Power Flasher

This is a power flasher which flashes "like a lighthouse". It is possible to see this flasher a mile away from all directions -- depending on the lamp used, which may be up to 36 Watts. The Power Flasher's off period is about 20 seconds, and its on period about 0.1 seconds. OBSERVATION: All the pieces should be available from one's local electronics store -- however the lamp LP1 can be more difficult to source. One can find a 12V 1.5W white LED lamp* or a 12V 1.5W red LED lamp* or a 12V 1.5W blue LED lamp* at Amazon. 1.5W is ample to light up the interior of a car or a room -- matching the brightness of a halogen bulb. One could run the Power Flasher off a 12V car battery or (smaller) gel battery. Change R1 to change the frequency of the flash.

*This is an Amazon affiliate link. I earn a commission, at no cost to the buyer. 

The Book

Referring to my previous post, in 2014 I wrote a book about my experiences. When my wife knew that she was dying, she arranged a marriage for me, with a young African woman I hardly knew. Now that we have AI at our disposal, I ran the book through AI. Its opinion:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. A deeply moving memoir with some structural weaknesses, but a story that deserves to be read—especially in a time when questions of race, culture, and belonging are as urgent as ever.

POSTSCRIPT: The book is available through (click here) Amazon*. 

*This is an Amazon affiliate link. I earn a commission, at no cost to the buyer. 

‘You Never Recover’

It's been more than 15 years now, but I burst into tears today over the death of my wife Mirjam. I am now very happily married. Yet an old lady said to me once, "You never recover from grief." It's an old passport photo of 1995.

Promotional Video

Perhaps the most absurd moment in this otherwise very nice video is me wearing a Kiribati fisherman's hat. That's at 2:21. It's a promotional video of Cape Town Baptist Seminary, and worth taking a look at I think. OBSERVATION: That's Langa in the background in the aerial shots -- said to be a dangerous area -- or rather, as the police say, "in a high national risk tier". Most of my students on this day were on-line. They checked in remotely.

Killing One's Church

There's an interesting article on CNN today:  A ‘tsunami’ of church closings is poised to remake America. The basic reason that they are closing: 

"The same reason many go to church is the same reason why many churches struggle to survive: the allure of the familiar."

People want what they always knew. Or they want to take back what they once knew. Paradoxically, that is what kills the Church.

POSTSCRIPT: My own comment to someone was: "A healthy Church cannot be static, because it is serving a Person, not a culture."

More Bots than Human Beings

Something big happened this year that most people surely missed. For the first time, more non-humans searched the web than humans. To put it another way, automated web traffic officially overtook human activity for the first time in Internet history. The memorable moment came on 3 June when Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince announced that humans were now in the minority. OBSERVATION: This does matter. This very blog is crawling with bots, where for various reasons one would want to know how many humans there are. There are tools to track the bots -- but, in my experience, not that reliable.

You Read It First ...

Once again, you read it first on this blog. A Fox News headline proclaims this morning: "Trump signs executive order rebranding AI as 'Super Intelligence'". I wrote more than two years ago on this blog, "There are those who claim that AI is a trick. It is not a trick. It is a super-intelligence." See my post Super-Intelligence. OBSERVATION: But philosopher Nick Bostrom put the term on the map with his book Superintelligence in 2014.

Powering a Perpetual Clock

Many years ago I discovered -- perhaps for the first time -- that there is a ground/plant potential difference of about 0.4V in all plants. If one wires pot plants together in series -- inserting pins into the ground and into the plants -- one has (in this case, above) 2.0V potential. That is enough to run a "potato clock". The big difference is that a potato battery eventually goes flat, while this will keep on going as long as the pot plants are alive -- an almost endless source of free power. OBSERVATION: There is a suitable potato clock available from Amazon*, to plug in here.

*This is an Amazon affiliate link. I earn a commission, at no cost to the buyer. 

Robber Fly

I took this photo of a robber fly -- also called an assassin fly -- on the windscreen of my car. They used to be rare in Cape Town, but one sees them often now. A robber fly preys on other insects -- and will even snatch a spider from its web.

Meeting Deadlines

During an evening lecture, a student told me he had just submitted an assignment. I asked another student how he was doing. He said he would work on the assignment after the lecture, and hoped to submit by the deadline at midnight. I was quietly astonished. Suppose that he'd had the flu, or suffered an accident, or had an emergency? OBSERVATION: As it happens, he did very well. It has been my own custom, if given a deadline, to finish in half the time -- and I don't remember ever being challenged by a deadline, or indeed not finishing in half the time. I may have felt challenged at the start, yes -- though not challenged in finishing on time. (This is, in my view, the secret to my own high grades).