Thought Leader

Sometime around the age of six (or even earlier, if there are older siblings involved) children stop nagging for Hot Wheels and Bratz Dolls and start nagging for a Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters account. The reasons they give for this are as follows: 1) EVERYONE else at school has a Moshi Monsters / Club…

I have never really used PCs. Except in an internet café in Thailand or India or some other place. So what I am going to say about them comes from a place of ignorance. They suck. They don’t work. They are ugly. They make computing feel like something that only accountants do. No disrespect to…

By Roger Diamond The last decade of inaction, dithering and incompetence on the part of those deciding South Africa’s energy future is going to leave us in the dark — literally and figuratively. Renewable energy generation should already be in operation with massive programmes on research and further installations under way. Yet we sit with…

I feel the need to repost this statement here. I hope that all of the survivors of rape who read it feel supported. 8 April 2011 Rape Crisis Statement on the #itsnotrapeif Twitter phenomenon We heard via the online grapevine about a revolting Twitter hashtag  topic — #itsnotrapeif — and due to some masochistic compulsion…

… or when do political beliefs become prejudices? In a famous experiment conducted by researchers in the psychology department at Harvard University, participants are shown a video of a group people passing a ball. They are instructed to count the number of times the ball is passed by the people in the video who are…

By Danny Glenwright Dear Telkom, You dirty old monopoly, you. You really got me. I’m actually writing to congratulate you. You were in the running for a few weeks but today I made it official. You have taken the prize for the poorest service I’ve ever received. And considering I’m a journalist who has lived,…

Hot on the heels of the movie about how Facebook started comes 140 characters or less — the movie about how Twitter started. This is only the second successful production in the social networking genre surpassing straight-to-DVD offerings You’re in MySpace and Dude, where’s my MXit. In keeping with the title, director David Fincher used…

By Cano Ssemakulu It will always boil down to the money — the one commodity Africa has always lacked, and will always lack. Scientific research within the African context has not yielded results despite the presence of centres of scientific excellence across the African continent. Up till now Africa continues to suffer from solvable problems…

We are at the start of a period of significant investment in renewable energy in South Africa. Renewables will bring many advantages for the country. For simplicity in this blog I will deal mainly with the benefits of wind power, but these benefits will occur with solar, particularly solar PV, as well. The headline cost…

By Roger Diamond Looking into the future is fun, but even more fun is looking at how other people are looking into the future. First, there are the pessimists and doomsayers who are sure the game is all over and we have a few last years of light before the eternal darkness, or something along…