Random Variable

Frustration over the way Creative support podcasts in their software means I am about to embrace the dark side and get an iPod Classic.

I admire the openness of American universities to publish their lectures online, and even publicise them through the Apple store.

In fact, I ought to mention a number of podcasts that were perhaps crucial in getting me to apply to Birkbeck.

First, Greg Niemeyer’s “Foundations of American Cyberculture” course at Berkeley made me rethink the material I was teaching Year 9’s on web design - i.e., the National Curriculum Framework materials are hopelessly illogical and outdated, not to mention just plain boring.

Mainly, it was Nathan Sayre’s “Natural Resources and Population” lectures, also at Berkeley, which made me bite the bullet and quit teaching and get a great job back in London that also provides me with the flexibility to embark on a degree in Politics & Sociology (having previously done Computer Science).

Sayre’s course on “World Regions, Peoples and States” also ties in excellently with my first year courses. He also joint lectures on my other favourite topic, climate change.

In fact, I had to personally thank Nathan Sayre in an email just because I think he is that good and been that influential in my change in track.

My theory is that hybrids will be pretty much a fad thing. For the long term, look to bicycle technology for the state-of-the-art in carbon footprint reduction.

We all need relatively speedy transport these days. I believe we will see average bikes whose average speed for the average cyclist will be in excess of 40mph, and within the decade.

That were my thoughts the other day as I perused the racks outside work and noticed that all the cycles parked there were made of aluminium as opposed to my steel alloy rust bucket.

And here comes the news that mathematicians have finally worked out a model that explains ride stability at speed. That it’s 2007, and we only now know something that seems quite trivial should be some indicator of the growing market for cycles.

The stolen abalone, an endangered and protected species, would have been eventually sold to predominantly Chinese buyers for around £225 a kilo. And that’s the problem: the enormous value of the delicacy has brought the Chinese Triad gangs to South Africa. In a cash-free transaction, the Triads swap the abalone for the ingredients to make methamphetamine, or ‘tik’.

The Guardian reports on the growing drugs crisis in Cape Town.

“Female values” have not been shaped for public purposes nor under conditions of freedom but rather have been developed under conditions of oppression and bent to the service of power in the private sphere. Moreover they do not, any more than their masculine counterpart, bear our full humanity. Although we may find some of women’s historically developed qualities more appealing than those of men, women cannot be called the more “fully human” gender in a history that dichotomizes women and men along almost every dimension of human being and activity. Within the partiality of the construction of both women and men, there has been no ungendered human experience, only the experience of women and men

That from Wendy Brown’s Politics of Manhood.