Virus update

Posted on

And it’s not good news.

This from Dr Craig Spencer:

And he should know:

To be fair, this assumption means that I should be a bit of an authority on a lot of illnesses. And – because people do ask, my Top 3 worst ones from a personal experience point of view would be: Covid at number one, with Malaria and Influenza rather close behind. I’m guessing that if I managed to get it, Ebola might top the list quickly and (in all probability) finally.

Anyway…

The combined confirmed and suspected Ebola cases in DRC are now more than 1,000.
All signs are pointing to a very long and catastrophic outbreak in Central Africa:

  1. This is a vast undercount. We know this because the test positivity rate is hovering around 50%, only 20% of contacts are being traced (and in some areas, no contacts at all), and more cases keep popping up with no known connection. This all points to widespread and undetected community transmission.
  2. This is in only a week of detection. Compared to previous outbreaks, the growth is very fast, as the huge West Africa outbreak in 2016 was first detected at 49 cases and rose to 208 cases a month later. It took four months for that outbreak to reach the size of the current one in the DR Congo.
  3. The cases are spread out across 16 health zones. There are now multiple epicenters, making containment very difficult.

Next door in Uganda, the case count is seven. While this number is low compared to DRC, a concerning development is that two health care workers recently tested positive with uncertain exposure histories. If they weren’t treating known Ebola cases, this means it’s spreading undetected in Uganda as well.

As ever with outbreaks in less developed areas of the world, we’ll likely never know the true scale of this outbreak. And we definitely won’t have an accurate handle on what is going on day-to-day. That makes it very difficult to direct whatever resources might be available in order to help those on the ground. And all of this has been compounded by the withdrawal of USAID in the region. We can’t say for definite that this caused the outbreak to occur, but it’s fairly well accepted by those in the know that it will be playing a big part in not being able to control it more quickly and efficiently.

The US plan to bury their heads in the sand, and direct anyone from the affected region to a (as yet unbuilt) field hospital in Kenya is a worrying and bizarre decision (at least when compared with previous presidencies).

But whatever the causes and whatever the complications, it’s clear that this outbreak is – at the present time, at least – completely out of control.

State of Origin scenes

Posted on

I managed to spare a bit of time to watch the second half of the first 2026 NRL State of Origin game today.

Firstly, it was meant to be a background thing, and the plan to be getting on with other stuff while it was on actually seemed like a very good idea when I checked the half time score: 6-20.
I later found out that it had been 0-20, so actually, that 6 points was the start of a bit of a comeback.

But as the second half wore on with no additional score (but plenty of mistakes) from each side, I figured that I’d made the right call.

Never give up on a game though. Especially one as passionately partisan as this one.

A particularly nasty shoulder charge to the head, a red card, and suddenly there was momentum, belief and a will to win.

The last twenty minutes had me captivated.

And that it game down to the very last kick of the game to crown “the greatest comeback in Origin history“?

Perfection. What an incredible finish.

If only all sport was that exciting.

(I’ll lob a highlights video up on here as soon as it’s available.)

It’s available:

Wow.

It’s hard work

Posted on

Honestly, when it comes to keeping fit, the younger generation just don’t know how good they’ve got it. And obviously, I was the same when I was the younger generation, so fair enough. But wow – keeping fit as you get older is HARD WORK.

Sarcopenia – the age-related progressive loss of muscle mass, strength and function – is a real thing, and while it (allegedly) starts at 30 years old, I never really noticed it until fairly recently. But now suddenly standing still (metaphorically, and literally) is just not good enough. You have to work twice as hard: once to build the muscle mass, strength and function, and once to overcome the age-related progressive loss of muscle mass, strength and function.

That doesn’t seem fair.

But honestly, you still need to live your life as well. All work and no play and all that. There’s zero fun (as far as I’m concerned) in devoting all your time to just trying to stay fit. You need to enjoy your life, and not make every decision about your health.
And so when I saw this, it rang very true, and I did actually laugh:

Yep. That’s me.

I will occasionally do a 7am run, but you’re not ever going to see either of the others in any way, shape or form.

And if that means that I have to work even harder in the gym and on the road when it comes to keeping fit and combatting my age, well, so be it.

Business must be good

Posted on

The economy is in a terrible state, so we’re told.

And actually, you only have to look around to see that that’s a pretty accurate synopsis. Unemployment is through the roof, costs are rising, inflation is up (and doesn’t seem to really match what’s happening on the ground), and we’re all feeling the squeeze. Multi-factorial stuff, but most of those factors can be narrowed down to a few knobhead politicians.

That’s for another post.

Sadly though, things still need doing. And we have a job that needs doing on our house, which is long overdue. It’s a project that will hopefully save us money in the long run, but it is going to cost a chunk of money up front. Like tens of thousands of Rands. And so, as any sensible person would, I contacted six different expert companies to get some comparative quotes.

Well, dear reader… Business must be better than we all thought.

Fair play, one contacted me back within a day, and we set some stuff up.

Less fair, but maybe ok kind of play, another one contacted me back after a few days, and (after a bit of misunderstanding), arranged to come out for a site inspection. But then didn’t turn up. Staff sickness apparently – when I called them. And because we all understand that these things happen, we rearranged another appointment and then they didn’t turn up again.

Red flag central, and an easy call for me.

I sent a Whatsapp saying that I wouldn’t be taking it any further, and I got a message back saying:

Great. No problem. Fully understand.

Wow. “Great”, really?
(And thanks for the apology for wasting my time.) (Twice.)

But even that was arguably better than the four who didn’t even bother to reply to my original message.

I really don’t get it. I’m literally wanting to give you business: to give you a lot of money for doing a job that you are apparently very good at. I’m doing the hard yards; I’m opening the dialogue and excusing you from doing the whole, time-consuming, costly, cold-calling marketing thing. Just give me a call.

But you couldn’t even be arsed to get in touch.

Business must be really good.

And so what do I do now? Because I’d selected those six companies based on the good reviews they had, and so now I must start selecting others that had less good or fewer good reviews. That’s already pushing me to seventh best and below before we’ve even taken into consideration that ? of them probably won’t even reply (data from a May 2026 study, n=6).

Because the thing is, much like voting for a political party in an election, selecting the least worst doesn’t necessarily make them any good. It just makes them less bad than the others. And in this case, the bar for that is so low that it’s a tripping hazard in hell.

So what choice do I have? The job still needs doing. And I still need to protect us from potentially being ripped off.

So here we go again, I guess.

Brilliant.

Long Exposure

Posted on

I quite like long exposure photographs. And not just from other people. I’ve had a go at a few long exposure photographs myself.
I think my record length is 4 hours. And it worked out quite well.

But those 240 minutes pale into insignificance when you learn about what Jonathon Keats, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona, is doing.

His is longer than mine (stop it). His is going to be 1000 years long.

His creation is simple: A small copper cylinder with a pin-sized hole sits atop a steel pole. To ensure the device survives the ravages of time, the tiny opening was pierced through a thin layer of 24-karat gold. Over the next 1,000 years, sunlight that enters the contraption will slowly fade a light-sensitive surface covered in an oil paint pigment called rose madder, resulting in an extremely long-exposure image of the landscape.

This is essentially a very (very) fancy take on a beer can solar tracking photography experiment. For which the current record is 8 years (and that was by mistake).

The camera in Tucson isn’t Keats’ first venture with experimental long-exposure photography. In 2014, the researcher worked with a team to distribute 100 cameras to residents in Berlin, instructing them to hide the cameras until 2114 for the next generation to retrieve. He has previously installed several other Millenium Cameras at Arizona State University in Tempe, Amherst College in Massachusetts and Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Keats hopes to keep installing additional Millennium Cameras in new locations around the world, from the Austrian Alps to Chongqing, China.

I guess that South Africa doesn’t make the list. Despite being plagued by the same issues as the rest of the world as far as Climate Change, rampant development and loss of natural habitat go, our local skollies also have a bit of a scrap metal fetish, and a camera full of copper and 24k gold will definitely be enough for a quick fix. It’ll be lucky to last 1000 hours, let alone 1000 years.

I mean, as a project, it’s very adventurous and impressive and all that, but I quite like the idea of being able to actually view what I’ve spent the time and effort creating. Jonathon isn’t going to have that privilege. Unless something very remarkable happens in the medical research field over the next couple of decades.

I’d find that incredible frustrating. But if he’s at peace with it – and I don’t really think he’s got any choice in the matter – then fair play.

It’s just disappointing that no-one came up with a similar plan back in 1023 (which was admittedly about 800 years before the invention of photography), so that we could see what the results looked like before we pop our collective clogs.