General

Poverty jostles alongside wealth in Shanghai. On one street corner I can buy a delicious takeaway omelette, a jidanbin (jidan: egg, bin: cake) with a choice of spices for about three RMB. I can add a sausage and it become four and a half RMB. Literally twenty steps away I can walk into a typical, […]

I have always been the foremost advocate of academic freedom among my peers, most of whom during their early undergraduate days did not see the relevance of academic freedom in their lives, which were seemingly interminable cycles of rote learning and repetition. Though they might have resented the absence of free thinking from their first-year […]

The annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference has just closed in New York and as usual it was a digital-publishing feast. Though I didn’t get to go myself, the flood of blogging and tweeting that came from the conference kept me happy right until my brain exploded. Though more time would improve my […]

We are a much-maligned lot, we who have a fondness for fortifying malt-based beverages. Whenever the government needs a quick fix to balance its books, pay for JZ’s legal fees, Trevor’s follicle treatments etc we get milked. Just like that. No-one ever thinks about the good we do. Not only do we contribute to the […]

We were living in China when Tom Cruise arrived to do some scenes for Mission Impossible 3. One of the scenes showed the endless trails of laundry hanging out on the rails of apartment buildings. The Chinese censors delayed releasing the film and deleted scenes of tatty underwear and bras hanging on rails outside apartment […]

A Times Online article on Robert Mugabe’s little 85th birthday party makes for interesting reading. A veritable feast in the land of famine is planned for this auspicious event. Lobster, Moët & Chandon, prawns and definitely no maize meal. Just as an aside any brand that associates itself, by supplying its goods, with this event […]

Why do South Africans, especially South African politicians, love the expression “willy-nilly” so? What exactly is its appeal? Here’s a selection of quotes, acquired willy-nilly — pronounced weelie-neelie — online, though they don’t begin to reflect the popularity of the word (I’ve heard it often in interviews on 702 and the SABC, for example): “We’re […]

In his farewell speech this week, Tony Leon stood before parliament and reflected on his tenure in the legislature as leader of the opposition; a tenure that no sane man can proclaim to have been inspiring. His was two decades of disappointment. Under the false pretext of fighting for justice, order and good governance, Leon […]

This story has captured my interest mainly because most people commenting on the post (link expires February 16) seem to be fairly misinformed about what is considered fair play on the web and the law. To summarise the story it goes something like this: A fairly well-known and prolific blogger registers the domain name www.mycoke.co.za. […]

“You miss too much these days if you stop to think” — Bono of U2 I scowled as I watched Eric, a bright 16-year-old Chinese student. He liked to sit in the back of the class. He was blissfully ignorant of the fact that I could see him playing with his PlayStation behind his desk. […]

It seems as if, in light of the success of recent experimental scientific attempts to extend the life of certain insects and animals, immortality is not in principle impossible, as Ulrich Bahnsen observes in Zeit Wissen’s feature on “the 12 big questions of science”. Astonishingly, by means of genetic manipulation scientists have managed to extend […]