearer a whole day.

We could have gone on a much more direct route (and potentially avoided this), but that wouldn’t actually have saved much more than 3 or 4 hours and would have wasted half a day at the other end. It would have also cost a lot more (like almost double), and to be honest we would rather spend that money on experiences and beer than on a slightly more direct flight.

That slightly more direct flight would also be on a very old plane, instead of the shiny new ones we will be enjoying.

And although BA have now done away with their 747s, they are still running 777-200s mostly built in the last century, on the Cape Town route. Those outdated aircraft don’t offer much comfort for passengers, given that it’s their 5th longest flight at around 11½ hours.

BA’s longer flights are:
4: Gatwick to Mauritius (also on 777-200s and doubly awful because you start at Gatwick)
3: Heathrow to Singapore
2: Heathrow to Buenos Aires
1: Heathrow to Santiago

That discomfort noted, it’s worth remembering that BA have been flying to Cape Town for over 90 years now. The first flight (albeit operating under Imperial Airlines, rather than the BA name at the time) was on January 20th 1932. The distance of er… 6000 Miles… being a bit much for aircraft back in those days, there were numerous stops along the way, and the journey took 11 days rather than 11 hours.

Better book a bit more annual leave.

Caught short

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It’s the shortest day of the year in Cape Town (and elsewhere in the global south too, obvs).

That means sunrise at 0751, sunset at 1744 and just 9 hours, 53 minutes and 31 seconds of daylight today. That’s 1 second shorter than yesterday, and 0.65 seconds shorter than tomorrow. It might not seem like much, because it’s not, but these things do get measured and those are the numbers.

Make plans now. Don’t waste your 0.65 extra seconds of daylight tomorrow.

Of course, that means that it’s also the longest day in the Northern hemisphere, and from tomorrow, the nights will be closing in as they head inexorably towards winter.

This year, this fact is actually rather annoying, given that we’re heading up to the top half of the world very shortly. But still, because we’re staying (generally) to the west side of their time zone, and because we’re staying (exclusively) a lot further north than Cape Town is south, we’re still going to have some lovely late evenings.

In fact, sunset on our second night in Ireland will only be at 9:58pm. Sunset has never been anywhere near that late in Cape Town.

It’s been a long, hard winter so far, and we’re not out of the woods just yet.
But hey, South Africa: summer is just around the corner.

A weird 0

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Wandering downstairs in the semi-darkness this morning, I took a quick look at the rain gauge.

It’s broken.

There’s this odd “0” shape being displayed on the screen where there are usually the numbers of millimetres of rain. I’m going to have to have a look at the manual, because I can’t remember it doing this before.

More seriously, it is nice to have a day with no rain forecast to just try and make a start on drying everything (and I mean everything) out. We’ve had over 460mm of rain so far this month, versus the long term average of 175mm for the whole of June. It’s no wonder the rain gauge needs a break.

On the plus side, the dams are now sitting at 91.7% full (yesterday morning, before yesterday’s rain and before all the run-off form all the other rain).

That rather erect worm means that we’re looking good for a water restriction-free summer, although the best time to save water is when you have water, and with this on the way, maybe caution is the sensible option.

But for now, go and enjoy the sunshine ahead of the (showers tomorrow and the) next cold front early next week.

H5N1 – coming soon

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With a world suffering with pandemic fatigue, knobhead anti-vaxxers rife everywhere you look, and a general deep distrust of Government-instituted Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), an outbreak of something really serious right now couldn’t come at a worse time.

Jimmy Carr: “Do you think we overreacted to Covid-19?”
Audience: “Yes!”
JC: “Yeah, a lot of the survivors think so.”

Jimmy Carr – His Dark Material (2021)

And yet, the warning signs are very much there that Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu (HPAI) (H5N1) has had its fun with the birds and is moving onto mammals. In the US, there have been almost 200 “spillover” infections of mammals with the virus:

On March 29, the USDA first published its data on cases of HPAI infections in mammals from 2022 to late March 2023. The H5N1 virus subtype was detected in numerous species: bobcat, black and brown bears, bottlenose dolphin, harbor and grey seals, mountain lion, red fox, raccoon, striped skunk, and more.

While on the Pacific Coast of South America it’s looking even more serious:

Indeed:

Senapesca made a balance on Monday on the progress of avian influenza in Chile, detailing that a total of 11,471 specimens have died as a result of this influenza.
The authorities confirmed the deaths of 9,853 sea lions, 1,555 Humboldt penguins, 27 chungungos, 21 spiny porpoises, 14 Chilean dolphins and one huillín.

Senapesca is the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Chile.
Chungungos and huillíns are two different sorts of otter. You live*, you learn.

And sure, the penguins are very much avian, but the rest of them… well… it’s not good news.

It’s important to understand that at the moment, there have been very few human cases of H5N1, and no reports of human to human transmission. So no need to panic. But there are a couple of provisos: firstly, that this is a very nasty virus with a very high mortality rate in the cases we have seen (far, far (far!) higher than SARS-CoV-2), and secondly, we’re potentially only ever one mutation away from that human to human transmission becoming a thing, and the more mammalian infections that we see, the more likely that is to happen.

On the plus side, we have a very good handle on this Influenza virus already. It’s been around for a while and we’ve got a lot of information on its genomics and how it works. That should mean that any vaccine production should be able to be rapidly achieved, and that the product should be very effective.

But then there are all the politics and logistics to slow things down.

It then remains to be seen – in the event of it all going pear-shaped – how many people will actually go and get vaccinated, given the problems detailed in the first paragraph above. But in this case, I can’t see choosing not to as being any more than an accelerated form of natural selection.

Anyway, definitely one to watch out for.
Enjoy your day.

* not if you’re an otter, obviously