It being Sunday n'all - Thought Leader

It’s hard to keep Dylan’s words out of your head reading about the breakneck pace at which change is happening all over our planet.

From the fun and fire in the US [I can’t see what all the fuss is about. We’ve had black guys getting into white houses for generations] to the Biblical-scale of weather changes that are exposing parts of Earth man has never seen because they’ve been hidden beneath glaciers longer than we have even existed.

Yeah man, the times they sure are a-changing! It’s all mighty fast for me.

In California now you can buy a home DNA kit for about the cost of a desktop PC (say, R5 000) which can identify 90 genetic traits and conditions from a bit of spit. This little DIY doohicky can tell whether you’re going to go bald early, go blind, are more likely to become an addict, what your personal preferences are and that your unborn son has a better than 50% chance of inheriting high-risk Parkinson’s disease. This is a major body blow to palmistry, Tarot cards and astrologers — though they still have the edge on whether you’re gonna hit the Lotto or not. If you saw the 1997 movie Gattaca, you’ll recognise the scene.

Seems green cars are just around the corner. The Japanese Aptera is the all-electric environmental fave getting nearly 200km a charge [the hybrid can almost make it from the Big Naartjie to Durbs). And once it gets to the homeland of pimping your ride, the larnies can grind it down Musgrave Road from nought to 100ks in 10 seconds, n’all.

The Europeans are not being left behind by the charge for change either. The Wops are paving sidewalks with smog-eating cement. The Poms have taken CSI to another level and developed a way to get fingerprints off rusted bullet casings. The Swiss have built a mutant scooter, with a fully enclosed Kevlar shell, that can do 100km on less than four litres of motion-lotion.

The jolly old fellows at Oxford have built a fridge without oxone-killing freon gas — just ammonia, butane and jolly old water — while the Canadians have pioneered a bicycle rental system in Montreal that is virtually thief-proof and can instantly track a bike. anywhere in town.

If you want to chop off you hand, England is the place to do it. Instead of getting one of those Nick Nolte hook-alikes from Tropic Thunder, get yourself an iLimb. With motors for each finger, it can wield a pair of scissors, swipe a credit card and hold a cup of coffee. And if that’s not geek enough for you, try IBM’s Roadrunner that recently smashed the petaflop barrier by doing one quadrillion calculations a second.

And, of course, we’re all waiting for word from Cern on when the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will let us know why mass exists, what happens to energy, whether there are extra dimensions we haven’t found yet and how come E=MC² is correct.

And, it being Sunday n’all, even the immutable realm of Roman Catholicism has updated its list of deadly sins. The new sins in the city are social damners in line with the temptations of our times — bioethical sins, morally dubious experiments that harm human embryos, drug abuse, pollution, social injustice, accumulating excessive wealth and creating poverty.

That hurts, man, ’cause it’s the only new change that is Proudly South African too. Guess I’d better not stand in the doorway or block up the hall, ’cause he that get’s hurt will be he who has stalled. Yeah, the times they are changing.