Here's the Wired link to my story on Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Man, Irish bridges and Hamilton's quaternions, which ran Oct 30th: What Makes Lara Croft Leap?  It got a little garbled in the edit. The quote on Irish castles should be attributed to Gell-Man.
7:21:54 PM  #   your two cents []

Here's a column I wrote for the Irish Times last week on South Africa, for some other impressions.
4:44:13 PM  #   your two cents []

Back from South Africa today, and I must say I have never before been on a trip where every single day was so astonishing, surprising, full of challenges to all your senses and perceptions. The whole country was like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when everthing shifts from black and white to technicolour. And maybe that's not a bad metaphor for the biggest challenge any visitor faces when confronted with the cauldron of complexity that is South Africa: how to move from seeing the nation defined *only* in terms of its race relations and its legacy of apartheid, a truly black and white position?

What I learned in two weeks was that the country is a mass of contradictions, full of energy and despair, hope and anger, pride and bitterness, kindness and fear. Deliberately, I don't set matching pairs of contradictions against one another here, because that (as in Northern Ireland) is far too simple an exercise. What emerged for me is not direct contradictions but jumbled complexity, where any given issue (and those that clearly preoccupy South Africans at the moment are crime, race, the economy, HIV/Aids, education, poverty) incorporates many of these emotions. But again and again, the overriding emotion I heard expressed, from people I met and from the radio and press and the conference I attended, was optimism -- even as right wing white separatists bombed Soweto last week; even as children are dying of starvation in the Eastern Cape, an issue of great concern to the UN but which has received little international public awareness; even as the country grapples with 15% inflation and a massively devalued rand; even as HIV becomes so commonplace and worrying that an HIV+ character was created for the South African version of Sesame Street to help children cope with either being HIV+ or having a parent or friend who is. Despite such grimness, this is at heart a nation that bursts with possibility, that is more multicultural and multiethnic than any place I have ever been, which even nearly a decade on, has a shimmering pride in its independence -- almost a shock, as if it still can't quite believe Nelson Mandela has walked free from Robben Island and become a statesman rather than a political prisoner.

At the same time, much remains that is ugly -- the casual racist remarks from some, the luxurious tourist resorts which come with armed guards and barbed wire to keep out the very real dangers (and I'm not talking about the game reserves and wild animals), the dire poverty of many of the zulu villages in the area we were visiting, the fact that 7 million South Africans have neither clean, safe water or sewage facilities. And this in a nation known for its wine and gardens and golf courses, whose highways are on par with any in Europe or, say, California -- and certainly much better than nearly any Irish roads!

Much more to say but I have other things to do at the moment. I had tried to post items from Africa but found on my return that we must have had a power outage in this part of Dublin as the computer had rebooted. It's one of the disadvantages of the desktop operations of Radio, if you are relying on remotely posting to a home computer on a DSL line. If anything happens to the PC or the connection you are effectively deblogged -- and I had so many snippets I'd have liked to post from So Africa as I travelled! Alas. A long post on the conference itself was lost completely because of this.

More to come, plus a picture gallery. I'll just close by saying Africa is truly seductive, truly extraordinary. I dare anyone to spend a single night listening to the night sounds of the African bush, the stunning symphony of whistles and chirps and growls and calls and answers and rumbles and whines, and not flat out fall in love with the place. The continent gets in your blood. I'm already thinking of where I want to go next.

4:24:44 PM  #   your two cents []