Day 215 – Robben Island review

OK. So it’s about time that I put pixel to screen on the subject of our visit to Robben Island.

What a privilege.

Long story short, I went out there as part of a school visit – ostensibly as an adult to up the necessary ratio and do the cooking – but I was able to get to photograph and do all the things that the kids were able to do, and that included some very special moments.

The kids were great and they learned a lot, not just about the history of the island, but also a lot about the environment and how we (mankind) are affecting it. The beach clean-up that we did on the Friday afternoon was thoroughly depressing. We shifted a bakkie load of plastic in less than half an hour and then looked back at where we’d been and it just still looked like a dump site. We found Kelp Gull nests on the beach (no predators, no humans), with eggs surrounded by shredded plastic bags, bottle tops and biscuit wrappers. It was a hard reality check.

Something needs to change. Thank goodness we’re educating the adults of tomorrow clearly better than we educated the adults of today.

A braai in the evening and then to our dorms: converted cells in the convict prison on the island – the one where they kept the real criminals, not the political guys trying to overthrow the Apartheid government. Not bad, actually. Probably much better than back in the day.

OK – definitely much better than back in the day.

And then Saturday. What an incredible day. One that will stay with me forever.

Up early – ridiculously early – having had the idea and getting permission to go out for a run as long as I was back in time to make breakfast. I don’t do early starts, but with an opportunity like that, why would I not sacrifice an extra hours sleep?

Wow. Literally an island to myself. Out before sunrise with the fog lying heavily over the veld and the beaches.

I say ‘to myself’, but there were fallow deer, springbok and steenbok, tortoises, ibises and penguins. The run was good – flat and quick – with numerous photo stops because why on earth wouldn’t you? The sense of freedom was both palpable and ironic.

Just an amazing start to an amazing day.

Breakfast – and then a group wander: the Leper’s Graveyard, the church, and then…

We got to the “real” prison at about 9:30am, giving us an exclusive visit until the first ferryload of tourists arrived at 11:30. And our guide had the masterkey: we had full access to anything: everything. And so it was at 10:16am on Saturday 24th October 2020 that I found myself – for a short while – alone inside Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison cell, facing the very same bars that he would have faced.

I still haven’t quite found the words to describe how I felt right then. The privilege to be able to be somewhere that thousands of tourists only get to view from the outside, to stand where he had stood for all those years. There was something deeply meaningful – almost spiritual – about it, but I’m not even pretending to understand what living in there must have been like. There were plenty of documented experiences shared around the site that made for very harrowing reading.
For me, it was just a genuinely incredible experience to be able to go inside the cell of prisoner 466/64 and just be there for a minute on my own.

The rest of the visit was also amazing, but obviously, this was a clear highlight.

But as highlights go. Wow. That’s got to be right up there.

I need to revisit my thoughts on the Ivivaneni that we made as well, after the 1996 version started by Madiba at the Lime Quarry on the Island.

Inspired by the Zulu proverb “Ukuphosa itshe esivivaneni” (literally mean to throw one’s stone on the pile/monument) to make a personal contribution to a great common cause. This contribution is made in the spirit that everyone buys into and does their bit to create a motivating vision of the future. The arrangement of stones in an isivivane is contributed by diverse people over time and so another way of seeing isivivane is as a form of collectively performed memory.

Again, a really inspiring and shared moment, especially after such a demanding, depressing, crazy year.

I need to thank the people involved, but I don’t generally name people on this blog, and so, having thanked them in person, that will have to do. You know who you are. Thank you.

And yes, of course there are photos, at least one or two of which I’m really happy with, but there’s been another thing I’ve had to get busy with since I’ve been back, and so I’m still playing a bit of catch up.

We’ll get there.

The dream continues…

Something here while I look through a disappointing lot of photos from yesterday and clean sand out of everything and everywhere – everywhere – after sundowners on Llandudno beach yesterday evening.

We appear to have brought back quite a lot of the beach with us. It’s amazing to consider that there is any beach left given the number of people down there yesterday that must have brought an equal amount of beach back with them.

We’re struggling a little today. Mrs 6000 slipped on the dodgy stairs down to the beach yesterday and twisted her knee, so she’s sore and limping around this morning.
The beagle is suffering slightly after it decided to steal and wolf down 2 slices of pizza, each generously topped with piquante peppers. This was yesterday evening, it was thoroughly scolded and it still hasn’t been able to look me in the eye since.
And 6000 Jr is unwell. If he’d been to Italy or China, I’d be very concerned, but he hasn’t, and so I’m just quite concerned. Fresh air, drugs, rest and relaxation is the best we can do for him. And possibly a brandy later (for me).

So let’s have some good news: Sheffield United…  I mean… What. A. Season.

Another hard-fought win yesterday, another 3 points and the dream continues.

Bullet header. Great saves. Fantastic effort. Amazing team spirit. Unbelievable belief. You make your own luck*.

And yes, I know that some of my readers are left cold by football. That’s fine. I’m not, and I’m having a great time at the moment.

I’ll get back to my photos now. Might share some a bit later. Maybe tomorrow.
Watch this space.

 

 

* This one is BS. 

Faster wifi on planes

The future is now.

To be honest, the future was actually already then, when I was on a flight over Turkey, tracking my flight over Turkey en route to nearly kill my Mum by walking into her kitchen while she thought I was 6000 miles… away.

Wi-fi on planes is incredible. Not just because it’s useful as a communication, productivity and time-passing tool, but also because of the way it works. From your device to the on-board router, then pinged from the top of the plane moving at close on 1,000kph to a satellite about 35,786km up (which itself is moving at 18,000kph) and then down to earth and then – obviously – back again.

Like, I said: Incredible.

In fact, the only issue with the wi-fi on planes is that it’s not very fast. So sending photos or anything larger than a Whatsapp message takes ages or doesn’t really work at all. Especially just after dinner.

But now it’s about to get better:

Emirates has partnered with Thales to bring 50Mbps connectivity to its Boeing 777X fleet in 2020.

That’s five times faster than I get at home. Five.

And look, I know I’m very lucky to have a generally stable internet connection at home. But my house stays where it is and is attached by a long cable to the place where the internet comes from (which also stays where it is). It’s relatively simple to get internet to go back and forth along that cable. But they still can’t do it at more than 10Mbps.

I think the potential solutions here are fairly obvious: move my house to an Emirates 777 (clearly not an option), or park an Emirates 777 in my back garden (it could be a contemporary sculpture).

The neighbours might not be happy, but at least they’d have really speedy internet.

93 seconds you’ll never get back

Remember Leonhard Euler from the Satan’s Arithmetic post? Of course you do.
Now behold Euler’s Disc – probably the most hypnotic thing ever.

Look into the eyes, look into the eyes, not around the eyes… and you’re under…

The physics behind this “scientific toy” can be found here, but basically, it comes down to this:

A spinning/rolling disk ultimately comes to rest; and it does so quite abruptly, the final stage of motion being accompanied by a whirring sound of rapidly increasing frequency. As the disk rolls, the point P of rolling contact describes a circle that oscillates with a constant angular velocity w. If the motion is non-dissipative, w is constant and the motion persists forever, contrary to observation (since w is not constant in real life situations). In fact, precession rate of the axis of symmetry approaches a finite-time singularity modeled by a power law with exponent approximately -1/3 (depending on specific conditions).

So there you have it. Obviously,  it’s important that you remember that rolling friction is the primary mechanism for kinetic energy dissipation in this scenario and not air resistance.