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Showing posts from April, 2011

Nuclear ice

A practical joke fad has been sweeping through Peace Corps South Africa. It's called 'icing.' One finds a Smirnof Ice and presents it to the target of one's choice, who is obligated to drink the entire thing in one go. Here we can see, though, there is a bottle twice the size of average. I therefore propose the term 'nuclear ice' to describe such an attack.

Baby steps

In an encouraging sign, my school's new library is still being used, and a couple weeks back they tracked down another mess of used books from somewhere. What's more, all of it has been done without any help from me.

Multitasking

Speaking of multitasking, Kevin Drum has a question : After writing a couple of posts about multitasking, I'm curious about something: how good are you at multitasking? Which is to say, how good do you think you are at multitasking? And what kinds of things to you multitask at? ...But I can't multitask at all. For example, I can't listen to music and write at the same time. It's too distracting. I don't comment on TV news much because I don't watch TV news. Partly that's because TV news rots your brain, but mostly it's because I can't write while the TV is on in the background. Too distracting. And when I write long form pieces for the magazine, I work on them almost exclusively on weekends. I just can't task switch effectively between blogging and article writing during the day. Of course, this is only true for cognitive tasks. Like anyone, I can work out and watch TV at the same time, or carry on a conversation while I'm cooking dinner

Collected links

1. Gay marriage just keeps on gaining . 2. Multitasking makes you dumber . 3. ProPublica's Pulitzer-winning series on Wall Street . 4. Yglesias has advice on making blogging into a job . 5. The future according to Google .

Washing machines and dryers

Yglesias : Once upon a time there were no washing machines so washing clothes by hand is what people did and since it’s a huge pain in the ass, getting paid by someone else to do their laundry by hand was a job you could have. Handwashing jobs are still common here in rural South Africa. Being that unemployment is often 50-90% in villages, it makes a lot of sense. Personally, I do it myself because I'm cheap, though I get an offer from an old lady about once a week to do my washing. I've gotten fairly used to it, but Yglesias is right, it's a huge pain in the ass. Going back to the old washing machine is one thing I'm really looking forward to back home. However, I don't think I'll ever use a clothes dryer again. (Maybe that's too strong; using them to fluff pillows and so forth is pretty convenient. In any case, that's why God made laundromats.) Hanging my clothes up outside is easy, convenient, and saves a lot of time. At my site, I hang t

Petitionary prayer

My mp3 player batteries gave about about two-thirds of the way through my bus trip back to Kuruman and so I was unfortunately forced to listen to a lot of Christian propaganda. What's more, they had a lame Christian movie going with the volume so loud that, though I used earplugs, I couldn't help following the plot. The Christianity-drenched part didn't bother me so much as the utterly atrocious production values and acting, but it did spark some questions in my mind. Namely, what kind of God is implied by Intercape-style prayer? By the "Intercape" qualifier I mean to rule out the kind of prayer that characterizes a lot of Eastern or intellectual religious practice; examples might be straight up worship, where one is just paying mental tribute to the greatness of God, or meditation, where one achieves wisdom through the contemplation of God's diverse qualities. (Obviously, that's not an exhaustive list.) Instead I'm talking about petitionary p

It gets worse

Sorry to keep banging on about lousy construction, but upon further inspection I noticed even more shoddy details in that concrete slab. Walking across it, I noticed it's about as flat as the Hindu Kush. Clearly they made no effort to level across the forms and just eyeballed it as they were pouring. Worse, they didn't even strip the forms (the wooden bits that define the shape of the slab) before laying brick on the side, as you can see in the picture. That wood will eventually rot, leaving a gap between the slab and the brick, destabilizing both and leaving a perfect habitat for termites and other pests. However, it's probably a safe bet that the slab itself will have crumbled to smithereens by that time anyway. I say this all to reinforce the fact that it is not lack of money that is holding back South African education. And because I've poured a lot of concrete in my day and it bugs me when people screw it up this badly.

RSA vs. US cell phone service

In the context of AT&T's bid to acquire T-Mobile and further consolidate the already seriously monopolized US cell phone market, Horace Dediu explains why it is that American cell phone service sucks so bad: The trouble is that US consumers have never had much choice and the US wireless marketplace has been a minefield of incompatibilities and obstacles to market forces. To begin with, US carriers maintain multiple incompatible network standards. Phones which work on one network do not work on any other. A Sprint phone won’t work on AT&T or on Verizon. In fact, some Sprint phones won’t work on all of Sprint’s network as it still uses the iDen standard legacy from the Nextel acquisition. Even the iPhone which is designed for the AT&T network does not handle T-Mobile’s version of 3G. So a consumer cannot make a decision on devices independent of a decision on carrier. This is a phenomenon unique to the US[1]. When I got to South Africa I was fairly amazed that one co

Public works

Ever since the Frankfurt International people built my school a classroom for Grade R last year, we had enough rooms for each teacher. At the beginning of this year, grades 7 and 8 were combined due to numbers and so one classroom stood empty. Now you can see the concrete pad the department has finished for another unnecessary classroom, this time mobile. God knows why they're still going ahead with it. On a side note, you can also see the generally lower quality of construction that prevails here, especially when it comes to concrete. This slab was mixed on site and finished over a week or so, so there are several cold joints across the whole thing. There is no steel reinforcement, and you can notice the puddles from no thought to drainage.

Bus travel

Here's a picture from my recent trip back home. Buses are a lot more common here than in the US and the quality is quite a bit higher. For this trip I was on the front seat of the top deck of an Intercape bus. It's a decent company save their unfortunate practice of incessant Christian propaganda during the ride.

Sign of the day

Here's a great example of South African customer service.

Picture of the day

This is from Plettenburg Bay, where we stopped for lunch yesterday.

Bunji repeat!

I'm in Cape Town for a bit on vacation. Today we drove a ways up the coast to Storm's River. Here's my certificate from doing the world's highest bunji jump there. More pictures to follow soon.

Quick update

I've been away from the computer for a bit. More to come later.