Quite a detour. Should've used Google Maps

Every time malaria mosquitoes are discussed, the topic of gene drives come up. Then the question, what if things go wrong? Malaria kills more than 400 000 people per year. I feel that anyone standing in the way of gene drives should be personally held responsible for some of these deaths. What's the odds that things can turn out worse?

A few weeks ago, I bought a Xaomi Redmi 5 to replace my ageing Note 3 and am pleasantly surprised (I hate depreciation).

The Xaomi had very little crapware and most can be uninstalled. Where I needed to keep my Samsung on charge at work also, I now end the day on 50%. RAM and storage is identical. Graphics render faster. It cost me less than $200. Latest Android is awesome Fingerprint reader is an unexpected bonus. Dual sim or sim+ SD card. No heating that I feel. The screen dims down to barely readable in the dark.

I have yet to see an add.

A notable drawback is that the built-in video player needs permission to access the phone, so I'll download another one from the Play store.

Taxed Rands to be more exact, but your point is valid. Most scientific research are government sponsered due to the perceived low odds of returns. We mostly focused on maintaining equipment, studying ionospheric research. Riometers (wide band radio receivers in 200Mhz range) directional and wide band, magnetometers, radar, aurora cameras. My most important project was maintaining ion detectors to measure cosmic rays. The count is higher with a more perpendicular magnetic fields. Besides daily checks and side projects, there's much free time to fratenize if all equipment runs as designed. In my first year, our main water pipe burst on about 100 places due to low temperature water, freezing. We spent a few weeks carrying 6m, 100mm pipes, removing insulation, welding gaps closed, adding new heating tape and reinstalling the pipes.

Antartcica is one of the least disturbed places on earth with an immense magnifying glass of the impact we humans have on the continent. I overwintered in 2006 and 2007 on SANAE base in teams 45 and 46. Everything that goes in, must come back and the risks of contamination, even though remote, prohibited any growing of anything. No chicken bones were part of the food due to the risk of chicken flu for the bird colonies. Regardless of the laws, in a team of 9 members, with no access to the outside world, the team actually decides on the laws for the year. We may or may not have grown something to smoke, made a braai in the kitchen or used the fire extinguishers to fizz our drinks.

My family's down to 20 liters per person per day with a sub-R1000 grey water system. We re-use the washing machine's water by catching it in a 210 liter drum. We then add some swimming pool chlorine for decontamination and bought a secondhand washing machine pump to pump it into the toilet with our unused garden hose. The washing machine's water is now also a third as the first rinse's water is used for the second load's wash and the second rinse's water is used for the second load's first rinse. If we can make is slighly neater, we'll keep the system in pace after the drought.

I live in Cape Town and spent some time performing calculations today. My household of 4 currently use 200 liters per day. A large 5000 liter tank can serve my household for 25 days, thus not very helpful. The city promises queueing for water for 25 liters per person per day when water runs out, but how long would I need to keep my toddlers in line to receive our share? Where will the city get the water? For 4 million people you'd need 100 million liter of water. If 20% need to be supplimented by trucks, it's still 20million/40000 = 500 trucks per day. Now there's a public outrage for the 5% increase of municipal accounts to fund the projects. How do the imbeciles, that support this outrage, propose we fund the projects? Who is not willing to pay more for water to continue getting some. In the extreme, people would pay all their money for water if it's the only way to remain alive. I've agreed with the city's approach to wait and see for as long as possible rather than pay for white elephants never to be used again, but now I'm beginning to worry. We had to endure the load shedding of electricity, but in retrospect, 2 hours without power is a much smaller problem that 4 months without water I have a damp area under the house, so I may l have groundwater and will propably attempt to install a wellpoint myself in the near future if I can't get a contractor. Otherwise, I may be screwed.

And then the value of all bitcoins will quickly approach 0 and the entity that spent so much money to acquire all the bitcoins will be broke.

About 50% true. A lot of corruption in the procurement of text books happened in 2013. The delivery of text books in 2014 was actually much more efficient.

The electricity is in short supply due to an increase in demand, but many power stations are being brought online with the largest dry-cooled power station in the world (Medupi) expected to come on-line in 2014.

The private sector did a stellar job bringing wind and solar energy to the grid with 37 turbines near Hopefield, 30 in Caledon, a large farm (probably about 50) near Jeffrey's Bay and about 20 turbines near Cook House (I'm just quoting these numbers from driving past them). I do however feel that providing tablets to the poorest communities is a bad idea as it will be very expensive to replace damaged/stolen tablets.

A lot of research has been done where hookworms are used to treat allergies. The main concept being that a modern immune system is bored without an enemy to attack and then attacks innocent cells.

Say the body is America and the immune system is America's defence force. The immune system is needed when dangerous pathogens appear, in the same way that American troops are needed to defend against enemies. If America is in no war and all its troops are recalled without downsizing the military, these troops will get bored and start identifying innocent people as enemies. It might shoot down a trainee pilot from Canada when entering American air space. This plane falls on a city and damages property or may start a fire in America. In the same way, the immune system may become bored when there are very few pathogen and starts attacking molecules that are not dangerous. Just as the defence force can be trained to identify russian fighter aircraft on a radar, so the immune system can be trained to identify pathogens correctly by means of vaccinations. In the extreme case, the defence force might attack the poor Canadian with an atomic bomb so big it destroys the whole continent. In the same way an allergic reaction can kill the person.

Now in Helminthic Therapy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy, the hookworms are used as a perpetual enemy in the same way that America might used Afghanistan/Vietnam/Iraq. This causes a constant drain of blood, but when controlled, it may improve the health of the body overall.

Dogs are carriers of hookworms and the benefits of hookworms and allergies has been known for a long time, so in my opinion, this article is old news.

I recently bought a raspberry Pi with the idea of hosting a web server from home using a Huawei Dongle and the cell phone network. Due to the power wastage, I didn't think it a good idea to use my regular PC for the job.

First you obviously need to get the Huawei Dongle working with wvdial or something similar. This took me perhaps a week.

Then you need to contact your cell phone service provider and ask for an unrestricted APN otherwise they block all connections to your dongle. This took some paperwork, but I managed to get it done.

Once incoming connections are allowed, you can start hosting your website. The first proper request to my website activated the dongle's maximum power usage and this resulted in a power brown-out and the PI crashed. After upping the power supply from 700 mA to 1000 mA, this problem was solved.

NOIP and dyndns solved my dns problems easily.

The last problem I haven't solved yet is routing to my Pi with the cell phone networks. About 10% of the time, it finds a route, but the rest of the time it only finds the IP address. I will buy another sim card and see if it improves my situation, but in the mean time I've resorted to Amazon's cloud offering.

http://www.genetica.com/GeneticaWebV2.nsf/XPrenatalDNAPaternityTest.xsp

Watch this space