iNeck Brace for Long iFlitesLast week Apple Computers filed a patent for a travel app called iTravel.
Where?
That’s something I’ve always wanted to know. I seem to be traveling so much these days if someone could just give me a device or an app for my other devices so that the first device knows where I misplaced the second device, and when it needs an update, then clearly I wouldn’t suffer jetlag so much.
Though I do see a problem with Apple’s strategy.
The app could book airlines, hotels and cars, and would be an extension of iTunes “Concert Ticket +” and would as well provide ticketless check-in using NFC (Near Field Communications) such as retina scanning or fingerprinting.
The main problem is its name. There are already several iTravels: there’s an iTravel Rental Car company in Georgia, there’s an iTravel Alarm Clock and iTravel Neck Art, and a multitude of sites already out there such as iTravel2u and iTravelsmart among many others, and then there’s iTravel Travel, a Project of Travel.
iPod already has an iTravelBag. And inside the iTravelBag for the iPod you can place the iStickUm Notem to remind yourself where you lastum putum your iPoddom.
i41 welcome them iAll. In fact given the trends in the industry I expect we will soon see iAll+.
I was fascinated once listening to a woman from China explain how she uses a computer in Mandarin. There are 5000 basic characters in mandarin and obviously not 5000 keyboard keys. But by typing the English equivalent of the phonetic counterpart of the character, the character then appears. Meaning is achieved when enough characters emerge strung together.
So there is this labor (finger bashing) intensive midstep process of creating meaning through creation of the character phonetically. When I asked her if this isn’t a bit stressful, she raised her left index finger, touched the top of her ear with her right little finger, stuck her elbow out at me and looked slightly up.
i41 wood gate up mixed.
But anything that improves the direction of my travel is much appreciated.
Kristin Shea wrote:
I’m planning a trip to East Africa from the beginning of Sept through end of November this year. I’d like to incorporate seeing the Mountain Gorillas, along with volunteering and sightseeing in Tanzania. Two questions: 1) What is the ideal time to see the gorillas? & 2) Can you recommend any volunteer opportunities in Tanzania or Rwanda? I’m a teacher and would like to lend a hand while back there. Thanks!
A: The mountain gorillas live in the “rain” (intentionally bracketed!) forests of East and central Africa, so it rains a lot. But there are seasons when it rains less than more, and if your schedule permits, that is probably the best time to go. But before I tell you what those seasons are, I think you need to think of what else you’ll be doing, and what your own schedule permits, because even in the season of “less” it could be raining hard! So to the answer: normally it rains most in April, May and from mid-November to mid-December. (Not so this year, by the way. It rained most in March!) The point is that it rains so much, that ought not be as important a consideration as the other things you’re doing… As to volunteering, there are several tour companies which promote volunteering, but I don’t like any of them. What I suggest you do is go to the source. Find a school that offers the discipline that you teach back at home and contact them directly. Finding a school is easy and with that I’ll be happy to help. Send me another email and we’ll get you going!
Kristin wrote back on 14May:
Amahoro has been referred to me and I’ve researched them…They seem great. My concern is that I’m traveling by myself and & I’m wondering if there’s a recommended tour company that would let me join a group. Any thoughts?
Based on your advice, I’m researching direct volunteer opportunities in the Arusha area. There is a hostel there that I’ll use as a back-up plan. If you know of any elementary schools or orphanages that are in need of volunteers, please pass along their info to me. Thank you!!!!
A. Amahoro is a good company, you’re in good hands. I wouldn’t worry about joining a group, because a gorilla trek is by government rules a group of 6-7 people with one guide. So whether you arrive alone or not, you’ll be automatically teamed up for the actual trek.
August and part of September is a school holiday month in most of East Africa and the term that begins in September is a critical exam study month for all children matriculating at the end of the year, so you’re going to find many administrators loathe to take on a volunteer, then. However, there are many private schools that have a slightly different schedule and dozens of orphanages that integrate schooling into their facility. When contacting these people, it’s very important that you sell yourself with your own training and background. This may sound strange, since you’re volunteering, but the fact is that now there may be too many outsiders trying to volunteer these days, so like any position in which you’d like to intern, you have to sound valuable. In the old days, just offering to volunteer was enough; absolutely not so, anymore.
Jim,
Long time since we spoke. My son, Mike is going to Africa and we were talking about malaria meds. When we traveled with you, many years ago, you gave me the name of a med I bought in London as the current US brand caused nightmares. Is that still the case and what do you now suggest is the best?
A: Lariam is the drug you’re recalling, and yes it’s still available and widely prescribed, and yes, I still suggest you look for something else. My own personal experience and that of many colleagues is that it just produces too many side effects. On my last two safaris, in fact, people who were using it reacted so badly both stopped using it in the middle of the safari, which isn’t good. Once you start a malaria prevention regimen, you ought not in the middle stop or switch.
There are other options, but I can’t recommend one over the other because it depends very much upon the medical health history of the person involved. It’s really absolutely something that you should see your personal physician about.
Can't remember. Was he born here?
A single case or two of corruption brought down the Kenyan election. But the recently ended UK election, like the notorious Bush/Gore election, was riveted with irregularities.
Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MP for South East England since 1999, and winner of the Bastiat Award for online journalism, writes in his blog that this week’s UK elections were corrupt and therefore inconclusive.
He posits “how much easier electoral malpractice has become in the United Kingdom than in the two banana republics where I have been an election monitor.”
He claims that “Many people were denied a vote.”
And while Hannan looks from the inside out, there were plenty who saw the same thing from the outside in.
Election monitors from the Commonwealth Countries have been fairly unanimous in criticizing the results as unfair, inconclusive and flawed.
Kenya’s Ababu Namwamba of the election commission told UK newspapers, “The allegations of fraud and of voters being turned away threaten the integrity of the vote, especially in marginal constituencies where candidates have a majority of less than 1,000.
“The number of seats the Tories needed for an absolute majority is not that high — this could have made the difference. One candidate told me that the British system is possibly the most corruptible in the whole world,” Namwamba added.
Marie Marilyn Jalloh, an MP from Sierra Leone, added: “There has to be doubt over the legitimacy of the result… [The UK] system is a recipe for corruption; it was a massive shock when I saw you didn’t need any identification to vote.
In Sierra Leone, as in Kenya, voters must present an identity card corroborated by finger prints.
Even observers from places where elections have not been so contested criticized the process. Lisa Hanna, an MP from Jamaica, said: “I was shocked by the lack of checks.”
I dare say that the difference between Brown, Clegg and Cameron is much less than Gore and Bush, although the British may see that differently. But frankly I feel the difference between Gore and Bush was much greater than between Kibaki and Odinga, the two contentious rivals in the Kenyan election of 2007.
And in all three contests, the results were so close that even isolated acts of corruption or inadvertent irregularities could conclusively effect the outcomes.
What does this mean?
For a moment, let’s presume that some system could be put in place that would assure there were no irregularities … not one.
And let’s also presume that like the Dutch, institutions were in place to make everyone vote (the Dutch give out parking-like tickets to offenders who don’t vote).
It would still be close. Do you think that those who lost would concede so easily?
No, of course not. I happen to have been on the aggrieved side of the Bush/Gore outcome: I believe the world would have been a happier, more peaceful place if the results had better reflected the actual outcome.
But would I have conceded had the results been flipped? Would I have allowed the will of my community to proceed to waging decades of what I considered immoral wars? Or would I have sustained an outcome that I might in my inner conscience known was unfair? In order to “save the world from war.”
Elections work only when both outcomes are at some level acceptable to all sides. When compromise, however stinging, works.
Compromise in the world doesn’t work, today. That means elections won’t work. I’m not sure why, but the whole damn world is too polarized for elections, even incorruptible ones.
Representation by Tomislan Maricic in SCIENCE.Neandertal weren’t wiped out by us barbaic humans. They’re are one of our great-great-great, great-great-great? or something grandparents!
Between a hundredth and a twenty-fifth of those of us non-Africans is Neandertal! (Modern Africans as a race have little or no Neandertal DNA.)
The report issued today in Science radically changes our view of ourselves. It was only one year ago this week that Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania reported that essentially all people alive today were more or less pure ancestors of a small band of hominins that crossed over from Africa 50,000 years ago.
Not necessarily so.
Quite likely that band prospered, moved north and interbred with another type of hominin, the Neanderthal. Or maybe that band went extinct or was absorbed by a group of hominins already living in Europe that had already interbred with Neandertal!
Maybe… Neandertal and we, homo sapiens, are one and the same species, after all?
This is great, joyous science! How different, for example, it is from the secretive, arrogant paleoanthropology of Ardi announced not too long ago.
This is open to us all, to the world, and it is breath-taking!
At this point I should direct all of you not to the report itself, but to those brilliant and affable scientists who can translate it into terms we can all understand. There are many of these wonderful individuals, but my favorite is the University of Wisconsin’s John Hawks.
Today’s report in Science is probably the most exciting research on close-to-modern hominins ever seen. And not a single element of that report came from the field.
It all came from… DNA.
You remember that the human genome project started in 1990 and took about 13-14 years to complete, and that by 2004 we had a nearly complete working blueprint of our genes.
They did it with Neandertal in about two years. The Max Planck Institute mapped the genome of Neandertal from five species found in Europe from a bone powder weighing less than an aspirin.
To come to the amazing conclusions they did, they had to compare the Neandertal genome not only to our genome, but also to chimp’s.
And by simultaneously looking at the sections of the Neandertal and modern man genome that differ from a modern chimp’s, the most groundbreaking science was achieved: some of us modern humans have more divergence from Neandertal DNA than others. Modern Asians carry more Neandertal DNA than modern Africans.
That means our common modern human ancestors, the guys who previously we thought wiped out the Neandertals when they met them… didn’t. They absorbed them into the population and probably before migrating east to Asia. (There’s no evidence, yet, that Neandertals got themselves to Asia.)
The report also took a first look at some of the genes we now carry that likely came from Neandertals. (It will take much longer, and may never be possible to find them all.) And reexamined genes of importance that we absolutely don’t have from Neandertals.
Why would that be? Why do we carry some of the genes and not others?
Because some worked and some didn’t for evolving us. We’ve known for some time, for example, that really important genes, ones that effect energetics, longevity, and our brain, don’t come from the Neandertal. These are the dynamite genes carried in the mitochondrial DNA that has been available for examination for more than a few years.
Genes relating to our brain functions, stamina and life span didn’t come from Neandertal. It’s a stretch but not entirely unfair to conclude that may be some of the reasons Neandertal went extinct: because they didn’t share these important characteristics with our ancestoral lineage.
And genes relating to diabetes and a few rare diseases did come from Neandertals. As did certain genes relating to “cognition.” But since we still don’t really know how these genes even in modern humans translate into the workings of diabetes, these rare diseases or “cognition”, we don’t of course know how to determine if this was useful or not in our own modern evolution.
There is so much science left to do! And what’s amazing is that this type of science is done mostly in front of a computer screen, not out brushing pumice away from fossils.
And finally one of the most awesome aspects of this science, which continues from the genome project itself, is that it is all PUBLIC. Everything, every discovery, every postulate, every tool and method is on the internet.
It’s there for every cerebral scientist to use to further his own intricate theories, as it’s there for an 8th grader to create a science project.
Kudus to these guys: University of California’s Richard E. Green and a host of others, and Max Plank’s Hernán A. Burbano and a host of others.
Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki returned from China’s expo with a commitment from the Chinese to build a new Kenyan port on the island of Lamu.
He called China “an important strategic partner.”
Hmm. That’s how Secretary of State just referred to Kenya: a “strategic partner.” Quite a phrase, that.
Kenya is on the threshold of a great decision. In two months the nation will vote YES or NO on a new constitution. Even getting to this point, of getting the Kenyan politicians to create a new constitution that in my opinion works well for the average wananchi was a Herculean task.
If it weren’t for the U.S., the U.K. and the EU, it would never have happened. This frontline of democracy and human rights bribed, cajoled and threatened Kenyan leaders until they finally… at the last minute … created a draft the population can vote on.
In fact when it seemed all was lost, good ole Kofi Annan jetted back into town to push the wayward leaders back on track.
So far, it has cost the consortium of good guys about $11 billion. And this is separate from ongoing initiatives like AIDS and malaria prevention, and separate from the several billion that poured into the country to stabilize it right after the political turbulence that followed the last election.
The west doesn’t want Kenya to fail. Why?
We say we don’t want Kenya to fail, because “Kenya is a strategic partner.” Untangle the myriad of meanings from that and you get to a fundamental core that “Kenya shares our values” which ultimately, of course, means that Kenya is OK with us dominating the world.
I’m not sure we would feel that way if al-Qaeda weren’t sitting next door in Somalia. We don’t seem to be quite as passionate about Senegal.
China, on the other hand, doesn’t give a hoot who is running Kenya or how they’re doing it.
“We don’t need lectures on how to govern ourselves. Lecturing us on issues that deal with governance and transparency is in bad taste,” Raila Odinga, Kenya’s current Prime Minister told Hillary Clinton last year. China never says a word about how Kenya should be governed, and certainly doesn’t care how transparent anything is.
The University of Nairobi’s Joseph Onjala warned Kenya’s leaders in 2007 that their presumption that China’s aid comes without strings attached was naive.
Chinese money is much less than the west’s : about a tenth, although growing substantially year by year. And Chinese aid is nearly all for infrastructure. The west’s aid for such important things like publishing and disseminating the draft constitution, propping up Kenyan development agencies, and unloading tons of consumables like food, is all very important nourishment for a developing society, but it doesn’t last… like a road.
China’s building roads all over the place, now. See my earlier blogs. It’s mind blowing. It’s building a Kenyan railway. They just signed a deal to help build a new port. Build-Baby-Build. Just now it’s transforming a bit: it’s becoming Drill-Baby-Drill.
The west’s aid comes with enormous accountability, a huge reversal from the free-wheeling AID giving of the Cold War era. No accountability whatever to China. Now from an efficiency standpoint, the Chinese would prefer to send their own workers to build the road, which they do, and it gets built. But a lot more cash comes into Kenya to “build the road” than it takes to build the road. And China doesn’t care where it goes.
Yesterday, President Kibaki granted China 6 of the 11 potential oil spots new technology believes might exist in the Kenyan desert. Yesterday, China announced that the world’s deepest oil well (5800 meters: about 18000′ or more than three miles deep!) has been completed in Kenya’s desert. It didn’t say if there was something found way down there.
The west sees Kenya as a strategic partner for its values.
China sees Kenya as a strategic partner for oil.
Do these two “strategic partners” have anything in common? Actually, yes.
Wildebeest survive, but Maasai must move on.A remarkable study released yesterday by wildlife experts in East Africa that details the effects of the 2007-2009 drought unintentionally and benignly predicts the end of Maasai culture.
Reading way between the numbers of surviving zebra and elephant, I see an imminent end to Maasai pastoralism, the foundation of Maasai culture.
But first to the survey itself, remarkable for its professionalism and swiftness. Led by the Kenyan Wildlife Service, assisted by Tanzanian partners and professional wildlife organizations, it represents one of the finest and most complete ad hoc aerial animal counts I’ve ever seen.
The news was not good, but it was not expected to be better.
Nearly 60% of Maasai domestic stock and almost 50% of wild herbivores were lost in the greater Amboseli/Kilimanjaro/Natron wildlife dispersal area. (Elephant were hardly effected.)
The area studied is one of the most important tourist areas in East Africa. Included is Amboseli National Park, Arusha National Park, the eastern part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) and a number of protected private as well as hunting reserves that form a huge rectangle straddling the Kenyan/Tanzanian border just southeast of the Serengeti.
It is the second most highly visited tourist area (after the Maasai Mara, Serengeti and western NCA).
But tourism is becoming less and less important. There is so much human habitation in and nearby this area: The main Arusha/Nairobi road goes right through the middle. The northern reaches of the Moshi and Arusha municipal areas are found here. The heavy agricultural areas of western Kilimanjaro and Manyara border the study area.
So the modern human/animal pressures are great, but even more importantly, within the majority of the area Maasai pastoralists live freely. There is a dynamic argument going on today in East Africa regarding the efficacy of continuing to presume that Maasai culture will remain traditional enough that large numbers of Maasai can continue to coexist with big game.
I think this survey answers that question with a definitive “No.”
Pastoralists suffered on the same scale as all the wild animals tourists come to see. Nearly 60% of the Maasai’s stock of a quarter million cows and goats was lost. Wild herbivores like wildebeest and zebra will repopulate fairly quickly. Cows and goats can’t, not because their reproductive systems are that much slower, but because their reproduction is essentially managed by the Maasai.
Unlike wild animals that die in areas where there is no grass, a large portion of the surviving Maasai stock herds was nurtured through the drought by supplemental food sources, and not sufficiently so. So the stock herd that survives is much weaker and sicker than the remaining wild animal herds.
With an abundance of grass, now, wild animals are like to have several years of massively reduced infant mortality as the populations refill the ecological holes caused by the drought. Not so with Maasai stock. The over grazing that has plagued Africa’s farm stock dispersal areas for years has taken its toll. There has been massive loss of top soil, enormous erosion and farm stock dispersal areas are not growing grass in the same healthy way the protected wild life areas are.
Moreover, the toll on the Maasai families was severe. As precious as the stock is to a Maasai pastoralist, modern necessities are pressing on his day-to-day responsibilities. School fees. Potable water. Malaria control. Tse-tse eradication.
Addressing these human necessities compromises reinvigorating the farm stock.
What I think this survey shows is that the Maasai pastoralism is no longer sustainable in the climate change era we’ve now entered. For this so-called “drought” – definitely so in the area just under study – was not as wide spread as past droughts. It was more severe in many areas, but it wasn’t as universal. That’s what drought is, today, in a climate change environment.
And that in itself provides opportunity for modern man. And while it’s hard in this short space to explain the chain of events that would lead a Maasai pastoralist to abandon his herding for a bank teller job, that’s exactly what it shows.
I really don’t know if this is good news or bad news. But it is certainly news.
American religious fanatics are in East Africa announcing the end of the world and that the Kenyan draft constitution is blasphemous. What’s wrong? Not enough to do at home?
There’s no better object lesson on the futility of debate in America, today, than the stance taken by religious extremists. You can’t argue something that’s a lie except by calling it a lie, and that ends the discourse.
The result simply divides those listening into those who believe the lie and those who are calling out the lie.
And now these intellectually bereft righties have opened up a new battle front in East Africa. While I doubt it will work, their success in East Africa could be catastrophic. Several American religious groups are funding the “No Campaign” against Kenya’s Draft Constitution.
In July the Kenyan population votes on a referendum for a new constitution. The process of creating this draft constitution has been much more laborious and contentious than Obama’s health care legislation, but it represents a fabulous consensus among Kenya’s very fractured politic.
All the sane governments of the world are praising Kenya and the process that created the draft. The U.S. is pouring in considerable funds to help publish the draft and distribute it among the Kenyan population.
It’s a very fair constitution. Like all big legislation (and this is the biggest) it will be modified and reworked with time. But as a start it’s wonderful and should put an end to the potential for violence in the next election.
A powerful coalition of Kenyan churches opposes the draft and is campaigning for a “No” vote, which will throw the country into turmoil. Their justification? The draft constitution allows abortion.
Article 26 empowers doctors to end a pregnancy if it endangers a woman’s life.
The American-funded campaign in typical American extremist end-all-argument fashion extends the Kenyan churches complaint into a patent lie, claiming that the draft constitution allows “abortion on demand.”
Friday, Jordan Sekulow, head of Pat Robertson’s Center for Law & Justice, told the Associated Press that the draft constitution “..opens the door to abortion on demand.”
(“Tens of thousands of dollars” have already reached Kenya according to Sekulow’s blog on his site. In addition thousands of brochures printed by New York’s National Right-to-Life Committee are today being circulated in Nairobi.)
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is a non-governmental public interest law firm founded in 1990 by the controversial televangelist Pat Robertson well-known for claiming that the Haitian earthquake was because the Haitians made a pact with the devil.
ACLJ gets its word out in Kenya particularly through the Christian Broadcast Network, which spends millions to achieve prime broadcast space throughout Africa.
I’ve often wondered why Christian fanatics spend so much energy in Africa. Consider the Electronic Bible Fellowship located in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Their most recent campaign is to alert the world that it is ending on May 21, 2011. Their technique is by erecting billboards. Here is the list of where their seven billboards are located:
Kumasi and Accra (Ghana); Dominican Republic, Addis Ababa, Maseru (Lesotho), Jamaica, and Dar-es-Salaam.
In the U.S. – where they live, or at least where they live until May 21 next year – they only use “moving” billboards – that is, signs on automobiles and RVs.
My brain is just too strained trying to figure this one out. Why do American religious fanatics do crazy things in Africa? I know there’s a reason.
And the best answer I can give right now is in Swahili. Sorry. But really, you don’t have to understand Swahili to laugh at this great Tanzanian comedian and his TV clip about the Dar billboard which eBible erected over a busy bus and matatu station in the center of Dar. Pull the timer button to just over 3 minutes to get to the segment where he “interviews” distraught Dar citizens who work under the billboard.
