Category: Cyprus

I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.

Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.

Tsiknopempti

Yesterday was Tsiknopempti – one of my favourite Cyprus holidays.  There are many names for it in English, but none of them really explains what’s going on.  Some of the names are “Barbecue Thursday”, “Meat Thursday”, “Grill Thursday”, “Smelly/Stinky Thursday”, “Fat Thursday“, etc.  Most of the people work only half day, and from around midday or so, the grills are coming out and everyone is cooking meat – ribs, chops, sausages, etc.  The smell of barbecue is in the air everywhere.

Today, is a Recovery Day.  But I don’t know yet if anyone is celebrating it but me.

University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, (UCLan Cyprus)

Cyprus Mail reports:

CONSTRUCTION of a modern €53 million campus has begun in Pyla to accommodate the first British university on the island, University of Central Lancashire Cyprus, (UCLan Cyprus).

UCLan Cyprus will open in October this year and students will have the option of studying their programme entirely in Cyprus or transferring for part of their studies to the UK. They expect to have 5,000 students initially. All courses will be taught in English.

These are some interesting news.  Of course, we have quite a few universities here in Cyprus, but most of them, with the exception of maybe University of Cyprus, were speed-track-converted from a bunch of colleges.  It’ll be interesting to see how different a “real” university is going to be, and if it will create any worthy competition to push the educational institutions a bit.  The level of local schools wasn’t all that high back when I was a student, and judging by the younger candidates that I interviewed for jobs in the last few years, the situation isn’t getting any better.  Hopefully, the UCLan Cyprus arrival can change this.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun.  It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014.  While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding  around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage.  I thought that was a bit excessive.  After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk.  Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing.  How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.  Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book.  How much space is there on a modern hard drive?  I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes).  How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000.  I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes.  But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order.  3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already.  By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that.  Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home.  New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here.  It read more like:

  • 600,000 books (print)
  • 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
  • 10,000 audio books (digital)
  • 150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots.  But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line.  Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world?  Especially now that we do have the technology.

TEDxNicosia videos are online

I’ve been waiting for TEDxNicosia videos to be published online and finally the wait is over.  As good as they are, there is really no way to express the atmosphere that was in the room.  But they definitely help to imagine.  Get inspired!

And, as mentioned before, if you have time for only a single talk, then watch this one, by Nicos Anastasiou.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyFCfg0fS3U]

Together with the photos and the summary of my personal experiences, I hope you can realize now how cool of an event that was.

Cyprus prison population

The other day I was reading Cyprus Mail’s coverage of Cyprus prison overpopulation problem.  As any other problem it does involve attention.  But for me personally the article was more useful with absolute numbers rather than relative.  This paragraph in particular:

Cyprus’ total prison population in June this year, including pre-trial detainees and remand prisoners, was 831. Its prison population rate reached 105 per 100,000 members of the population, lower than the EU average of 137 per 100,000.

Can you imagine that there are only, more or less, 830 people in prison?  And some of them aren’t even proven criminals yet – pre-trial detainees!

Coming from Russia, with it’s multi-million population and millions of people in correctional facilities, and criminal culture tightly integrated into the population with TV, movies, music and language; so tight indeed that even presidents, premiers and ministers are using bits and pieces of it during their public speeches and appearances; I find it almost impossible to believe that there are less than a 1,000 people in Cyprus jails.