See ya later, alligator

I'll be in South Africa on business till Saturday. See you when I get back.

Kak day

This just about sums it up...

Industrial Wasteland

Dubai - again

I've started experimenting with low light photography. It's a lot more difficult than I thought, but a huge amount of fun. I've never had much success with flash photography, so I try and avoid it at all costs. The results are almost always more interesting.

Helluva job

I have just sorted,catalogued, and added keywords to just over 11,000 photos. Been long overdue, but its almost done. Another 1,300 to go then its all over. Will get back to blogging and commenting again soon. Right now I'm a bit frazzled.

There is nowhere quite like it..

Building in Dubai just doesn’t stop. This is the Dubai Marina.High density living personified. Two years ago there was nothing here. Now this. Its all part of the grand plan. From the Palm Islands to Media City and Sports City and University City and Business Bay and the new 140 square kilometre Free Trade Zone at Jebel Ali and 40 others just like it. Each one of these developments is bigger than Manhattan. And they’re all being built at the same time. One of the Group companies is busy with eight building of over 90 stories - that’s besides the Burj Dubai that the already the tallest structure in the world. Nothing quite like this has happened anywhere before. There is no financial model to work from. Where its going to, nobody knows. Everyone is coming to look, to learn. Where else in the world is there a country where only 15% of the population are citizens? Where high tech lives side by side with traditional dhows still sailing the trade winds to Muscat and Zanzibar as they have for 4,000 years. This is an interesting place.

1421 - The Year China Discovered the World

"...On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was 'to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas' and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.

When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans..."

Read this book. It makes you think. This one was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. It read like a novel, and makes you realise just how far ahead of the rest of the world the Chinese Empire really was. The research is ongoing, and reported on their website. Many scientists call it crap, mostly I think because (i) it messes with their theories and (ii) a non-historian thought it up first. The various "for and against" arguments are in Wikipedia.