Day 2: Kigali

Secondo giorno, nella mattina ho fatto un giretto x il giardino mentre gli altri si svegliavano, facendo foto a piante, luertole e quel che capitava sotto tiro.

Poi, con Salvatore abbiamo deciso di fare un giretto nel quartiere. Credevamo di essere in una zona pos, a giudicare dalla casa dove stavamo e quella adiacente... Dallaltro lato, una setta di scamanati pregava ad alta voce e di tanto in tanto si scatenava in Allelujaaahhh da far gelare il sangue. A quanto pare, il Rwanda e' in preda ad una febbre religiosa... Ognuno sceglie la religione che vuole, se non piu' d'una... Boh...

Comunque, qualche passo oltre il cancello della casa, ed un altro universo comincia. La terra rossa, solcata dalle pioggie torrenziali, catapecchie di lamiera e legname recuperati, bambini scalzi che escon fuori dai vicoli x sfidarsi a vicenda a parlare coi due visi pallidi vestiti con colori sgargianti, che girellano baldanzosi sotto il sole... fatto sta che, in due o tre minuti, cminciamo a sentirci noi come auelli che vengon osservati, tipo le bestie del circo che vengon fatte sfilare nella strada generale... La gente e' comunque estremamente cordiale, e non ha problemi a parlare due o piu' lingue... alla faccia dell'Italia monoglotta, dove il 50% manco parla bene l'italiano... dopo un'oretta circa rientriamo a casa, non prima d'aver imboccato un paio di vcoli acaso ed esserci mezzi persi...

Nel pomeriggio, invece siamo andatoi a visitare la 'vera' Kigali...

a piu' tardi x il resoconto OK?

le foto le trovate su: http://picasaweb.google.com/gufodotto/RwandaDec07 e anche http://picasaweb.google.com/gufodotto/SalvaRwandaDec07 e http://picasaweb.google.com/gufodotto/FloraRwandaDec07

Day 1: the travel

Eccomi qua. proviamo a tenere un diario regolare del mio viaggio in Rwanda.

Allora, il volo e' stato abastanza uneventful, eccessivamente lungo e noioso. Speravo di riuscire a vedere l'Africa dall'alto ma, a causa del ritardo in partenza, il sole e' tramontato prima che si arrivasse sul Sahara. O forse c'eravamo gia' quando e' tramontato, ma c'erano le nuvole... pazienza. la cosa e' stata comunque interessante xke', x la prima volta, ho volato spra un'area del mondo non illuminata. In Europa, dove voli voli, sei sempre sulla testa di qualcuno che legge un libro sotto una lampadina, o guarda la TV. In africa, il niente... X quel che ne sapevo, saremmo potuti essere sopra l'Oceno Atlantico... ma avremmo visto pi' navi, mi sa... Invece buio assoluto sintanto che non siamo arrivati proprio sopra Kigali.

Una volta arrivati e recuperati i bagagli, si salta a bordo delle camionette (le classiche pick-up Toyota o Isuzu) o macchine (una Mercedes d'antan che la mamma di Marie si ostina a rianimare) e si va a casa...

a breve x il resto... ora vado a nuotare un po'...

Again on Gorillas

Seen yesterday Long Way Down's Episode where they are in Rwanda. Ewan Mc Gregor goes through Rwanda by Motorbike and stops by the national Park to see the Gorillas.

I am not sure they would let 'normal people get so close to them, but if they do, I understand why the prices are so high. They will want to keep visits to a minimum (once a day, at dusk) yet have enough money to run the conservation program off it.

All in all, it seemed a pretty well-run operation, and since the experience must be soo fantastic I am reconsidering it. Trouble is, there may be not any ticket left for when we'll arrive there. Well, in case may be I'll come back another time.

Look out, there's a Lion behind that bus!!!

copy-paste from Null-Hypothesis , which dubs itself as The Journal of Unlikely Science. It came to me through the facebook group We're scientists AND we're sexy! Ok, I admit, I am a member of it. Yeah, right. Me. Sexy. Ouch! It Hurts.

I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat

By Jamie Lawson

Scientists in California have been busy flashing images at people again. This is a favourite game of psychophysicists the world over, being a nice way of measuring reaction times to... well, Visual Things. This time they’ve been looking to see if people pay more attention to evolutionarily salient objects like lions and impala rather than novelties like cars, tables and lamps.

The result will come as no surprise to the evolutionary psychologists in the crowd. When presented with pairs of images, each flashed rapidly and identical except for a tiny change, participants were much faster and more accurate at identifying changes involving animals (including humans) than those involving your aforementioned inanimate things, even if the animal was hardly visible at all. This also held true when a failure to notice the inanimate object in the scenes would normally be associated with sudden and messy death, such as is the case with cars.

The explanation? Well, back in the day, humans would have benefited from attention to things that they could hunt and eat (like impala) as well as to things that could eat them (like lions) and things that may have filled both categories (like... each other). Humans who ignored these objects moving about would presumably have died from either a) starvation or b) being killed and/or eaten, so a tendency to attend to animate objects became hardwired in to the human visual system. Things like cars, although life threatening, are just far too modern to have been incorporated.

So, the good news is that you are very likely to spot a big cat as it sneaks up on you with every intention of making you its lunch. Sadly, in moving to avoid it, you may just end up being crushed beneath the wheels of a bus you have entirely failed to notice. Ah well, swings and roundabouts, eh?

Has Evolution Stopped, for Homo?

Not at all. If anything, it seems to have accelerated over the course of the past 80.000 Years.

It's what The Economist reports in this article. The original piece of research can be found in PNAS.

Since I don't have time to comment today, just go and read it, it's free.

An interesting personal side-note on the article: it points out how two version of lactose tolerance arose independently in the Indo-European and the African Tutsi populations. So, may be my child(ren) will inherit both versions. I wonder if there are any studies around investigating the effect of the two mutations present at the same time in people's cells. Will they reinforce each other? Or will they have a completely different effect? I guess it depends on the detailed mechanism of action of the two... I'll have a look on the world wide wikipedia...