Another "racist email" farce?

Is this another one of those cynical distractions from some real issue? I refer to the "racist email" sent by some Otto Botha in the Aveng Group.

My bet is that this was just a stupid lapse of judgement, for which Mr Botha will pay dearly. I don't necessarily believe that this email betrays any particularly virulent strain of racism. Instead I believe that it's just another case of some random Afrikaner half hankering for some past that never really was, who is socially surrounded by people just like him, so he doesn't get the corrective feedback that would have prevented this turn of events. Just look at that list of executive managers: 14 of those 15 are lily-white - which one of them is likely to reply to some random politically-incorrect joke he trots out on Monday morning, pointing out that it's really uncool? Where on the list of priorities do you think "Be my colleagues' PC nanny" appears?

Should his head roll? I'm not sure about that. I am sure that there should be some form of punishment; after all, he is a leader in a company - a symbol, if you like, of what that company values, and symbols have meaning. But should he be forced out? That's less clear to me. I think Dr Hadebe is right to confront Mr Botha, and Aveng, but I think he overanalyzes the content of the email. IMHO it's just a stupid email sent in a stupid moment by a man who should know better.

I would like to see a more nuanced discourse on racism in the South African political economy. I'd like to see a distinction between this sort of overt offensiveness (that I hesitate to call "racism" - when my white friends tell these sort of "jokes" they seem to me more like toilet humour than a genuine expression of their beliefs), and the covert racism that you can really only notice if you're at the receiving end, or if you reduce it all to numbers, or pay closer attention to your surroundings than what narrow self-interest demands. Like when all the white staff at one of our offices has keys to the office, but "there are no spare keys left" when a non-white colleague joins. Or when my first instinct is to believe a white guy who asks me for gas money, but to expect the lone black executive among the 15 to be an "affirmative action appointment". Having a mini media storm every few years about some stupid emailed joke distracts us from the real issue.

There must be justice!

It seems I am not the only one who is getting a lot more attention from DirectAxis than I would like. There must be consequences. Not all of these ideas will stop the fake cheques, but just thinking about them should give some satisfaction.

• Google-bomb them. If anyone searches for DirectAxis, the search results should point everywhere other than their cutesy website.
• Find out the CEO's cellphone number (for extra credit, his wife's also), and use that when signing in at building security desks. (I suspect that's one way the "databases" get your info.) Use it also when anyone "needs" your phone number. This is probably not legal, so don't do it.
• Weld their gates shut. Don't do this either!
• If they include business reply envelopes (I haven't even opened their crap, I should really check this out), cram it full of "valuable marketing material" and "business correspondence" you've received from other "respected vendors" (read: other junk mail), and pop it in the mail.
• Call them, and take as much of the call centre staff's time as you possibly can. If economic sadism is your thing, you'll enjoy it, meaning it would be a good use of your time, and the call will cost them (staff costs, opportunity costs, not so much call costs - you bear those) more than it costs you. Use it as practice for sarging women (as most of the pit crew seem to be). My record is 25 minutes on an incoming junk call.

I really should add a link to my FV / PV calculators to make this post more relevant to DirectAxis's business.

2050

In 2050 I'll be an old man. These are my expectations:

• The Chinese will have sent humans to the moon.
• A manned mission to Mars will be Real Soon Now.
• We'll have strong evidence for life on some number of extrasolar planets, but I doubt we could conclusively tell if that life was "intelligent" or not.
• We'll have some blotchy extrasolar planet surface images, once we build a Luciola-class hypertelescope.
• The kernel (name unknown) will be many gigabytes of C source, taking a whole minute to compile.
• C will still be a "dying language". Java who? Oh that's those old guys who work for insurance companies?
• Rich people will be able to live essentially forever, through pharmaceutical / surgical interventions.
• Most cancers will be manageable. You'll expect to die from something other than cancer even when diagnosed with it. Getting a cancer diagnosis will be a bit like getting an HIV diagnosis today if you're in the first world: totally bummed, but you know life will go on for a while, as long as you keep taking your pills.
• We'll have finally outgrown the x86 instruction set, except in some niche legacy-dependent contexts. A bit like the PDP-11's status now. I doubt that that means we'll be using amd64 instead, because I think we'll increasingly outgrow the need for instruction-level backwards compatibility. Most of your desktop apps will be implemented in an interpreted language, or perhaps in a JVM-style monitor.
• There will be one or two asteroids we know we'll have to deflect at some point in the next 1000 years.
• All of our deserts, and then some, will be covered in solar panels. Whether PV or solar thermal plant, I don't know - probably some equilibrium based on weather conditions.
• Commercial fusion power will become available Real Soon Now.
• We will, or will have, spent another order of magnitude of money on a moar biggerer particle accelerator.
• Space cadets will still be dreaming about space elevators, while decrying the inefficiencies of chemical rockets, which somehow still just get the job done, and mostly reliably so.
• Africa will be suffering a dozen or two civil wars, and most of its countries will be bad places to live: you'll be poor, exposed to crime, and basically every one of David Bullard's stereotypes will be proving themselves true.
• We'll still be driving cars, albeit fewer of us, and we'll still be moaning about the price of fuel, yet we'll still drive 500m to the shop.

The best things in life are free

On Tuesday I hiked up Lion's Head after work with hiking friend Bronwen. I think we left just a little bit too late to catch the sunset from the top. But in a month or two, leaving at 17:30 should leave a reasonably fit person enough time to get to the top in time.

It was full moon, so although we missed watching the sun fizzle into the ocean, we did catch the moonrise on the opposite end of the Earth.

Shadow of Lion's Head

Last rays of sunset illuminate Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles

The moon rises from behind the clouds and mountains

Dusk cityscape

Camps Bay at dusk

Clifton at dusk

Cape Town night view

Sea Point by night

Profile of Devil's Peak set against city lights

Southern cross near the top of the image

Primitive telescope making tools

I've recently restarted my 4-inch reflector telescope project at the urging of an acquaintance from dance class. About 10 years ago I had already hogged out the curve, aiming for about a 100cm focal length, which I overshot a little. I managed to find my grinding log from back then, but it includes entries only for grits #120 and #220. I skipped #320, figuring that I can just put in (much) more time at #500; I also didn't want to deepen the curve yet more. Actually I'm not sure if I did or didn't use #320; the baby food jar in which the grit lives had lost its insulation-tape seal around the rim of the lid.

My grinding station is now the bathroom table in the otherwise unused flat in my back yard. Every other waist-height surface in my home is in use. (Yes, I need to get my ass in gear and create some more surfaces.) But anyway, unused is good, as it means there aren't any random household particles landing on my work.

According to ATM canon, I should have a wooden slab and brackets to hold the mirror. But faux-poor and lazy as I am, I simply plonked the glass on a sheet of newspaper, in turn on the bare laminated tabletop, and started grinding. Here is my setup:


That black thing is a quick-and-dirty pitch polisher. I simply softened some pitch and transferred it to a pickle jar cap, then pressed it on the mirror blank to establish some contact. The pink stuff is rouge, of course. I was completely surprised by how well this polisher worked - I got specular reflections after about 5 minutes of polishing with this thing!

Don't let Jacob Maroga leave Eskom

I would be sad to find out that Jacob Maroga, CEO of Eskom, has resigned as some news reports are reporting today.

IMHO Mr Maroga is the best man for the job Eskom (and its customers) can realistically hope to have. It's important here to decouple one's selfish kneejerk reaction to Eskom's application for 3 45% hikes in electricity tariffs from one's desire to have the right person leading the company.

• Mr Maroga has been an electrical engineer for 24 years, and I'd much prefer an electrical engineer who's been with Eskom for 14 years running an electricity supply company than some random accountant or politician type or artist type.
• Mr Maroga has been CEO since May 2007. This is roughly when the worst of the unplanned power failures in the Western Cape were coming to an end. We had a couple more bouts of planned power failures in early 2008, to be fair. Since then, I don't remember any Eskom-caused failures affecting me. My point here is that Thulani Gcabashe is rightly no longer CEO of Eskom. The power failures were not Mr Maroga's doing.
• 10 years ago, when new power stations should have started to have been built, Maroga was "Distribution Technology Manager". Do you see the lack of the word "Generation" there, or in fact anywhere in his career?
• Eskom's electricity is too cheap. Too cheap for them to make a profit (which they must, else capitalism demands they go out of business), not too cheap for us to afford. (Blame the municipalities here, not Eskom. Quick quiz - what's the single largest source of income for your municipality?) Getting rid of Jacob Maroga and replacing him with someone new won't change this fact: their electricity will still be too cheap.

So remind me: why do you want Jacob Maroga out?

Financial independence

The Elm tree and the Vine.

An extravagant young Vine, vainly ambitious of independency, and fond of rambling at large, despised the alliance of a stately Elm that grew near, and courted her embraces. Having risen to some small height without any kind of support, she shot forth her flimsy branches to a very uncommon and superfluous length; calling on her neighbor to take notice how little she wanted his assistance. Poor infatuated shrub, replied the Elm, how inconsistent is thy conduct! Wouldst thou be truly independent, thou shouldst carefully apply those juices to the enlargement of thy stem, which thou lavishest in vain upon unnecessary foliage. I shortly shall behold thee groveling on the ground; yet countenanced, indeed, by many of the human race, who intoxicated with vanity,
have despised economy; and who, to support for a moment their empty boast of independence, have exhausted the very source of it in frivolous expenses.

[Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/stream/aesopsfables00dodsrich/aesopsfables00dodsrich_djvu.txt with scannos fixed.]