PhD in Chem Eng, grudgingly preventing our extinction. M&G 200 Young South Africans 2018. Pseudoscientologist.
Joined December 2010
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119 Photos and videos
May 20
This comment angered a lot of people who hold opinions more strongly than they retain information. I did a brief summary of Johannesburg's water situation , adapted from my lectures, so here's a link: Johannesburg: the city that shouldn't exist
linkedin.com/pulse/johannesb…
May 20
People in the comments here all seem to think that groundwater is a magical infinite resource. If everyone drills boreholes then after a month those boreholes will all run dry and they'll be no better off except for the sinkholes their houses fall into.
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May 20
People in the comments here all seem to think that groundwater is a magical infinite resource. If everyone drills boreholes then after a month those boreholes will all run dry and they'll be no better off except for the sinkholes their houses fall into.
May 19
South Africa’s government is preparing to crack down on households with boreholes. businesstech.co.za/news/gove…
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Little known fact - this is the actual origin of the phrase "don't be mean"
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Apr 16
There isn't a whole lot of overlap between people who play golf and people who drive Golfs 🤔
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Mar 24
I'd go further and say that an environment rewarding agreeability over honesty is a sufficient condition to be considered toxic.
Toxic environments don't want you to be realistic. They want you to be agreeable. Authenticity makes people uncomfortable. If your honesty disrupts their illusion, they'll reject it because they don't want it. They want compliance. Be too honest, and you become a problem.
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Feb 25
I have realized that when people say objectively untrue things on here, and get challenged on them, they aren't getting angry because they're defending an opinion they actually believe, they're frustrated by the unmet expectation of a pat on the back for signaling their alignment
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Feb 25
This notion mostly came from watching @atkinsmike1 interact or rather, be interacted with, while stubbornly trying to iron out real issues with angry people by sticking to provably true facts
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Jan 15
As a scientist and engineer, I like preciseness of language. Some percentage of people DO identify with a gender that is divergent from their biological sex. To adequately describe people, we DO need the extended terminology. I disagree on technical grounds (among others)
Jan 14
We are not ‘cis male’ or ‘cis female’.
We are simply male or female.
No prefix required.
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Jan 15
Stacey's Razor: do not ascribe to a conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by an incentive.
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Jan 11
The situation in Iran highlights the geopolitical importance of Starlink (or similar services) - a country having access to an internet service provider that the government can't switch off is actually kind of important
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Maybe I'm an optimist, but I think maybe Venezuela will be a turning point in social media discourse. The two ideas that "Maduro was an illegitimate dictator" and "America can't just unilaterally change regimes" are quite easy to hold in your head at the same time 1/2
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The vast multitude of people capable of doing so may very well stop listening to the 'influencers', on both sides, whose incentives to pander to an audience prevent them from doing so
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Removing election-stealing dictators isn't necessarily a bad thing, but doing it unilaterally without even talking to anyone about it beforehand and then nakedky saying that you want the oil, that's a bit different.
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The TL;DR here is that reelection is a short-term incentive, whereas growth and sustainability are long-term incentives. That mismatch drives politicians to make short-term decisions.
Do you want to understand what's happening in Venezuela? Watch this.
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There's a lot of scrambling in boardrooms to take credit for ending Eskom's rash of ruptured boiler tubes, a main cause of load-shedding. The fix didn't happen in boardrooms, the credit should go to Josias Van Der Merwe and KG Moloko /1
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Josias passed away in 2023 and is dearly, dearly missed, not just for his research that changed the trajectory of our country but for his tremendous heart, selflessly helping anyone in need and putting students' needs far far above own. We owe him a tremendous debt. /3
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Worst typo of my life, Josias passed away in 2024, it's felt like much much longer in the specter of it
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Josias was an avid Comrades runner and a Green Number holder. I run each year with his race number stitched into my kit, to symbolically take him to the double Green Number he was chasing. We'll get there in 2027 on the hundredth run of the historic race.
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