The public’s unwillingness to learn basic scientific concepts and scientists’ inability to communicate those concepts lead the public to reject promising research (such as genetic modification), ignore serious problems (such as global warming) and embrace dangerous nonsense (such as anti-vaccination rhetoric).

— Proposition from the Ph.D. thesis of Dr Wynand Winterbach, via Francois Malan on Facebook.

(This important message was brought to you by cpbotha.net, trawling facebook for interesting tidbits so you don’t have to!)

Read More

Exactly ten minutes after having made a single discreet phone call, a truck arrives at one’s house with thousands of pieces of lovingly chopped braai wood. The amount of one’s choosing is then lovingly yet efficiently stacked right by the holy altar of meat scorching, after which the truck leaves on its next mission.

(P.S. The wood is rooikrans.)

Read More

Currently listening to Chris Sneddon’s mix on musicForProgramming();

For this last hour it has been exactly the right levels of everything to drown out distractions from my surroundings whilst not acting as a distraction in itself.

(Yes, I’m doing small status updates here now. It’s an experiment.)

Read More

Jack Black brewery’s Lumberjack is an amber ale craft brewed in Cape Town. As bottle designs go, this one is pretty metal:

Amongst a number of impressive-sounding statements, the back of  the bottle concludes with:

Lumberjack has a sturdy malt driven backbone packed with loads of roasted malt. Huge hop additions intensify the piney-citrus aromas of this full flavoured ale. A beer for the brave.

After reading that, who does not want to drink this beer for the brave?! Based on extensive testing, I can report that this is indeed a full-bodied beer that deserves and rewards your full attention.

Read More

Six jumping castles for the little ones, beautiful food and Lourensford wine for the adults. Lourensford Harvest Market is on every Sunday at Lourensford Wine Estate.

We might just make it through this autumn in one piece!

Read More

This is the 90th edition of the weekly head voices. I just looked up the very first edition – it was way back in August of 2009! (That was apparently about 285 weeks ago, meaning I’ve averaged about one post every 3.17 weeks.)

To celebrate, have some bullets:

• Behind me are two weeks of extreme focus chasing various deadlines. I can feel my brain taking some strain switching between C++ and GPU shaders on the one side and Python and D3 on the other. I’m hoping it’s the good kind of strain.
• Had to get the latest NVIDIA 346 drivers going on an Ubuntu 14.04 Optimus laptop (dynamic switching between Intel and NVIDIA graphics) due to very specific features required for a work project. This first led to this post fixing Ubuntu black screen on the bleeding edge and then acted as the straw that broke the camel’s back…
• … where with “straw” I actually mean a very good excuse to buy a new PC, an event which I found so exciting that I surgically removed it from this post and inserted into a completely separate post which you can read by clicking here.
• Here, have a summary of a really interesting article in the nytimes from which I learned at least two interesting new things:
  • Von Economo neurons, or spindle neurons, are neurons that can be four times as large as other neurons, are long and thin, and have branches that extend far across the brain. Researchers think that these neurons act as fast relays between different remote regions of the brain, which could for example help humans “manage impulses and stay focused on long term goals”.
  • In a post-mortem study on so-called SuperAgers, people who at past 80 were still as cognitively strong as healthy 50 year olds, it was found that these geriatric geniuses had five times more Von Economo neurons than normal. The burning question now is: Did they start out with more than normal, or did they just retain them better?

Just in case you sometimes doubt that the internet is, in spite of everything, an awesome force for good in the world today, I present the following evidence (via @alper):

Read More

WARNING: EXTREME PC hardware-related nerdiness ahead. Read at your own risk.

My most awesome employer to date (that’s the vxlabs of course!) decided to treat me with a brand new workstation. On Tuesday, February 10 of the year 2015 the new desktop PC arrived. (Around these parts, we have a long tradition of writing about new computer acquisitions, see for example 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 or 2013.)

Because this event has sparked quite some interest amongst the various groups reading this blog, management has decided to present workstation-related information in a Q and A format.

Read More

I found myself in Stellenbosch this weekend, so I drove by my old student house. Fifteen odd years ago, the house used to go by the name The Far Side. It was usually inhabited by five fairly attractive yet dangerously intelligent male engineering students, who were, quite unexpectedly, also extremely modest. (In those days, prepending “male” to “engineering student” was mostly redundant.)

Well, it seems The Far Side has gone through a little transformation of its own:

Read More

I wish you all a zen-filled 2015! (I think zen trumps straight happiness, because zen means that you’re on your way to understanding and making peace with the mechanisms underneath the happiness, all the way down.)

So much has happened since I last stood on this soap-box. However, as Noeska explains, this means I have even less to write about than usual. (for those of you too busy to click: things further back seem far less relevant now, so less motivation to write down)

Read More

Two days ago, I received this in the mail:

For various reasons I was temporarily ever-so-slightly misty-eyed. Well-done boys, I’m SUPER proud of you!

Other books you might also like.

I’ve recently finished reading two other mind-expanding books:

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin: Liu Cixin is a wildly popular Chinese science fiction author. I found this recently translated first edition of a trilogy to be an awesome first peek into modern Chinese science fiction. The translator, Ken Liu, managed to produce an English version of this story that still managed to bring across themes of Chinese history and culture. On top of that, you also get a computer consisting of 30 million soldiers arranged into inter-connected logic gates (think that’s far-fetched?), artificially intelligent quantum entangled photons (told you), and much more. I’ll be lining up as soon as the translations of part 2 and 3 appear.

Read More