Archive for South Africa
inside Africa [cover]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags Africa, AI, art for science, Asilomar conference centre, bacterial genomes, Burkina Faso, cover, genomics, Ghana, guts, Kenya, microbiome, Nature, pie-chart, rogue universities, South Africa, Zulu baskets on April 25, 2025 by xi'an
at the boor, as advertised
Posted in pictures, Statistics with tags Belgium, Boer Wars, boor, Brussel, Brussels, Bruxelles, Dutch language, Flemish language, jatp, North Sea, oysters, restaurant, restaurant review, skewness, South Africa, variance, waiter on March 8, 2024 by xi'an
the long way off a small, angry planet
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags Australopithecus sediba, fossils, Homo naledi, Johannesburg, paleonthology, publicity stunt, South Africa, space, The Guardian, Virgin Galactic on November 13, 2023 by xi'an
(im)possible lottery outcome
Posted in Kids, Statistics with tags coincidences, lottery, Powerball, South Africa on December 27, 2020 by xi'an
Another outcry after an “impossible” lottery result that “must” be fraudulous! Obtaining the sequence 5,6,7,8,9,10 on the Tuesday December 1, 2020, draw of the Souht-African Powerball is indeed a low probability event. Just like obtaining any fixed sequence on a specific day for a specific lottery system. As I am unsure the last number has to differ from the others or not, consider the approximation where the 6 numbers are drawn uniformly without replacement from the first fifty integers. The number of outcomes is then approximately 16 millions, making any fixed outcome having a chance of 6 10⁻⁸ of happening for one draw. However, the psychological impact of an “impossible” lottery result would have been the same for any sequence of 6 consecutive numbers, which makes the event happening with a probability of approximately one chance in 400,000. Not so staggering then! And considering the repetition of lotteries, space- and time-wise, it takes roughly 40,000 draws for a consecutive sequence to be drawn with probability 10%. Which means 16 years if considering each US State having a draw every week…
Rooibos tax for aboriginal communities
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags 150th anniversary, Alexander McCall Smith, Aspalathus, Botswana, Khoi people, Nature, N⁰1 Ladies Detective Agency, red tea, Rooibos, San people, South Africa on January 25, 2020 by xi'an
Just read in the 150th anniversary issue of Nature that the South African Government had agreed to a share of the rooibos tea profits be reversed to the aboriginal San and Khoi communities. Following a lengthy debate on whether or not rooibos tea was in use before European settlers invaded the area. I cannot remember when I started drinking rooibos but it may have been connected with reading my first book of the delicious Mma Ramotswe and the №1 Ladies Detective Agency series…! Which author, Alexander McCall Smith is a self-declared tea addict. (Since the story is located in Botswana, I have no idea whether or not tea is exported from this country and if the benefits reach the local communities.)
