the corner office

It's approaching month-end and our ADSL quota is all but spent. This is a good thing, because once a month, for a few days, I'm forced to remove myself from the blogging world and the news sites and the goings-on and y'know, have a life. My productivity goes through the roof for those few days, and each month I promise myself that even when the bandwidth comes back I'll rein in the info ingestion and spend more time doing other things.

Famous last words. I'm still in uh, holiday mode, and at least partly by design I spend more time reading up on current affairs and arb stuff these days than I do reading up on technical content. I'm just being a layabout: it's the equivalent of vegging out in front of CNN or Sky News or BBC World all day, really. Except that at least political blogs are way less vapid. Usually. And it beats the hell out of watching infomercials and soap operas. Usually.

But hey, it's my holiday/student life and I'm enjoying it. Soon exams will be over and I'll have to think about becoming a productive member of society again. But in the meantime, it's back to studying and doing fun things that don't involve intercontinental telecommunications. It might be a few days before thee blog gets replicated up again, so for now, bye!

Via Andrew Sullivan, a BBC article about the less glamorous side of archaeology:

Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century.

The stone room is in a newly-unearthed annex to Luther's house in Wittenberg.

Luther is quoted as saying he was "in cloaca", or in the sewer, when he was inspired to argue that salvation is granted because of faith, not deeds.

The scholar suffered from constipation and spent many hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.

Hehe. Some might write it off as childish humour but oh man, it fits perfectly (or not, as the case may be). Puuuuush. Straaaaaaain. Gasp. Puuuuuuush. Straaaaaaaain. Light-headed, elevated blood pressure, lack of oxygen, next thing you're having a religious experience.

But this is the zinger for me:

Luther left a candid catalogue of his battle with constipation but despite this wealth of information, certain key details remain obscure - such as what the great reformer may have used in place of toilet paper.

"We still don't know what was used for wiping in those days," says Dr Treu. The paper of the time, he says, would have been too expensive and critically, "too stiff" for the purpose.

We don't know what people used before someone invented bogroll? The mind boggles.

Some local politics for a change. Well, not much of a change. DA mal discusses Thabo Mbeki's reaction to a question from the DA's Ryan Coetzee during yesterday's Question Time in Parliament:

I felt anguish, heartache, embarrassment seeing that man, our President, use his podium in Parliament to rail so dementedly about racism. The man seemed paranoid. He was almost confused. He seemed so patently unable to handle his interrogator. He seemed inarticulate. He seemed unable to calculate the impact of his words and phraseology.

Where've I heard that before, I wonder?

Anyhoo. Ryan Coetzee has issued a statement saying that he doesn't believe Mbeki is fit to lead the country. Harsh, but not far off the mark in my view. Mbeki's refusal to confront the HIV/AIDs issue and focus on fundamental problems our society faces is unforgiveable.

The statistics in the DA press release make for thoroughly depressing reading:

Rape statistics

According to government crime statistics, released in September 2004, there was a 17.8% increase in reported rapes between 1994/95 and 2003/04.

An ongoing Population Council survey of 3000 men and women in Gauteng, released in September 2004, showed that 21% of young men between 15 and 34 believe that a flirting woman wants sex. [The Citizen 5 October 2004]

Another survey of young men in Gauteng, released in 2000, found that one in four young men claimed to have had sex with a woman without her consent by the time he had reached 18. [Sunday Times 25 June 2000]

A study of violence against women in three provinces found that between 19% and 28% of women had been subjected to physical violence by a current or ex-partner. [MRC News, vol.32 No.3 June 2001]

A Cape Town survey found that 41% of men reported having physically abused a female partner in the ten years before the study. [MRC News, vol.32 No.3 June 2001]

Studies on adolescent sexuality show that one third of teenage girls experience forced sexual initiation. [MRC News, vol.32 No.3 June 2001]

An Medical Research Council study found that 15% of men reported having raped or attempted to rape their wife or girlfriend during the ten years prior to the study. [MRC News, vol.32 No.3 June 2001]

So common is unwanted sex in South Africa, that research has shown people to confine the use of the word `rape' to use in describing acts of strangers. [MRC News, vol.32 No.3 June 2001]

In a study based on a survey of nearly 300 000 children aged 10-19 in 1418 South African schools, published in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal, it was found that:. [Cape Argus 19 October 2004]
- Raping 'someone you know' was not seen as sexual violence, nor was 'unwanted touching'.
- Just less than half the children believed that girls mean yes when they say no.
- More than a quarter believe that girls enjoy rape.
- About 11% of boys and 4% of girls claimed to have forced someone else to have sex - and of these children, nearly 665 of the boys and nearly three quarters of the girls had themsevles been forced to have sex.
- Children who had been forced to have sex were more likely to say that they would intentionally spread HIV.


AIDS infection statistics

The 14th annual HIV and Syphilis Seroprevalence Survey shows that although infections are not increasing as rapidly as they were in the 1990s, the epidemic has still not levelled off. 27.9% of pregnant women attending antinatal clinics were HIV-positive in 2003, in comparison to 26.5% in 2002. [www.doh.org.za]

The government's plan for HIV/AIDS treatment and care, published last November, estimated that between 400 000 and 500 000 South Africans were at an advanced stage of HIV and would benefit from AIDS drugs. [www.doh.org.za]

Estimates by the Bureau for Market Research suggest that HIV could be responsible for 5m deaths by 2011 and 9-10m by 2021. The total number of AIDS-related deaths was expected to exceed 500 000 a year between 2007 and 2011. [Bureau of Market Research, Unisa: A Projection of the South African Population 2001 to 2021]

If Mbeki spent more time trying to deal with problems like these and less having his little tirades against everyone who doesn't kiss his arse, this country would be a much better place. Mbeki brings up the racism issue every time he's criticised by "white" media or "white" politicians, but by demographics alone, there are many more black women who suffer from this country's tyranny of rape, and many more black people who'll be dying of AIDs in the years to come than white people.

I just noticed an obscure Google search hitting my blog:

humor of the 1830 s

Yeah, those were the days...

SABC3 is showing Demolition Man tomorrow night. Again. Between the SABC and eTV, that damned movie must have been shown at least TEN times in the past few years. It must be the most repeated movie on South African television. Even more than Leon Schuster movies. That's how bad it is. It wasn't a bad movie, but it's reached the point where I bloody hate it.

We really must remember to schedule Thursday night dinners earlier. CSI is on at half past eight, and it's not a dinner-friendly TV. Especially episodes about body farms.

In a fit of boredom, I'm googling the names of people I went to school with. Next to nada. One old school friend has a good number of hits 'cause she's a gay rights activist, another shares a name with a pr0n star (not the same person, I don't think), and the rest are almost entirely unknown to the Internet. Admittedly a number of the wimmins are probably married and changed names, but I don't imagine they're any different to the others.

On that note, I just googled my own name and realised that my own home page doesn't feature on the first page. Travesty! Top spot is held by a photographer namesake, and while my name dominates the remainder of the links, they're links on other blogs and web sites more popular than mine. I know why: apart from the 'who' page, this blog doesn't mention me by name. I need to work that into these pages somehow. Subtly, of course.

COLIN PRETORIUS, dammit!

I did a quick emerge sync and I'm going to have to pull down over 300 megs to get my system upgraded. OK, admittedly that's mainly 70 megs for an updated version of xorg-x11, and 210 megs for the latest version of OpenOffice!

That's madness. If I actually liked OpenOffice, I might be less resentful.

I'm wondering if I shouldn't take this opportunity to move my system from Gentoo's stable package line (x86) to its unstable (~x86) line. Living on the edge, risk-taking hip-with-the-times dude and all that. Problem is, that would involve 600 megs of downloading, and enough compiling to make my little Athlon gulp in fear. Perhaps month-end. I'll save my bandwidth for other things for now.

The really cool thing is that I've finally proven to myself that I can live mainly, if not solely in Linux. There are a number of tweaks I need to make it really homely, and I'm not sure if the Notes client will behave once I start doing more serious development with it... but I've not used Windows in anger for nearly 3 weeks, and that's a first for me.

Every day I wake up and promise myself I'll lay off the political stuff, but then I read the news and I just can't help myself.

Today, Pat Robertson says that Dubya didn't believe that there'd be casualties in Iraq. "Verily, we shall smite them with our righteousness and the shrapnel from their roadside IEDs will fall as impotent as a gentle summer rain upon our unarmoured Humvees." Or something.

I'm not sure why Bush, devout man of the Lord that he is, smiled upon by heaven and a chorus of angels and adored by the faithful everywhere, chose to ignore the advice of a good Christian fellow like Robertson. Especially because Robertson says he's hearing it straight from the top:

"I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy," Robertson said. "I warned him about casualties."

I still don't get why it is that when people like Pat Robertson hear voices they get syndicated TV slots, but the rest of us get padded cells.

I have a nearly-empty tin of condensed milk on my desk. I can hear it telling me that A, after forgetting to put it in the fridge last night I should throw it out and B, I should get another tin from the pantry.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

As expected, Computer Graphics was a disaster. Coding stuff was fine, the theory wasn't. I can't gripe, I should've put more effort into it. *sigh*

This is interesting: the BBC has a list of 101 words in 101 years, listing when words first became common. Some, thankfully, didn't have much staying power (1909's tiddly-om-pom-pom, for example), and it's hard to imagine that people once lived without terms like sacred cow (1910), sex (in a copulative sense, 1929), dunk (1937) and pissed off (1943).

One technical term struck me as odd: the use of the word "applet" is dated to 1990. Java only arrived much later, but true enough, from Dictionary.com:

Merriam Webster "Collegiate Edition" gives a 1990 definition: a short application program especially for performing a simple specific task.

I can't remember whether I'd ever heard the term prior to Java, but there you go.

I certainly haven't been deserving of the exam papers I've been getting, and my luck is going to run out eventually. In the meantime, lucky me: of the zillion things I could have been asked in today's paper, the exam (mostly) asked things I happened to know the answers to.

Time for a quick nap, and then it's a mad cram for Graphics Programming.