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Tag: South Africa

I spent yesterday watching the rather nail-biting match between south Africa and England. Both teams played really well, and the total of 323 runs which south Africa were chasing was a huge score. Even though south Africa came up 22 runs short, it was a very good effort.

Of everyone though, I was most impressed with Graeme Smith’s performance. He got 141 runs and stayed in the match for almost the entire innings.

I did lose a little bit of respect for the English side though. Towards the end of Graeme Smith’s innings, he started cramping badly. From what I saw on TV, it looked like it was painful for him to walk, let alone run.

When Smith asked for a runner, to run for him (which he was fully entitled to do), the English captain, Andrew Strauss, refused to allow it, saying that runners should not be allowed for cramping.

Understandably, Smith, and the rest of the team were not particularly happy about this, as there is a fair bit of historical precedent where runners were allowed for this very reason.

It looks to me as though Strauss was wanting to make sure that South Africa was in the least favourable position to win the game, although, by that stage the chances of us winning was remote whether Smith got a runner or not, so seriously, would it really have been so terrible for Struass to allow the runner? I certainly don’t think so, and it left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth. It came across as rather unsportsmanlike, which cricket is normally known for its high levels of sportsmanship.

And to the Proteas, I know we lost, but I am proud of you guys anyway.

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Sumbandila, the second South African satellite, has taken to the skies. It was launched from a rocket in Kazakhstan on Thursday evening, and has entered orbit. The last I heard, from the SA Weather and Disaster Information Service – of all people), they were still trying to stabilise the orbit, all the equipment appears to be functioning, everything appears to indicate a successful launch.

The purpose of the satellite is for earth observation, but don’t worry, it is not quite a spy satellite. It has a resolution that can make out objects of 6.25m on the ground. The satellite has a polar orbit, with a path crossing over South Africa. The orbit is 500 – 600km about the earth, which makes it a low-earth orbit, and will be used to monitor weather such as sea and land temperatures, clouds formation, rainfall and ocean levels.

Interestingly though, this satellite has been trying to get launched since late 2006, when it was going to be launched off of a nuclear submarine, but a few problems prevented that launch from happening. The launch date has been postponed several times since then, so it is great to see an actual launch has now happened.

The satellite development was headed up by the Stellenbosch University engineering faculty. It weighs 81kg, and is 1m by 0.5m in dimensions. The cost of the satellite was R26 million.

And for those of you wondering what the name Sumbandila means, it in Venda (a local South African language) it means “lead the way”. I think that is a fitting name, and hope it does lead to more involvement in space from South Africa.

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Today, on news24, I saw the reply from Telkom about the pigeon race to copy 4GB of data from Howick to Hillcrest (read my post about it here).

Telkom are claiming that they cannot be blamed for the slow internet connection, as they say that The Unlimited have not followed their recommendations and that if they had a problem they should have contacted the Telkom call centre to sort them out.

Now, anyone in South Africa who has had to deal with the Telkom call centre will know that that is an exercise in futility. Telkom are so well known for non-delivery of services. Just think of sites such as www.hellkom.co.za, or the amount of complaints on www.mybroadband.co.za.

Telkom have a stranglehold on communications in South Africa, and as with all monopolies, they don’t really have much reason to improve service if there is nowhere else to go. New infrastructure like the new Seacom cable might change things like that in the future, but for now, there is not much we can do.

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Having studied astronomy for a number of years at university, this is a subject that is very close to my heart, and South Africa is in a good spot right now. We have a good climate for astronomy, one of the world’s largest ground-based optical telescopes (SALT out in Sutherland), a magnetic observatory in Hermanus, and several other smaller observatories.

That all is old news though. More exciting things are still to come. South Africa are bidding to build what will be the largest radio telescope array in the world, and our only competition are the Australians.

This radio telescope, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be made up of 3000 radio dishes, each of which is 3 stories high. Think of something similar to the Very Large Array (VLA) out in New Mexico that featured in the movie Contact. Except the VLA comprises only 27 dishes. Now, granted, each dish in the SKA will be smaller than the ones in the VLA, with 3000 of them working together, nothing before it will compare.

The name of the telescope comes not from the size of the area on which the telescopes will be built, but rather, the combined surface area of the dishes, which will be spread out over an enormous area. If we get the bid, most of the dishes will be built in the Northern Cape, with 7 other neighbouring countries also having a few dishes, since the full scale will be 3000km across.

The reason for this is that when you use several radio telescopes far apart from each other, you can get much better resolution than having one big giant dish. I won’t go into the technical details of how this works since I would probably lose 99% of my readers doing that. Suffice to say, what we are essentially creating here is a huge radio telescope 3000km across that is made up of 3000 individual bits, all connected by fiber optics.

And what would be the price tag for this project? Only a paltry two billion euros. It sounds a lot, but when you compare to what you are trying to do, it doesn’t sound like much.

I think South Africans need to come forward and be proud that we are being considered. Come on show your support.

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Winston the Pigeon is the champion in a most unusual race.

A company in KwaZulu-Natal, The Unlimited, decided that they were a little sick and tired of the unreliable internet connectivity they were getting from Telkom. They have to regularly send 4GB of data from their Howick office, near Pietermaritzburg to their head office in Hillcrest, Durban – a distance of 80km.

Someone had a bright idea that it would probably be faster to send the data between the office using a carrier pigeon than using their broadband connection, and thus was born Pigeon Race 2009.

Today, at 10:00 or so the race began, and Winston, the carrier pigeon did not disappoint. the download is still underway at the time of writing, while Winston has landed already, and the data has already been copied off the memory disk they attached to its leg. A recent test by the company showed it took over 2 days to transfer the 4GB over broadband. Winstons trip took 2 hours 6 minutes.

There is some talk that the company might employ more carrier pigeons after the success of this little experiment.

Many people who were trying to watch the live internet feeds struggled due to inadequate internet bandwidth. I love the irony.

This just goes to prove that Telkom IS as bad as they are made out to be….I just hope this contest spurs on our local communications companies to pull up their socks and offer us a real service.

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I am beginning to get a little tired of hearing about the 2010 Soccer World Cup every second of the day. It is great that we, South Africa, are hosting it, but it drives me insane as to how people are just using it as an excuse for everything from marketing campaigns to changing laws.

I encountered a good example this weekend.

Claudia and I were driving through Observatory, in Cape Town, and Claudia told me that she saw a sign at the Engen garage we had just driven past saying that they accepted credit cards to pay for fuel. this lead to a little argument, as the law in South Africa prohibits paying for fuel with credit cards, so I thought she had been mistaken.

As it turns out, I was wrong (and did apologise). It was indeed illegal to buy fuel on credit card. That is why for decades, South Africans have had to have garage cards in order to buy fuel on credit, instead of being able to use their credit cards. This, however, was changed last month, I discovered. The law was amended and it is now legal to buy fuel on a regular credit card, and Engen has been the first fuel retailer in South Africa to begin accepting them.

Now, what has this to do with the Soccer world cup, you may ask? Well, the reason they changed that law to allow credit cards is to make it easier for foreign tourists coming over here next year for the soccer. What makes this event so special that government can change laws like this just for that. I mean, for years we have had to put up with it, and now suddenly we hosting a sporting event, and they able to change it.

Yes, it will make life easier for our tourists, and, heck, it will even make life a lot easier for me, but I really think that the reasons for why it is happening are somewhat flawed.

You can read more from an Engen press release

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