Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2010

Foksani?

So this morning I'm minding my own business on the bus when at one of the stops this guy starts yelling at me. He got on the bus, pushed me a little bit, then got off and banged on my window. He's the one on the right in the picture. He kept repeating something like "foksani," which apparently means he wanted to fight me. He was either insane or in a drunken rage. I'd bet on the latter. It was strange to go from a sleepy doze to full attack adrenaline surge in a few seconds. Luckily everyone on the bus immediately rose to my defense, and people outside restrained him as you can see in the picture. So, no coffee for me this morning, thanks.

The new library

An organization called Biblionef donated a bunch of books to my school, so the library the Kalahari Experience built here has some books on the shelves. I've been teaching my classes there as well. The next step is to organize a system where the kids can be in there reading on a regular basis.

Quote of the day

Larison has the funniest recapitulation of the conservative response to Jacob Heilbrunn’s excellent Foreign Policy article "The End of the Establishment." Fly takes for granted that the public supports his objections to the Obama administration when they do not, and he then conjures up errors the administration has not committed to back up his original false claim. In other words, there is “broad foreign policy consensus on the Right today” because most Republicans and conservatives have simply been inventing claims about mistakes that Obama has not made, attributed views to him he does not hold, and imagined that most Americans reject administration policies that do not exist.

My new favorite picture

Namibia trip: Fish River Canyon and Sossusvlei

Fun facts: Namibia is the second-least densely populated country in the world (behind Mongolia, and if you don't count Greenland and some others as colonies). Namibia was also part of South Africa from 1920 to 1990, administered as a de-facto fifth province. Anyway, we started our trip by meeting up in Upington. There was a bit of a fiasco when I went with Noah to pick up our rental car in Kimberley (due apparently to my poor line of credit), but after some desperate pleading and signing a couple minor organs away as collateral, we managed to scrape through with Noah's card. The next day we got right to it, descending into the Fish River Canyon which was pretty close to as spectacular as advertised. I heard from several people that it's the second-largest canyon in the world (which seems like a rather difficult thing to measure), but to me it seemed comparable to some smaller US canyons like the San Juan, and quite a bit smaller than the Grand Canyon. It cuts down thr

Article of the day

Hackers get the better of the world's top computer security experts: The struggle against this remarkable worm is a sort of chess match unfolding in the esoteric world of computer security. It pits the cleverest attackers in the world, the bad guys, against the cleverest defenders in the world, the good guys (who have been dubbed the “Conficker Cabal”). It has prompted the first truly concerted global effort to kill a computer virus, extraordinary feats of international cooperation, and the deployment of state-of-the-art decryption techniques—moves and countermoves at the highest level of programming. The good guys have gone to unprecedented lengths, and have had successes beyond anything they would have thought possible when they started. But a year and a half into the battle, here’s the bottom line: The worm is winning.

Happy anniversary

July 24, 2009, we landed in O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg. (I missed it by a few days. Forgive me as I was out of the country.) It seems simultaneously forever ago and yesterday. I don't have much to add at this point other than cheap nostalgia; maybe I can come up with something better tomorrow when I start sorting through my hiking pictures.

Guest post: Black Box Revisited

[ Front matter: this is my Dad's best story. If I ever write anything this good, I'll be extremely proud of myself. It was published in Mountain Gazette in 2004 .] The call took me by surprise. I remember I was cooking something, maybe pancakes, in a smoking hot skillet, trying to talk while juggling a pan, spatula and the receiver. I hadn’t even talked to him in over a year. With the phone clamped to my ear by my shoulder I couldn’t hear all that well. Did he say Dugald? Breakfast was two degrees from emoliation. Yeah, Dugald Bremner. No kidding. He was planning a trip. Could I come along? It wasn’t so common anymore, to be included in the travel plans of my nefarious partners. I had married, having decided that happiness might best be pursued by living with one good woman in a hamlet in Utah. It was as far away from everything as you could get. If you went any further, you’d be coming back. It was sort of working out. I hadn’t been a full-time guide for a c

Today in preventable deaths

The only thing that gives me hope that the US will be able to get a handle on the health care crisis is that so many of the problems are, well, head-spinningly stupid : Deadly yet easily preventable bloodstream infections continue to plague American hospitals because facility administrators fail to commit resources and attention to the problem, according to a survey of medical professionals released Monday. An estimated 80,000 patients per year develop catheter-related bloodstream infections, or CRBSIs -- which can occur when tubes that are inserted into a vein to monitor blood flow or deliver medication and nutrients are improperly prepared or left in longer than necessary. About 30,000 patients die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accounting for nearly a third of annual deaths from hospital-acquired infections in the United States. Yet evidence suggests hospital workers could all but eliminate CRBSIs by following a five-step checklist that is

Last thoughts on the World Cup

For most of the time, I don't much care about sport. As a Colorado resident, I didn't realize the Rockies were in the World Series until they lost their second game and never watched John Elway and the Broncos win the Superbowl. I usually tend to think that sports are pointless (the very definition of a sport really), the games often terribly brutal, and the players spoiled, overpaid corporate shills. That's not to say I don't enjoy watching the occasional game--I still remember the Rose Bowl where Vince Young led UT to victory against USC as very good. The thing is I am not a fan. One can't really enjoy a sport if one doesn't care who wins. However, this has been sport at its very best. All those negative things about sport are all true--but it's not the whole story. Witness the ceasefire Didier Drogba single-handedly wrought in Ivory Coast in 2006. Most countries are built around political compromise, often ignoring ethnic distributions and geogr

Is baie koud vandag

About a week ago I was talking with a friend in New York and gloating a little bit because it was close to 40 C there with intense humidity. I didn't genuflect that day to the gods in charge of punishing the smug (deities which figure prominently in my personal cosmology), because a couple days later it got really cold, the coldest so far in the village. This morning there was a layer of ice on my water bucket. It's not really that cold by previous standards--when I lived in Utah I can remember it getting to -40 a few times. (Bonus points if you can tell me why the scale doesn't matter.) The thing that gets me is that you can't escape. It's colder in my shack than outside during the day. The sleeping bag my folks sent me a couple months bag has been a godsend; I sleep in it every night and spend much of the day sitting around in it. About the only way to get and stay warm. Another issue is my computer. Below a certain temperature it trips the fan to maximum

Feel it: it is gone

Well, that went by pretty quick. We're already feeling post-World Cup hangover as what was helping prop up the economy and distracting everyone from the intractable problems ground to a halt. Last night I watched the final with my host family wrapped in my sleeping bag as the temperature plummeted to near-freezing yesterday. I have to agree with Becca's sentiments here : As the world cup comes to an end this weekend, it's a bit hard to process. It seems like the World Cup has been omnipresent in South Africa's consciousness since long before we arrived in the country so it will be a bit weird to go on without it. The final itself was a little underwhelming--all the semifinals and especially the third place match were far better soccer. There were some atrocious fouls, particularly from the Dutch. I was amazed the De Jong's karate kick into Xavi Alonso's chest didn't end up with a red card. Still, the better team won, and on a very impressive goal, n

Philosophy articles

Ron Rosenbaum takes on the New Atheists (as seems to be fashionable these days) in something he calls An Agnostic Manifesto . Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.) Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually . Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of "multiverse

Is the Daily Show sexist?

A few days back, after the tryout of former video-game host Olivia Munn, Jezebel posted an indictment of The Daily Show : The Daily Show is many things: progressive darling, alleged news source for America's youth, righteous media critique. And it's also a boys' club where women's contributions are often ignored and dismissed. The show responded with this letter from women staffers: The Daily Show isn't a place where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens. On the contrary: just like the men here, we're indispensable. We generate a significant portion of the show's creative content and the fact is, it wouldn't be the show that you love without us. It's tough to know what to make of this. Comedy is, indisputably, a male-dominated profession. Take a look at Comedy Central's list of the 100 best comedians--by my count, eight of them are women. And according to Jezebel, Munn is only the second female correspondent in

Spain vs. Germany

While not the most exciting game, this was one that Spain deserved to win. They played better than I've seen them in the whole tournament. Germany, while they played well, showed little of the devastating power that saw them obliterate Argentina, perhaps because of Mueller's absence. In any case, the final should be fantastic. No matter who wins, it will be a country that has never gotten the cup before, and I heartily support that. In fact, this is the first time that Spain has even made it to the semifinals. Sports Illustrated called the final for them--we'll see what happens. All in all, I've been much more pleased with the quality of play and games so far than in 2006. Let's hope it stays that way.

Quote of the day

"No doubt a youth who received impressions cautiously, whose love was lukewarm, and whose mind was too prudent for his age and so of little value, such a young man might, I admit, have avoided what happened to my hero...I am glad that my hero showed himself not too reasonable at that moment, for any man of sense will come back to reason in time, but, if love does not gain the upper hand in a boy's heart at such an exception moment, when will it?" -- The Brothers Karamazov . I was reminded of that by this article in the NYT . Still gives me the shivers.

Superman!

I bet you didn't know I could fly, huh? That's Lion's Head in the background. UPDATE: That island in the bay there is Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned.

Karen Kaye bait

We saw this bird-thing in Kruger. I don't know what the hell it is.

Handstand of the day

I'm going through some of my vacation pictures. This one is taken from the top of Table Mountain in Cape Town. My friend on the right there wrote a pretty extensive journal of the whole trip, with luck we can get a version of that posted here in the future, complete with videos and pictures. Sound good?

Heading home

Today I'm on the taxi back to the village after this workshop. It's a bit tight but pretty cheap.

Sunset

This from yesterday.