a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
A visit to the Cape Town area is not quite complete for me without checking up on my old alma mater, the University of Stellenbosch, and the town itself. It was very late on Tuesday afternoon when I got there, though – and so the shadows were too long for taking fully lit pictures of the beautiful buildings. But here they are anyway.
I met my brother and nephew for lunch on Tuesday. We picked the swank Westin Hotel restaurant in the city’s Foreshore district. My nephew ordered a chocolate milkshake (not on the menu) to go with his lunch – and to their credit, they were up to it. ‘It will just take a little time’, said our server.
Protea is both the botanical name and common name for a large group of flowers found in the Cape Town area and on the slopes of Table Mountain. They are named after the Greek god Proteus (who could change his form at will), because they have such a wide variety of forms.
After I had dropped my friend Marlien at the airport on Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Camps Bay. There are two ways to get there from Cape Town : across the ‘neck’ of Table Mountain called Kloofnek (a kloof is a ravine), or along the Atlantic coastline through Greenpoint and Seapoint. I picked the Kloofnek road out there, and wanted to drive back along the coast, but found the late Sunday afternoon traffic too much, so I went back the same way I had come.
My friend Marlien and I ran out to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, the way we normally do when she visits me here. We did not stay too long, though : a blustery wind came up and made it unpleasant, and so we left early. I see my picture of the Enigma XK does not quite do it justice. Checking into it again later, I found out that it used to be a fisheries patrol vessel, but has been turned into a luxury expedition yacht ! I think that some of the spectacular pictures on the link were taken in Antarctica.
There is no shortage of coffee shops in South Africa .. but even so, Starbucks is about to open its first store in Johannesburg (in a suburb called Rosebank). In the mean time, there is the ‘Seattle Coffee Company’ that provides excellent coffees. Curiously though, no filtered coffee was on the menu, so I had to order an Americano (a shot of espresso with hot water added).
Check out this amazing picture from the front page of Thursday’s newspaper here – of a 20 ton Bryde’s whale and a school of mackerel. The beast came from below and breached the surface right next to a snorkeling diver that was checking out a school of mackerel near the coast in the Port Elizabeth area. (Bryde’s whale eat fish and not plankton). It disappeared immediately after that, leaving the snorkeler and photographer wondering : whoah! whathappened? did that really happen?
I mentioned in a post last year that there had been plans on the drawing board for South Africa to build a large number of new nuclear power stations (8 to 12). Well, it turns out a lot of events had transpired behind the scenes. So much has happened, that veteran journalist Allister Sparks writes in this article (in Afrikaans, unfortunately) that what we know now is likely still ‘the ears of the hippopotamus’ only. A whole hippopotamus is still out there. It all seems to be connected : the proposal of adding 9 600 MW of extra electrical capacity to the electrical power grid, by building the nuclear power stations, the approval of the proposal made possible by the unconditional support of Zuma’s allies in government, and Zuma’s sacking of two consecutive South Africa’s Finance Ministers (Pravin Gordhan en Nhlanhla Nene) over their objections to find funding for the proposal. Rough estimates came in at one trillion* South African Rand/ approx.US$ 66 billion. *One followed by twelve zeros.
And then there is the Gupta family and Zuma’s son Duduzane that have purchased an outsize number of shares in the Shiva Uranium mine, and discussions that Zuma personally had with then-Russian Prime Minister Russian Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, and current Russian President Vladimir Putin Rosatom for awarding the deal to the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation. Where will this all end? Zuma still has a lot of support from his African National Congress Party, but the ANC leadership from Gauteng Province has broken ranks and is now calling for Zuma’s resignation.
We made our 1 hr 20 min ‘hop’ from Frankfurt to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport this morning, and then took the long south-bound flight (11 h 20 mins) to Cape Town. It was 10 pm local time at our arrival. As I got into my rental car and started driving, I kept telling myself to keep left ! keep left ! (Driving in South Africa is on the left hand side, same as in the UK). There’s a much larger risk that one would drive in the wrong direction late at night when the streets are deserted.
It’s 6.00 am on Tuesday morning here in Frankfurt and I am back at the airport, checked in for my trip to Cape Town with a stop in Paris. There is stepped up security in place, or at least for Paris. My hand luggage was searched thoroughly. (I’m all those chargers and cables for my gadgets make for an ugly image on the baggage scanner).
I took the
Intercity Express (ICE) train to Düsseldorf today. The train is no slouch ! .. the electronic speed indicator in the cabin showed 297 km/h (185 mph), at times. It runs very quietly, and even with four stops, it took just an hour an a half one way. The train comes up all the way from Munich, Nuremburg, and then Frankfurt, on to Cologne and Düsseldorf, and its final stop is Essen. The one-way fare does not come cheap at €82, but hey : time is money, right?
I lucked out with an early check-in into the hotel on Sunday, so I could catch a few hours of sleep (did not get much on the overnight flight). By the time I woke up in the afternoon, there was not much time to go out, and besides, most German stores and buildings are closed on Sunday. So .. since it is spring and the Palmengarten botanical garden not far from my hotel in the west end of the city was open, that was a *natural* choice to make.
The Palmengarten botanical garden opened in 1871 and was an instant success with the public. It covers some 22 hectares (54 acres) and is one of the largest botanical gardens in Germany.
We left Seattle on time and traveled without incident. I sat next to a guy that told me he was on his way to Nuremberg in Bavaria to Adidas headquarters to talk to them about their e-commerce* efforts. Frankfurt was sunny and a decent 50°F/ 10°C at our arrival.
*A general term meaning the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the Internet. These business transactions occur either business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business.
It is time to start my journey to South Africa on Saturday morning. I’m making a stop in Frankfurt before picking up Air France there for Cape Town. I tried to generate a graphic itinerary in Google Maps but ended up drawing the flights in. Google only offers graphics for flights between one start point and one end point. As for driving, it offered a fascinating road trip from Paris to Cape Town : 172 hrs of drive time, with a ferry crossing across the Mediterranean, following the Trans-Sahara Highway through Algeria and Niger, and then another ferry to get across the mighty Congo River at Brazzaville. Now that would be a trip to remember.
The New York Times noted in an article ‘When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime’ that humans won’t be obsolete for a long time, if ever.
The concept of a ‘singularity’ was posited in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, who said that accelerating technological change would inevitably lead to machine intelligence that would match and then surpass human intelligence.
Well, there has been a long history of over-promising on what technology can do, and what is really delivered. (My internet access at home was completely flaky and unreliable on Wednesday, for example). There are significant barriers ahead as far as creating ever-more powerful computer chips (the circuits are now down to a few atoms wide), and we still don’t understand well enough how the human brain works, so that computer learning programs can be modeled on the brain. And hey, check out this 1958 write-up in the NYT about a thinking machine called the Perceptron, developed by the US Navy.
I finally took the 
plunge and acquired a new camera. It was overdue, seeing that the one I have dates back to 2009. Digital cameras are computers that take pictures, and my new EOS 7D Mark II has two new processors in, two card slots, a new sensor*, and a massive array of 65 autofocus elements in the focusing screen. It can take up to 10 frames per second, and can set the shutter to 1/8,000 of a second. (That may be enough to freeze a hummingbird’s wings in flight). I could have bought the camera on-line, but since the Best Buy electronics store let me put my grubby hands on 12 different cameras they had on display, and gave me good advice, I felt it’s only right that they get my money.
*It’s not a full-frame sensor, something I took a long time to make my peace with. But at $1,500 the camera body is an absolute bargain, compared to the $3,200 mirrorless camera from Sony that is generating quite a buzz, and that I had also considered. (The Sony camera takes 42 MP photos and super-high definition (4K) video with its brand new full frame sensor). But by sticking with Canon, I don’t have to buy new lenses (good lenses start at $600 and go up from there) and battery packs, and I don’t have to learn all the little settings for the new camera.
The leading candidates on both sides got a beating in the Wisconsin presidential primary elections tonight : Trump beaten by Cruz and Hillary Clinton by Bernie Sanders. Check out the maps from the New York Times. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the margin of victory was. Trump acted like a sulking loser, and accused Cruz of being a Trojan horse (of the Republican establishment trying to stop him from winning the nomination). Oh, and Trump also says Cruz indulged in illegal politicking, without offering any evidence.
There was an epic finish to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual basketball tournament tonight : Villanova defeated North Carolina 77-74 thanks to a game winning 3-pointer from Kris Jenkins in the 2016 National Championship game. The final points were made in the final second of the game. Check out the sequence of frames below, that shows the clock running down in tens of seconds, then the buzzer starts with the ball in the air, and it makes it through just before the buzzer stops. I guess the championship games are not called March Madness for nothing.
It was another nice spring day here in Seattle, 
but there is some rain on the way for Sunday night and Monday morning. I walked by the St. Nicholas* Russian Orthodox Cathedral on 13th Ave to check on the progress of its entry-way renovation, and saw that it is almost done.
*[From Wikipedia] Nicholas II was the last tzar of Russia, ruling from Nov 1, 1894 until his forced abdication on Mar 15, 1917. His reign saw the fall of Imperial Russia from being one of the foremost great powers of the world, to economic and military collapse.
The new SR 520 Floating Bridge and Landings project has been underway since early 2012, and parts of it is really for final commissioning and use by the general public. Bryan, Gary and I went to the official opening of the new State Route 520 Floating Bridge today. The new bridge has been built alongside the old (which will be dismantled and recycled). The final work on the ‘approaches’ to the bridge (the on-ramps and off-ramps) will continue, but vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) will be able to start to use the new bridge just a little later in April. The west-bound lanes will open first, with the east-bound lanes to follow two weeks later.
