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Triathlon

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-06-06 09:42:02 [0 comments]

Last Monday a good friend of mine somehow managed to talk me into taking part in an upcoming sprint triathlon. The only competitive swimming and running I've ever done was back in elementary school, so my goal is only to finish without drowning. I've been jogging for some time now, so the 5 km run doesn't worry me nearly as much as the 500m swim in frigid water. Oh, and the 22 km bike route that is "scenic yet challenging".

      

In the sky of my head...

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-06-06 09:30:29 [0 comments]

I dreamt that I was harvesting maternity carrots to use as fortification against a charging T-Rex. I consider this a welcome reprieve from all the bathroom stalls that don't seem to lock. Of course, these are only the dreams that I remember. Sigh.

      

Human in the making

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-05-23 13:27:18 [1 comment]

In case you haven't heard, Kelley and I are expecting a bouncing bundle of joy. I present to you, Mr. Brits jr.

A Brits in the making (click for more)

      

Colour management

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-05-14 10:35:43 [3 comments]

I've been getting a little more serious with the photoshopping as of late, and as I put most of my photos on the web, the issue of colour management eventually came up. In short, you spend hours getting things to look just right in photoshop only to see the browser mangle the colours for you. The good news is that Firefox 3 supports colour management and promises to respect embedded colour profiles. The bad news is a) it's not enabled by default, and b) I can't seem to get it to work anyway. So for the time being I will just convert my web photos to sRGB and leave it at that.

      

SVG on Mediawiki

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-01-20 14:48:13 [0 comments]

With Imagemagick's lackluster support for SVG I decided to try my hand on installing rsvg on my dreamhost account instead. I found this document very useful. All told it took about 2 hours (a few wrong turns). It still takes a bit of tweaking to get Inkscape's svg's to work, but at least the final result is acceptable.

      

The story of stuff

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-01-11 12:06:05 [1 comment]

I tried out this miro thing today, a "free, open source internet tv and video player" that connects you to a myriad of channels on subjects like science and entertainment. I must say that I am impressed, but more on that later. I came across The story of stuff, a charmingly informative exposé of consumerism. Here's a synopsis from the site:

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

The story of stuff

      

Microlending

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2008-01-06 19:16:43 [1 comment]

On my flight back to Vancouver an article about microlending caught my attention. If you're not content with merely buying a goat for a farmer in a developing nation, you may want to consider lending her some cash as well. Microcredit, as it is called, allows people who are willing and able to extend credit to unemployed or poor entrepreneurs, often in developing nations, who are otherwise unable to secure loans that could potentially give them the leg up they need. These people often fall prey to usury and loansharking and become trapped in a cycle of debt. Microlending programs like Grameen bank and Kiva aim to break this cycle by providing loans that are low risk to lenders and potentially life changing to borrowers. As it is more accessible to the internet community, I think I might give Kiva a shot.

Here's a video of Bill Clinton explaining microcredit and Kiva.org.

      

Taser death of Robert Dziekanski: Unreasonable Force

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2007-11-15 19:35:16 [0 comments]

No doubt everyone has heard of the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski after he was Tasered by RCMP officers and subsequently lost consciousness at the Vancouver airport. A bystander filmed the event and the video has finally been released to the public. The footage is pretty damning and leads one to the inescapable conclusion that ours is a society in which good people have to fear the police. I hope we wake up before it is too late.

      

Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2007-11-15 10:31:56 [0 comments]

Here's an interesting look into government subsidies on meat and dairy in the US and how fruit and vegetable farmers are getting short changed.

Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

      

First all-nanotube radio

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2007-11-01 14:52:40 [0 comments]

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created what seems to be the first radio receiver based entirely on a single carbon nanotube. The nanotube performs all the functions of a radio, from antenna to demodulator. What makes this especially interesting is that the radio frequency signals are received through mechanical resonance rather than purely electrical means. Applications that come to mind immediately are large, highly sensitive receiver arrays as well as microscopic biomedical devices. More here.

      

PhD Comics' "Introduction to Quantum Gradnamics"

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2007-10-31 19:31:20 [0 comments]

Piled Higher and Deeper has a cute take on the life of a graduate student with an eye on quantum mechanics:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

      

Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

Posted by Dirtysouthafrican, 2007-10-31 21:48:22 [2 comments]

Critics of the theory of evolution sometimes use the argument that if you shake a box full of broken watch parts that a functional watch will never form, and therefore the argument that simple molecules somehow evolved into complex life through mutation is inherently flawed. Most scientists actually have no problem with this as, they argue, if you shake the box long enough eventually something will happen. The Earth has been around for a very long time, and the improbableness of these events just doesn't make a dent when you sit around for 4.5 billion years.

But if you've read this far, I'm probably preaching† to the converted, and perhaps so is the subject of this post. This video turns the issue on its head by showing that you can, in fact, form a functional watch if you throw some evolution in the mix. The creator† of this video wrote a computer simulation that uses little more than the affinity between watch parts and allowing for mutations and genetic exchange to "evolve" timepieces that seem incredibly robust against the parameters in the model.

I seriously doubt that anything short of divine intervention will convert hardened creationists, and this video is probably too specifically targeted to get the message across, but Mother Nature has been around much longer than God, and she probably won't be offended by a few naysayers!

† Puns intended

      

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