Claire Gray

I'll have a double Propaganda with a side order of Nepotism, please.

So, while roooting around trying to find the latest results of the Zimbabwe election, I found this gem of an article on BBC World's website. They asked people round Zim to say who they support, and what their hopes and fears are for the future. This is some of what Olley from Harare had to say...

Zanu-PF is the only party in Zimbabwe that has a vision for the country. It is the only party that has a credible economic policy to lift us out of our economic doldrums.

/cough choke splutter. Uh, who caused the economic doldrums anyway?

The fact is that if you are going to develop a country it has to start from the land.

Okay... let's read on...

I now own land as a result of the land reform programme. I followed the procedure set out in the newspapers.  I went back to my village and registered myself on the list of those who wanted land.

It was then left to the Chief (who fortunately for me is my uncle) and the Chairman of the Land Committee in the area to decide who was to be allocated a piece of land.

Ah, yes. Of course.

In five years time I see it thriving which will mean I will no longer have to work.

My farm will sustain me.   

/raises eyebrows

I could not vote for the MDC as I believe that they are responsible for a lot of the suffering that has taken place in the country over the last five years.

 Can you say "propaganda"?

I don't know whether to cry or bang my head against a wall. And this is what MDC has to deal with.

(Read the full article here)

I'm Getting Old!

So far this week I have accomplished practically nothing MSc-wise. Monday was a public holiday for us - Easter Monday (yeah, we get it off!) but in the evening I had a  conference call with my supervisors, Simon Connell from Wits and Peter Bosted from JLab, and the rest of the JLab collabo.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent in tuts, labs, and group meetings, and today I spent the entire day marking lab reports! See, in SA, the beginning of the school year starts at the logical time of the beginning of the year. Wits has two lecturing terms, Feb to June, and July to Nov. There's a 3-4 week holiday in June/July after mid-year exams, and about a 6 week summer holiday after finals, over Christmas and New Year.

The two terms are also each split by a two week "mid-term" break. Next week will be the first week of this break, which means no tuts or labs to look after, and no lab reports to mark! (that was why I was trying to get them all done today, else they just tend to pile up and bite you from behind)

So, on my way back from a lab I was chatting to my friends Norm and Martin about how stuff is going, and I actually found myself saying "I'm so looking forward to the mid-term break because I'll finally have two whole weeks to actually get some work done!" They decided that this was irrefutable evidence that I'm getting old. Thanks guys. For that, I have decided to put some incriminating pics of you up here. The first was taken on holiday in Ballito at the end of last year, when Penny and I decided to paint Martin's nails. The pic isn't so great though 'cause it was taken with my camera phone. Norm doesn't let you take photos of him if he can help it, but I managed to find this one of him being a worm on our hike in the Drakensburg.

Happy Anniversary Mum and Dad!

It's their 23rd wedding anniversary today. I actually had forgotten until this evening when my mum phoned (to lay a guilt trip on me, she claimed) but I don't feel so bad because she said they themselves had forgotten until about 10am!

All's well...

Got an email from David on Wednesday saying he's fine. I just love the way he writes stuff:

" yo cle, don't worry bout me, was a few thousand k's away in khorat, but i was in bkok this weekend at the consert, it was awesome, but avril was shit. tell you bout it next time you're online. Oh yeah, and it was 10 feet high, not 10 cm's high, hehe, cheers, david "

Well, when I read it on Sky News it said 10cm. He went to a concert with Avril Lavigne over the weekend. Apparently they didn't even feel the earthquake in Khorat on Monday though!

" anyways, you keep on doing ur fzx thing, and ur masters and i'll keep chilling for the rest of the year, bye, luv ur baby bro.. "

:-P

Worried...

Just three months later, another earthquake has struck off the coast of Indonesia, along the same fault line that caused last year's tsunami disaster. This one measured between 8.5 and 8.7, compared to last year's 9.

The difference is this time my brother is in Thailand. And he was supposed to be in Phuket this weekend.

Tsunami warnings have been issued and people were evacuated, and apparently a 10cm wave "hit" the Cocos Islands to the south, but it seems that (touch wood) the threat of a major wave has passed. Still, we'll only stop worrying when we hear from him. So Dave, if by any chance you read this before you've sent us an email or something, just let us know you're ok please!

Meet Phoebe

I just want to introduce the newest member of our family, Phoebe. We got her yesterday, she is about 6 weeks old and smaller than my foot. Now if she would only stay still long enough for me to take some decent photos...

Don't Look Down!

What happens when someone tells you not to look down? You do, right? It's human nature to do exactly the opposite of what we're told, even when we're given a reason, even a very good one. For example, if someone said "Don't look down because we're really REALLY high up and you suffer from an extreme fear of heights with possibly fatal consequences ", you still probably would end up doing it.

That said, I think that this is probably a rather dangerous thing to write in the ICU waiting room of a Joburg hospital...

(and in case you're wondering, NO I didn't switch it off!)

Imagining Einstein

In celebration of the World Year of Physics, our Department of Science and Technology is sponsoring a one-man play called Imagining Einstein, written and performed by David Muller and produced through the MTN ScienCentre. The play follows the life of Einstein, from his patent office in Switzerland, through his office in Berlin, to his position at Princeton where he spent the last 20 years of his life.

The MTN ScienCentre where the play is normally performed is situated in Cape Town, but they brought it to Grahamstown last weekend for the SciFest, and on Saturday afternoon I went to see the performance, and I really enjoyed it. It is set for an age group of high school kids upwards, but there was a large group of younger ones there who seemed to enjoy it just as much - especially when they saw that Einstein wore no socks! This, combined with David Muller changing into a pair of old scruffy brown shoes (you can see them in the photo on the right) produced about 5 minutes of giggles that permeated the 900-seater theatre.

"Einstein" even got kids up on the stage at three points for hands-on visual demonstrations of the photoelectric effect, relativity, and the curvature of space. I liked the photoelectric effect one best - different coloured balls representing different frequency photons were dropped into a box (or metal plate) and another "electron" ball popped out with the corresponding kinetic energy. I guess these are some of the toys they have at the ScienCentre, it kinda makes me wish I was in primary school again so I could go and play there without being looked at strangely (read: I would still probably go play there now, anyway).

While fun and entertaining, the play also had its more serious parts, and there was a lot I learned from it about the life of Einstein that I didn't know before. I could tell that David Muller and the ScienCentre had a lot of fun putting this together, and I would definitely recommend that anyone interested in the man the World Year of Physics commemorates should see the play if they have the chance.

(last photo, the un-Einsteined David Muller)

Laser Show

As I mentioned in Part 2, I went to see the Sasol Laser Show again and tried messing about with my camera's exposure time settings and taking some photos. It was really awesome, for parts of the show they used a thin sheet of water in front of the laser to create a semi-transparent screen, onto which they projected pictures and animations. The animations were done the "old school" way, by hand-drawing a series of individual still pictures. Each individual picture was "plotted" by the laser, by "plotting" I literally mean tracing through a series of coordinates. The overall effect was stunning.

The photos on the right show some of the pictures achieved with the water screen. You'll have to view them full size to see them properly. The first is the World Year of Physics logo, and no prizes for guessing who the second picture shows. The third pic is of HartRAO, the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the last is the Sasol logo.

The photos on the left just show some of the effects generated by the laser without the water screen.

SciFest Weekend Part 2

There were so many things going on at the Monument... iThemba Labs had a number of workshops for schoolkids in their area and I visited them a couple of times throughout the weekend. The first one I went to was the "Phat Physics Game" that Ginny from iThemba had invented specially for the World Year of Physics. The idea of the game is to go round the board and answer physics questions on cards. If you got the question right, you got to keep the card.  There were also pamphlets and a periodic table on the table for the players to read, that provided clues. The cards had different designs, and the winner was the first person or team to spell out "IYP2005" with their cards.  Everyone seemed to have fun playing, while learning at the same time.

They also had a workshop called "Phat and Phast" for grades 9-12 where they built their own electric motors using magnets, copper wire and masking tape, and then got to try it out and see what they could winch up with it.

Also rolling around the festival was Bodi the battery operated robot, who fascinated both children and adults alike. Even though his "voice" is that of one of his operators speaking through a microphone, you still get this  urge to forget he's a robot and chat to him. The younger ones have no problem with this, of course, but I think some adults had a harder time of things trying to figure out just how, exactly, you're supposed to respond to a robot.

I stopped by for the end of a workshop on micro-rockets, where the participants had to build their own rockets, complete with nosecone and parachute. The propellant was the same powder used for flares, which when ignited would (safely) launch the rocket about 100m into the air, and terminate in a small explosion that was supposed to pop off the nosecone and release the parachute for a safe return to the ground. However, in 5 of the 7 rockets launched, this actually managed to blow the parachutes off the rocket entirely which was, nonetheless, quite funny.  Quite a crowd gathered to watch and the supervisors of the workshop made everyone stand up for each launch - so we could run away if the rocket went off on its own course! They launched the rockets quite far away, unfortunately, so I was unable to get any good photos of them flying.

That evening I met up with Ginny and Kevin from iThemba and we went to the evening lecture by Prof Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan on the biology of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. She spoke about how the study of the microstructure of fossilised bones has led to new insights into their growth patterns and modern-day relatives. It was actually really interesting. The part that the audience seemed to enjoy most, however, was when Prof Turan mentioned Nqwebasaurus Thwazi, a new species of dinosaur recently found here in South Africa, and the only dinosaur with a Xhosa name.

After the lecture we got to watch the Sasol Laser Show, which is in my opinion the coolest part of the SciFest. I went to see it again on Sunday morning before I left to take some photos, which I'll stick up in another post.