The next big thing..? Very eco-friendly:
The creator is unknown..
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
We arrived Cape Town one week ago after 18 hours in the air / on airports (yeah, I did pay the carbon tax). We started by a short two-day “holiday” on Cape Standard, a very charming hotel in Green Point. A five-minute walk lead us the fantastic coast of Cape Town with large waves pounding the clips, and we didn’t care that it rained cats and dogs. Some more minutes walk lead us to Waterfront – a harbor area with restaurants, shopping centers and a cinema. By luck, we reached the last days of the documentary festival Encounters.
Thursday we moved into our home for this semester, a charming (but poorly isolated..) house in Observatory near the Devil’s Peak mountain. We share it with three Americans attending courses at the University of Cape Town, which is located quite near. It turned out that getting to the University of the Western Cape at first was a little more difficult. The first day I used almost 2 hours to get there, but now I’ve found a bus route that runs at about 1 hour including some minutes walk and a short minibus ride. Saturday we went to DMC Dj Championships at Fiction, a cool bar at Long Street. The DJs were so talented that it was real fun! Monday the classes started at my university, which by the way has a really fascinating history as the “black” university fighting towards democracy under apartheid. I like Cape Town very good so far and I’m looking forward to what this semester will bring.
I got sick on Thursday and the cough is making it difficult both to sleep and attending lectures. And my voice sounds like it belongs to a 80 year old man. Conventional cough medicine is probably not more effective than placebo. But there is a much better solution… theobromine, found in chocolate – according to a peer-reviewed article by Usmani et al. Good news for all chocolate lovers!
I’ve been thinking about writing about this case for a long time. Obiora died in 2006 when the Norwegian police tried to arrest him. Obiora was unarmed, and the involved police officers have been criticized for using unnecessary violence. As a side note, they have had in total 14 violence-related complaints filed against them. The case was investigated by the Special Unit for Police Affairs, but was abandoned on May 4, 2007 concluding that in the case of three officers there was insufficient evidence to pursue an indictment.
Now there exists plans to take the case to the European Court on Human Rights. Lawyer Abid Raja has found that the case bears similarities with the French Saoud-case (No. 9375/02), where a young man suffered death after have being held face down to the ground by French police officers for over thirty minutes. The Strasbourg court held unanimiusly that there had been a violation of Article 2 (right to life) and 6 (right to a fair hearing) of the Convention.
The Supporting Group for Obiora arranges a fundraising for the up-coming trial. They have already collected more than 100.000 NOK, but need at least twice. Their bank account no. is 7878.06.19510, according to Klassekampen 27th June.
Photochemistry, the interaction between molecules and light (or electromagnetic radiation), can be quite spectacular. One example is luminescent compounds. Another is so-called photocromic reactions, which can be described as a reversible change of colour upon exposure to light. A neat example of such a reaction was just published in Org. Lett. and a video in the supporting information has been published on YouTube:
via The Chem Blog