Nourishing African Obscurity

In the spirit of finding blogs that few people have heard of may I present to you the Malawi Windmill Blogger. The blogger, a gentleman by the name of William Kamkwamba, has become a blogger because he built a windmill generator out of scrap for the family farmat the age of 14. He followed instructions from a book. "I tried it and I made it," he said to a standing ovation at the TEDGlobal 2007 conference in Arusha Tanzania.

This all comes (including some of the phasing because I'm lazy) from the excellent Meskel Square blog run by a Reuters journalist in Addis Ababa. The journalist is apparently now moving to Sudan because his wife, a journalist for the BBC, has been posted there and he has decided to follow.

Amongst the recent posts at Meskel Square as his coverage of TEDGlobal 2007. It is well worth reading the whole hting but I think the key is this part where he explains how different TED was to the usual bureaucratic development conference in Africa:

So how does that differ from a typical tech conference here on the continent? Picture any of a dozen that have been hosted in Addis Ababa's UN complex or African Union HQ over the past year or so. Imagine a parade of government officials and state-appointed telecoms execs spouting phony African proverbs and development platitudes. At the last one I went to, the keynote speaker spent an hour going through his ten priorities for African development – "Last but not least let us remember the need for capacity building...". At the one before that, the event only came to life once a day after lunch, as people rushed to the front desk to receive their DSAs (daily subsistence allowances – the lifeblood of any UN-funded conference circuit).

The difference between all that and what happened in Arusha was best summed up by TEDGlobal speaker and Africa Unchained author George Ayittey when he talked about:

The Cheetah Generation - made up of the youth, specifically the TED Fellows present here, the saviors of Africa who are not going to wait for government and aid organizations to do things for them.

The Hippo Generation - the current political and business leaders who are happy to wallow in their water holes, complaining about colonialism and poverty, but doing nothing about it. [Thank you White African for the summary.]

I have only ever attended conferences with hippos on the centre stage. Arusha was full of cheetahs. There was barely a government official in sight – apart from Tanzania's president Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete who rushed in on the last day, mesmerising the crowd with his diamond-studded watch. I only heard the phrase "capacity-building" mentioned once, and I am sure that was a slip of the tongue.

(Cross posted from my own blog)

Laying Off the Sauce (er, Book)

I just woke up from a deep sleep of about three hours. I've spent the entire day (after working, of course) reading Robert Fisk's book, The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. I got the book as a Christmas present and have finally had some time to read it, really read it. I'm on the chapter right now about the end of the Iraq-Iran War. In the previous chapter, Fisk was describing the trains the Iranians used to bring back to the cities victims of chemical attacks and ship new soldiers out to the front. Well, in my dream (among many other things), I dreamt I was on a train talking with the mother of my ex-girlfriend and my sister of all people. The train suddenly came to a stop when I realized my wallet and Oakley sunglasses were on the tracks and about to be run over. I woke up with my arm outstretched in the air (no, not from stretching, literally outstretched) as if trying to stop something from happening. Yeah, I need to stop reading this book for a bit.

Shading Obscurity

I said I would put something up for James but it seems that there is no shortage of guest posters...

So, in a Welshcakes moment, here is a picture of one of the Pancakes my lad gave me on Fathers Day.

Thanks Son.

Gaza

Israeli planes, tanks hit Gaza

By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer
15 minutes ago

EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip - Israel fired missiles and sent tanks on a foray into Gaza on Wednesday, killing four Palestinians in the deadliest military action since Hamas militants took control of the coastal strip.

At the same time, Israel eased restrictions on travel in and out of Gaza, letting in a few seriously ill or wounded Palestinians who had been holed up for days at a fetid border crossing.

A teenager with leukemia and four other Palestinians in need of medical care went through the tunnel at the Erez crossing in Israel, the military said. Israeli officials also authorized entry of all foreign nationals living in Gaza. (link)

Most of the people that read this will blame all this on the evil joos. They will neither look at or care about the context of what is happening to Israel or what has been happening to her since her inception in 1948. To them this will simply be another 'act of aggression' on the peaceful (heh) people of Palestine.

Of course, most people don't realize why they feel that way, but hopefully one day they'll be able to come to grips with the fact that they are against a country defending itself against terrorists and be able to grow from there. Of course, I hold out no hope for most of those people. I feel they will continue to ignore the actual happenings in the Middle East until the 'Palestinians' have fulfilled their 'mandate' to wipe Israel off the map (with ample help from the mad mullahs of Iran).

If that day ever happens, I wonder how many of you will be joyful and how many will realize that you had been rooting for it the whole time?

I probably should

post something on here as I did promise James I would. Don't know why he asked me, to be honest. I have been in something of a foul mood of late, but he laid down the challenge for me to try to get his blog shut down.

Pah. Can't be bothered. I'll tell you why I can't be bothered, shall I? Because my head hurts. People are always telling me that going to the gym is bad for me (except my mother who takes it upon herself to tell me when I have put so much as an ounce of weight on) and I think they may be right. The other week I ended up banging my head on the corner of one of the big wooden locker doors and, since I can't remember much of the rest of that evening besides going to a pub and not drinking alcohol), I was informed that in all likelihood I had knocked myself out.

Things then became worse when I went a bit tardy on the tube on the way to work and ended up in hospital and to kick a girl when she's down, I passed out on Sloane Square when I was wearing my new silk dress. (It was very odd, some guy was running round without his shirt on, but thank you to all the lovely people, whoever you are, who looked after me. And especially to the kind person who gave me a goody bag from the gay pride conference they had just been to. That came in handy during the wait in A&E).

Now I am on horrible tablets that I can't drink on, have constant headaches, can't walk very far unaided and might possibly have to wait weeks to see the neurologist. And Aunty Pat thinks the NHS is in a good state? I waited so long at A&E in a hospital gown with no pillow, no water even though I was thirsty, no pain killers and no chance of seeing a doctor that eventually I discharged myself on the grounds that I would me more comfortable and a lot warmer in my own bed. A health service which is the envy of the world? I don't think so.

I haven't even been able to register with my local GP since I moved house because I don't have a utility bill with my name and address on, since I share a flat, so have to go back to old house when I want to see a doctor. All in all, I am a little bit pissed off. There were lots of terrible things about living in Brussels, like foreign gentlemen of a darker hue regularly trying to drag me into their cars, but their health service was good. I had employee based health insurance and a doctor who I could call up and make an appointment in advance for. I could call up a specialist and make an appointment without having to be referred by my GP and thus save myself weeks of waiting and pain, and, of course, uncertainty.

I am off to Brussels tomorrow even though I am sick and if I do have another funny turn, it may be a blessing in disguise as perhaps I might be able to find out what the bloody hell is wrong with me.

I wish people didn't think a national health service was so good, because quite frankly when you're sick in this country, the waiting around and general hassle of everything makes me a lot sicker than I was to start with.

I'm off to have another sleep now, and if that bloody ice cream van drives past one again, he's getting a corneto up his fundament. Complete with chocolate flake.

Excellent Stem Cell News

In April I wrote a couple of posts about stem cells (and one somewhat indrectly) where I based a good deal of my argument on what was (then) the limit of published scientific knowledge. The critical points were that

1. We can't tell stem cells from normal ones except by seeing how they behave
2. Adult stem cells only produce cells for special parts of the body and not generalized ones

Well the Instapundit informs me that point (2) may no longer be true. At TCS there is an article about the researches of Shinya Yamanaka who has now published a couple of papers, includng this one in Nature, that appear to show that adding a few proteins to a stemcell it becomes "pluripotent", i.e. able to generate all types of cells. Critically (and unlike a certain Korean stem cell researcher), the research he published last year has now been reproduced by a different lab so it seems like he has got something right. Of course we are still at the "baby steps" stage of research. Prof Yamanaka has got mouse cells to work and there is, as far as I can tell, some confusion about whether what he has produced are "normal" stem cells or some evil thing that will produce tumors and nothing else. There may also (I'm limited to reading abstracts) be some mystery about why the trick he uses works. If you MUST know what he does is "retroviral introduction of Oct3/4 (also called Pou5f1), Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4, and subsequent selection for Fbx15 (also called Fbxo15) expression" and some colleagues have a paper that may explain why it works.

Now all this is excellent stuff and may well allow us to ditch the idea of human embryo stem cell research, but it seems to me that the TCS article is written by a gentleman who is vehemently against research using human embryonic stem cells so I'm not going to take his word for it. Why do I think that you ask? well phrases like the one I quote below seem to be a tad hyperbolic:

Will this disruptive technology open up ethical avenues in the promising field of stem cell research, avenues which do not involve turning women into battery hens for their eggs and destroying embryos?

I also suspect that, contrary to what the article implies, researchers would greatly prefer to use processed adult stem cells to embryonic ones if they can. One good reason why is that it will be very very easy for researchers to get adult human stem cells, from for example a piece of skin or flesh from a biopsy, and they will therefore be far more numerous and varied, becasue to put it simply every researcher can get his own from himself, and hence discoveries will be less likely to be flukes and more likely to work with all humans and not just some. But the bad news is that until we understand why retroviral insertion of Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4 works (and for that matter whether the same proteins work in human stem cells) we can never be sure that such modification is in fact safe. On the other hand the related positive news is that this may hold out the possibility that we figure out not just why adult stem cells aren't as flexible but also how stem cells differ from normal ones so that we can make every cell in a biopsy a stem cell.
(xposted at my own blog)