Summer holiday

I'm away for a while. Please come back in January.

Tiger vs. skinny bird with silly haircut

I took this odd clip at the Lino Park: you've heard of alien vs predator, shark vs bear, Brown vs. Cameron - well here's tiger versus what would normally be a small snack, one would think. Of course tigers are not native to Africa, so it could be that the bird is just too bird-brained to be instinctively terrified. Or perhaps they've become good friends through long incarceration in adjacent pens and they were just chatting through the wire like they do every day.

Can anyone name the bird species?

More animals

... a few pix from recent excursions; nowhere new, just the usual zoo and Lino Park (that's Rhino and Lion Park, conflated). I don't even know what they all are - what's the giant rat-like thing?

Killing a bull

Over the past couple of weeks there's been a big public debate (or is it really a media debate?) about a Zulu ritual called ukweshwama, in which a newly accredited regiment of some forty young men are obliged to kill an adult bull with their bare hands. Exactly how they did this was a bit murky, as the ceremony is sacred and so external observers are not allowed. However, Animal Rights Africa recently managed to get hold of some details and some photos, which showed that the bull is treated pretty badly for a while (eyes gouged, tongue ripped out, genitals manhandled, etc.) before eventually having its neck broken; ARA then presented a legal action in a SA High Court to have the ceremony banned. The legal action failed, because the judge accepted the evidence of the Zulus themselves that the bull didn't suffer, much, and their assertion that the ritual was essential to fulfill a cultural requirement, in which the power of the bull is transfered to the neo-warriors and then to the Zulu monarch, King Goodwill Zwelithini (although this reasoning is undermined a bit by the fact that the ritual had fallen into disuse and has recently been revived).

It's difficult to work out what to think about all of this; on the one hand a "modern" "liberal" (and I sometimes like to think I'm one) will decry needless cruelty to animals - it's a clear case, even for meat eaters - we like to think the steak in front of us didn't suffer too much on its way to our plate. On the other hand it also seems right to respect the religions and traditions of others, and it's somehow patronising to assume that "progressive" values are correct and those of traditionalists are wrong. Moreover, as so often in SA, the debate is mixed up with race issues - Zulus weren't allowed to practise their traditions under colonial and then apartheid rule, so if the new South Africa means freedom and tolerance for all cultures, then who is anybody to dictate moral standards to anyone else?

However, there seems to be a line beyond which most people would not accept a cultural practice just because it's a tradition - infibulation, for example, is pretty certainly beyond that line for the vast majority of the human race in the twenty-first century. Perhaps bull-baiting should be over the line too - and perhaps as a European I should be talking to the Spaniards I know about this very issue.

The evening light show

Most rainfall in South Africa is in the summer, and for the past couple of weeks in Johannesburg this has been delivered by a spectacular storm every evening, generally starting about seven o'clock but sometimes earlier. The rain comes down in bullets - I hear this on my roof, to the extent that conversation or watching TV is impossible over the background roar. At the peak of the storm there's bright cracking forked lighting, generally travelling as normal from the clouds to the earth, but sometimes licking horizontally across the underbelly of the cloud cover. Before, during and after the storm there are all-sky flashes of light which can go on for several hours - this is almost theatrical, like storm effects at the opera. Here are a few seconds from last night:

The rest of the Universe

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working my way effortfully through a book which was often very difficult (to me at least) but at the same time poetically written and awe-inducing because of its subject matter - is the universe infinite or finite? and if the latter, how might we measure it? The book is How the Universe Got its Spots by Janna Levin, an American astrophysicist or perhaps cosmologist. It's an unusual mixture of personal diary and an attempt to explain the mathematics and topology of the universe to a lay person - her mother, originally. I can't pretend to have understood more than fifty per cent of it, but Levin succeeds in explaining quite a few of the concepts that have eased into popular culture - and corrected a few of my popular misconceptions too. How about this, for example?:

"The big bang is not an explosion in space like a star exploding, where a ring of nebulous material surrounds an identifiable centre. Rather the big bang is the creation of space itself, of time. There is no sense to the question: how long was it before the big bang happened? Time started with the big bang. There is no sense to the question: where did the big bang happen? It happened everywhere. The earth is at the centre in a sense. Every galaxy is at the centre. The centre is everywhere. The first sketch of our universe, its birth, life and death, begins here."

How can the universe be finite? It would be like one of those video games where one edge of the screen is the same as the opposite edge - if you travel in one distance long enough you get back to where you started. More amazingly, Levin suggests that we can measure the distance between these two identical locations in space by comparing the tiny differences that exist in background radiation and matching them up in both directions - mapping the patterns of "spots" to find those that are the same - they would in fact be the same places.

What does this have to do with SA? Not much - except that my flat here in Dunkeld turns out to be the centre of the universe, just like the place where you are now; and one of the pleasures of going to nature reserves in SA is that they're a long way from cities and so there's no light pollution - you can lay on the ground at night and stare up at an astonishingly bright Milky Way - which is the rest of our galazy, seen edge on, consisting of millions of stars; and is one of billions of observable galaxies - the universe might be finite, but it's certainly very BIG. It tests my brain to consider such things even for a few minutes; I can't imagine a life dedicated to investigating the physics - and topology - and spots - of the universe.