I’ve recently followed my wife into the world of art, and have become fascinated with the challenge of portraiture. To create a face on a piece of paper that makes you feel as if that particular person is there looking at you is remarkably difficult, especially if it is someone that you know really well. But it’s not really art, more of a craft, because you work from a photograph and, because the addition or subtraction of even a millimetre makes a huge difference, it becomes kind of technical. Then I moved on to colour and that’s when I went…
General Interest
We discovered Honest Chocolate. It is truly the best and has caused an uptick in our consumption of Cointreau, which, as I’m sure you will agree, is the ultimate companion to a quality craft chocolate. We were amused to find that on the segments of each slab are the letters D O N T B E A F R A I D O F T H E D A R K. This is a constant reminder of something that we struggle with when we are sketching. Beginners, like us, painstakingly draw their subject, shade it in, feel quite proud and,…
We had already made the decision to relocate to Knysna. We based it on the beautiful coastal scenery and the forests. Then, before we moved, we started taking an interest in air quality. There’s an American standard that measures AQI, the Air Quality Index, on a scale from 0 to 500. Things start getting bad above 100. We compared Knysna with Berea in Durban, where my daughter lives, and with Johannesburg. Here’s what we found – Wow! That’s was amazing. Since we moved, we check the AQI every day and, whilst it goes up and down, it stays within the…
I remember being taught in school that older people are likely to suffer from high frequency deafness. Lord knows why they taught us that or why it stuck in my sieve-like brain. But stick it did, so when it happened to me, I knew what it was. Off to the audiologist and yup! you’ve got it mate. So now I wear hearing aids, which thankfully, are almost invisible. But they do block one’s ears and that means I can’t hear my smart phone so well. Now, if I had an iPhone, I could download an app that would link my…
I did it! I am terrified of heights. We stopped by at the bridge and I knew I had to do it. This was a battle of the brains. Front brain battling left brain, right brain and old brain. I am fascinated by my brain, and I have gone a long way to making it my best friend, but this was an incredible challenge. Could I bring myself to dive off a bridge over a 216 metre drop? For three nights, I hardly slept. I rehearsed that moment 5,4,3,2,1 Go! I was going to dive, not jump. I was ready.…
Sure, Covid has been a terrible pandemic. Devastating families and businesses. Smashing up an already smashed up economy. Changing the smiling faces and hugs that we South Africans are so used to into “Stay away from me”. Changing the property rental business probably forever. All very sad. But hey, there was at least some benefit. In February 2020, before we’d really cottoned on to Covid, I resolved that by the end of the year, Helen and I would be “free to choose”. That meant free to choose everything, from how we lived to where we lived. Having already opted for…
“will smell as sweet” – William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet. But what about a Stinking Corpse Lily (Rafflesia arnoldii)? If you call it a rose, will it still stink? I guess Eskom thinks it would actually smell like a rose? As in “We are not load shedding. This is load reduction” Ah! Now I understand. Thank you, Eskom, for that clarification. And how about this one? “The R10,6m allocated to SAA is not a bail out. It is a budget neutral allocation to enable the business rescue plan”. Ah! Now I understand. Thank you, Mr. Minister, for that clarification.…
Part of project management requires the determination of the critical path. So what is that? We’ll take a simple example from the kitchen. This simple meal comprises grilled steak with vegetables and mash. The cook can only do one thing at a time, the meal needs to be ready as quickly as possible and all three components of the meal are to be ready for serving at the same time (no hot tray here!). The question is which is the sequence of the following processes which will determine the total time from start to finish. The first thing we need…
How, we often ask ourselves, can an attorney and advocate, defend someone whom they believe to be guilty? Do you remember those debating competitions of your school days? Each of two competitors was given opposing arguments in relation to a proposition. They then had to argue their side of the debate and the one who was most convincing would be the winner. Did the competitors have to agree with their own argument? No. What was being tested was not their beliefs, but their ability to debate an issue. When an advocate argues in favour of his client, he is doing…
As you know, I am a bit of a Japanese abacus fanatic. This lead me to a fascinating method of multiplying using straight lines. Here’s how it works. We’ll take an example of 123 x 332 Draw parallel lines representing the number 123 Next draw a similar set of lines in the other direction representing 332 Now, all you have to do is separate the groups of numbers as I have done below Count the intersections in each group. This gives you 3 9 17 13 6 Carry the 10 of the 17 left to add it to the 9…
Feng shui is an ancient Chinese science aimed at encouraging energy flow and balance within a given space. Having lived in Hong Kong for two years, my lovely wife, Helen, tells me that it is pronounced fung shoi, so let’s go with that. There are all sorts of rules about how your house, for instance, should be placed in relation to its surroundings (particularly roads), which rooms should be used for what purpose (e.g. central, NE, SE, NE and SW), the layout of your furnishings and the materials that they are made of. Sure, you can engage a specialist practitioner…
I was brought up to believe that and was never preceded by a comma. My daughter said it always is. Seems we were both wrong. Evidently, these are the rules – You can list A, B, and C as in Peter, Paul, and Mary had a party. or you can list A, B and C as in Peter, Paul and Mary had a party. The comma is optional However, if the list is only of two items, there’s no comma A, and B is wrong as in Peter, and Paul exchanged business cards. A and B is right as in…
You hear about Bitcoin, then you must also hear the word blockchain. Ever wonder what the heck it is? I like to think of it as a new Internet of events. The events are the blocks and the sequence is the chain. Hence blockchain. It was adapted by Satoshi Nakamoto, the unidentified person or group of people who enhanced it for Bitcoin. Let’s take a simple example – On 12 July 2008 at 13h07, Jane buys an oil painting, “Life in the Roses” from Bob and pays with her cryptocurrency. That event will ultimately form a block. On 28 September…
I came across a mind blowing arithmetic pyramid and couldn’t resist the challenge of figuring out how it worked – Here’s the magic pyramid that held me in awe (I can’t give credits, because I don’t know who discovered it) So why does it work? It turns out to rely on that magic little number 9, so let’s reverse engineer it – I found it easier to start with the big number so that I could figure out the logic. Notice how taking one of the starting numbers away shifts all of the numbers one to the right, so the…
We moved to apartment living in Rosebank in September and have, for the first time become aware of the beginnings of the devastation of the urban forest. On the upside, however, we also enjoy almost daily sightings of rose-ringed parakeets. I used to be a very keen birder, but nowadays, I simply enjoy hearing and seeing them and no longer go out of my way to tick new ones. So it’s years since I added another tick to the 700+ list that I had accumulated over time. Imagine my surprise then, when I’ve recently added a new tick without having…
Johannesburg has the world’s largest urban forest (the other claimant in Rio is outside the residential part of the city). But our forest is dying! Helen and I live in Rosebank in the heart of the so called “Parks” – Parkview, Parkhurst, Parktown, and we are watching the trees around us die. Sure, many of them fall to property developers – there seems to be an insatiable demand for residential apartments, so that Rosebank central (which is largely devoid of trees) is creeping outwards, but that’s not the problem that we see as we drive through our leafy neighbourhood. Next…
Dear Cyril, There’s so much wrong with South Africa, you can’t possibly know where to start. There’s only one way out of your dilemma. You need to learn the technique of Dreaming Dreams. Here, I’ll teach you – But let’s just have a little chat first, to set the scene… If you try to prioritise your actions, you’ll find yourself trying to put out one fire while something else has to be left to burn. But so many of these fires are devastating and have to be tackled immediately. And how will you ever know whether this fire feeds that…
If A gets bigger whenever B gets bigger, did A cause B or did B cause A? This correlation is so often misinterpreted that it probably led to the expression “Lies, damned lies and statistics” Correlation can be positive (both things increase together) or negative (when one goes up, the other goes down) – Typical positive correlation would be an observation that the more laughter in a family, the better the kids do at school. Conclusion – laugh more with your family and that will improve your kids’ marks! An example of negative correlation would be finding that the more…
We recently spent a week in Cape Town. The question was how to get from our apartment in Rosebank to O.R Tambo International. I was excited to see that the Gautrain bus passed right in front of our apartment. Wow! Life had suddenly become so much easier. So, a few days before our departure I set about planning how we would get to O.R Tambo International Airport by Gautrain. It ended up like this: Gautrain bus from our door to Rosebank Gautrain station Wait for Gautrain to Sandton Disembark at Sandton and Again wait for Gautrain to ORT All the…
When I learned that my grandson and his sister planned careers in robotics and the arts respectively, I realised that the arts was about the safest of the lot. I guess robotics and AI are pretty safe careers as it will presumably be some time before robots can design better robots, but surely some of the arts will never be displaced. I can’t, for example, imagine humans watching a play written or acted by robots, but which of the arts could they conceivably take over? Surely not dance, for the same reason as acting. How about replacing an orchestra? Why…