I’ve just left Africa, on my way to Austin, Texas for SxSW, one of the biggest music, film and interactive festivals on the calendar. I’ll be joining a couple of dozen other South Africans, and will be blogging and tweeting up a storm.

To follow the adventure, go to Twitter and follow @sxswsa, or follow the blog at sxswsa.co.za.

I’ve been negligent recently. In the excitement and stress of preparing for my trip to South by South West (SxSW) in Austin, Texas, I haven’t updated my blog often enough.

Here’s a roundup of my recent writing:

The Mail & Guardian recently published a feature on the Phantom Pass fire near Knysna. I met up with some firemen to “walk the line”, and watched them on a controlled burn to safeguard unburnt forest. These guys work terrifically hard, and it’s dangerous to boot. They deserve our respect. Happily, the editors thought so too, and gave me a full page on page 12 of the over-full budget edition of the paper.

In The Daily Maverick, I wrote another column about the crime FIFA and our government are perpetrating against ordinary South Africans and their businesses, and renewed my call for a boycott, first made here. If you agree, and you are on Twitter, do use the #boycottfifa tag to draw attention to the matter. The marketing hype is deafening. The vuvuzelas drown out the nasty fact that our government spent R80 billion it couldn’t afford on infrastructure, FIFA stands to walk away with a cool R70 billion, but South Africans will have to be content with a mere R20 billion in extra GDP.

I also posted another response to critics of my climate change position, explaining the logical basis for my rejection of the apocalypse hypothesis: Ten reasons to reject climate alarmism. It even has footnotes. Ten of them.

Over on ITWeb, I got to thinking about social media, and how few large companies have dedicated people who can lead product innovation and respond to the rapidly changing landscape online. Heads in the sand, is how I described it.

I’ll be blogging up a storm from Texas, and will make sure this blog gets notified of any updates. I’ll also keep up my regular columns, if all goes well.

Last week’s column for The Daily Maverick was about how the news keeps getting better on the climate change front. The dominoes keep falling, and they appear to be gathering speed.

My previous columns on the subject of climate change prompted an extraordinary rant from a cognitive science student named Michael Meadon. Perhaps in pursuance of his research, he looked at my face and concluded that I’m not entitled to an opinion.

It is too tempting not to rebut. Read Meadon’s post first, then read on: Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to reply to the two Australians who commented on this article: Can Africa Topple Australia in the Contest To Build the World’s Biggest Telescope?

All I got, however, was this: “Comment Submission Error. Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again.”

This summary rejection is somewhat puzzling, since the error is meaningless, and the preview worked fine. [UPDATE: After several more attempts, I appear to have succeeded in posting my comment. Looks like the Captcha widget was broken for a time, and it was this “text” that the error referred to. The comment remains invisible, however, with no indication of whether it is merely being moderated.]

However, because I think it’s important, I’ll post my comment on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope here:

Frankly, the SKA shouldn’t be built, except with private money. Not in South Africa, and not in Australia. There. Having got libertarian principles out of the way, let’s get to business.

It is true that Africa is considerably poorer, somewhat less politically stable, and composed of several more countries, than the island colony of Australia. The same is true for South America, Asia, and indeed Europe.

And nevermind McGruder’s blackness, or the dark skins of most Africans. Racist reasons for building it, or not building it, belong in previous centuries. Africa might move on, if the people outside Africa who incessantly disparage it would do so.

If anyone needs investments like these, it’s the 750 million people of Africa, many of whom are cursed with economies that Western do-gooders, along with vogueish socialism at home, have made dependent on foreign aid and debt relief. Africans suffer as a result of inadequate basic infrastructure and difficulty in securing basic education for their children. Not that some major economies in the West aren’t heading for the same socialist malaise, so there’s no need to whitewash reality.

Projects like the SKA will contribute to the development of physical infrastructure (like electricity and telecommunications), political infrastructure (like the SADC customs union that continues to make slow progress), and social infrastructure (like education).

In terms of the standard of its scientists, the sophistication of its economy, and the development of its politics, Africa is quite capable of hosting a Big Science project such as the SKA. It has problems, sure, but motives to solve them trump negativity and despair. No politician in Africa (well, very few) would be stupid enough to put at risk a major project with international visibility such as the SKA.

Unlike the two Australian gentlemen who commented above, I will decline to speculate on a country I do not know. Australia’s virtues or shortcomings are not mine to judge. I’m sure it’s a splendid place, full of shiny, happy people. However, they might show the same courtesy towards others. If anything, short-sighted and ill-informed comments by people who haven’t a clue about the reality of Africa should provide added impetus for siting the SKA in Africa.

I live in Africa, by choice. As a columnist, I am frequently critical of the socialism and corruption that so often hurts Africans. And while the West has a lot to answer for in this respect, I believe Africa should sweep its own doorstep first. But to do that, it needs brooms. And indeed doorsteps.

If anyone in Africa were sceptical of the local capacity to operate a major facility like this, and their reasons weren’t knee-jerk racism, I’d probably be among them. However, I’m not sceptical. I believe anything is possible in Africa. I have faith in the ingenuity and dedication of its people. I believe, based on the scale and sophistication of numerous other industrial and scientific projects, that Africa has the technical and organisational ability to make the SKA an ongoing success.

Most importantly, I believe hosting the SKA can only make Africa a better place for everyone in it.

And that is worth more than all the stars in the sky.

I’ll bet if the Science Insider blog was hosted in Africa, by an African, its comment system would have worked.

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself recently. I’d been cautiously optimistic about Siphiwe Nyanda’s early moves as the communications minister in Jacob Zuma’s new South African government, but things are looking increasingly grim for the general, as I discuss here: The general’s reversal.

It is important that people are able to assert their rights, if they are to achieve prosperity in a free society. But this does not mean that any law that claims to help them do this is automatically good. South Africa’s Consumer Protection Act, which comes into force later this year, is a case in point. I’ve read it — the whole long, convoluted thing — and found among a few useful provisions several that are good in intent, but will likely hurt consumers in practice. Here’s my Tuesday column on the subject, published yesterday over at The Daily Maverick.

I missed a trick, however. I should have shredded it, viciously, for sounding like it was written 20 years ago for some foreign market. Mail-order? Catalogue? Who in SA uses those? And what about those newfangled interweb thingies? I hear you can buy stuff over them, though I’m not sure how you’d send a package down a wire.

After the frisson of a new Apple launch wears off, the reality is more prosaic. So it is with the Apple iPad, which has many faults beyond merely its unfortunate name. Here’s my ITWeb column on the subject.

My previous column at The Daily Maverick, Break the banking cartel, argued that the banks are unlikely ever to solve the problem of a generalised, cash-like, electronic transaction infrastructure that addresses the entire market, both rich and poor, local and foreign, buyer and seller, banked and unbanked.

Lest that argument be interpreted as a denunciation of bankers in general, I thought I’d question why everyone believes politicians when the latter blame the economic crisis on the former. Bankers are a product of their legal and regulatory environment. Hence, In defence of bankers.

Here’s a column based on the talk I gave at the amazing gathering of splendid people known as GeekRetreat last weekend. It argues that the most important hurdle to a universal online and mobile payment system that serves all South Africans is one law, namely the law against deposit-taking by non-banks.

Also published this week, a report on GeekRetreat for TechCentral, with details on two of the technology ideas that emerged.

(For some reason, this wasn’t published when it should have been, last week…)

How long can a columnist avoid the subject of our great leader of youth, Julius Malema? I don’t know. My experiment in this regard came to an end today. So here it is, published by The Daily Maverick. The alert reader will note some evidence that there was some discussion this morning about what the headline should be.

Ever since the first “2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act”, no. 11 of 2006 was passed, and FIFA began calling for volunteers for the Confederations Cup rather than employing people like civilised companies do, the whole World Cup thing has left a sour taste in my mouth. It’s annoying to watch your government hijacked, and your country and its people exploited, by people who think they’re too good for the rules by which the rest of us play.

So here’s an idea: Boycott FIFA.

I recently wrote a series of columns on Mann-made climate change and the email leak scandal over at The Daily Maverick: Pop goes the hot air balloon, Climate fraud kills people and Pray Copenhagen fails.

In response, I’ve been getting a lot of comments and criticisms in various forums. Some, like Twitter, are really not well suited to answering complex questions. So here’s a sort of FAQ that addresses the most common “buts” I hear: Climate clarity.

Wishing everyone a prosperous and free 2010.