I was without e-mail or the internet for a while falling in love with Africa. Now I’m back tending the fort and I find that I missed the very interesting discussion on AdS/CFT that happened in the meantime. I’ll tell you more about South Africa later on, but let me tell you that petting the cheetah was awesome.
Also, this trip made me realize that the biggest threat to various endangered species is population growth which results in encroachment of habitat.
You lucky guy! I had the privilege of playing around with a group of cheetahs, about the same size as the one in your picture, in an animal refuge outside Nairobi when I was working in Kenya – “awesome” doesn’t do it justice! Fantastic creatures (playful like domestic cats – except they could kill you!)
Having worked extensively in Africa: primarily Kenya and Nigeria, but also Mali and South Africa, I worry about the future there (well maybe not so much about South Africa). While I don’t agree with Uncle Al’s suggestion to offer no help to the the continent, his comment that they often have ‘no concomittant cultural or technological evolution’ to match the changes of the last few decads is unfortunately correct.
I’m on vacation with only occasional internet access, and this is David’s post. Nevertheless the first comment here was truly offensive, and entirely irrelevant to the post, bad enough for me to delete it (another first for our blog).
One of my worries getting into blogging was having to deal with this sort of stuff. I am really hoping this is not going to become a routine, but I’d rather not be associated with this kind of junk, and I’ll do what is required to keep our place clean. For our reasonable and intelligent readers, if you see a comment that does not satisfy these criteria, better just ignore it. Or as the slogan goes, please don’t feed the trolls.
Hi James:
Thanks for stopping by. I also worry about the future of Africa as a whole. In my opinion the only real way out is to get a serious commitment from the richer nations to develop the continent: you have to give them an economic way out of their troubles. There has to be a massive investment in education and infrastructure. Without proper infrastructure it will be very hard for any product produced in Africa to be cost effective. Some of the biggest costs of producing items are not so much labor and raw materials, but transportation costs to deliver them.
I’m also against subsidies for agricultural products in the Western world. These lead to excess production and dumping of excess below cost in third world countries, ruining local farming economies.
Moshe:
Thanks for making your opinions very clear. I’m sure this will not be the last time one of us feels that the comments cross a line.