Some time back I heard of a group of people on the internet who were spending their time creating graphs of songs titles and lyrics and posting them online – in fact there was a whole song chart pool on Flickr that was collecting them all. As a closet geek with a passion for music, [Continue]

Every time you turn the television on these days you get more talking heads crunching numbers about the US Elections – whispering urgently about who is going to win which states and why. I’m feeling a little left out, so I thought I would do my own analysis. In the internet age buzz is everything. [Continue]

It is either slightly disconcerting or enormously flattering when you arrive at a hotel for the first time and the receptionist greets you by name. In the case of my arrival at the Rapid Waters Hotel (and I use all three of those words advisedly) 29km outside of Potchefstroom, it could only be the former. [Continue]

I don’t know if you saw this recently — but it’s an actual screen capture of President Mbeki’s diary, as published on government’s own website. I wish I was making it up, but I’m not: (Source: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/diary.asp?show=President%20Mbeki) No, you nerd, the important thing here is not that he only scored a Google [Continue]

What if we could represent South African politics visually? What if we could take a snapshot of M&G investigative reporter Stefaans Brümmer’s brain? Would it look like a plate of multicoloured spaghetti? A box of rubber bands? Or would it look like this [Continue]

Spare a thought for the family of Andrew Olmsted. You may not know him, or even have heard of him, but you’re about to. This is what was posted on his blog site over the weekend: “This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we [Continue]

On Wednesday night I went to see Jethro Tull in concert. Not because I’m a fan, but because my wife is and one of my favourite things to do is go to live concerts. Another is to keep my wife happy, so this worked all round. In fact, even saying I’m not a big fan [Continue]

I’m tired of hearing how I need to play a role in fighting crime. In the wake of Lucky Dube’s shooting last week, President Mbeki said we should “act together as a people to confront this terrible scourge of crime”. The Ministry of Arts and Culture said in a statement that “crime is a South [Continue]