Here’s the seventh interview for Seal Club, featuring Khaled Abou Alfa of Broken Kode. It’s the first of my “blue and orange” interviews; 10 bonus points for guessing who the next one is with.
Computing in Africa
MIT has unveiled the production version of Negroponte’s $100 laptop. It’s hard to express how happy I am. It has the potential to make a huge difference in terms of African connectivity. Not just for education but in terms of an expanded business base and a route for freedom of speech.
My interest lies mostly in some research I did for my alternative practicum at teacher’s college. I was looking into the possibilities for internet aided learning in remoter regions of Sierra Leone. Cell coverage is spotty, but it’s improving by the day with new telecomm service. So, getting a data connection is possible, the harder part is maintaining an adequate power supply for your computing equipment. That makes that hand-crank on the laptop one of the most important features.
I investigated a number of solutions, eventually settling on handheld pdas and portable solar arrays. The power consumption is fairly minimal, the batteries are rechargable and you have the possibility of using a laptop as a central base-station. The laptops and/or pdas could come from anyone really. There are relatively inexpensive portable solar arrays available now that are capable of powering most of those devices. My ideas were partially inspired by Ben Saunders’ trek to the arctic and his blogging via pda (he used this rollable solar array).
The Junction Box is also an amazing piece of hardware. Combining a few of Negroponte’s laptops and portable Wifi router with direct cell-network capabilities creates some pretty cool options — like a mobile classroom. You could slap one of those in a jeep, but a pile of laptops in the trunk and drive around from school to school.
More cool physics demos
The science behind four interesting physics demos, including: walking on broken glass, dipping your hand in molten lead, having a concrete block smashed on your chest while sandwiched between a bed of nails and picking up a white-hot space-shuttle tile.
Scarface as Scarface
These Scarface posters are amazing (make sure you look in close), reproducing all 300 pages of script. Alanah did a series of Alice in Wonderland drawings in a similar style, we’ll see about getting them online.
Some fall photos
Just wanted to post a few photos from the roll of film I got back recently. They’re not news to those valiant flickr stream observers, but my posts over there aren’t as freqent with the semi-broken digital camera.
Dijkstra Archive
E. W. Dijkstra Archive features a compilation of his various manuscripts. The founding father of computer science believed it was a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. And he followed through.
Don’t screw with your regulars
Notice the ads on this site? Probably not. Advertising has been one of those things that has been hard to nail down properly on the web. What works for some won’t work for others. Not to mention the devious nature that 90% of the ads seem to have; punch the monkey, useless smilies, Windows errors. Most of it is crap.
Google style text-ads are everywhere. You see them arrayed haphazardly across many a templated weblog without too much thought and proceed to read about the webmasters that are disappointed by poor results. I’ve generally avoided slapping a bunch of ads all over this site because people aren’t going to click on them. At least not the regular readers — you’re just punishing them by displaying useless ads on your site. The people coming in via search engine are a different matter though. They’re transient, have little attachment to the site and are looking for something specific anyway. I don’t really mind showing them pseudo-random search-engine generated ads. And that’s what I’m doing.
Search Engines and WordPress
How do you go about doing something like this? For WordPress, I hacked together a plugin using Ryan Boren’s Search Hilite as a base. It’s kind of ugly, could be done better and I’m not going to support it. But I’ll make it available if you want a basic building block for your site — download.
Shoot the monkey demo
Shoot the Monkey is a popular physics demo (watch the video), that demonstrates projectile motion. Here’s a java simulation of the experiment.
Foldable mountain bike
The Paratrooper mountain bike from Montague is lightweight and foldable; designed with jumping out of a plane in mind. It would also be pretty handy size for an apartment or throwing in a car.
A list of mp3 weblogs
Monkeyfilter’s wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of mp3 weblogs, enough to keep you nice and busy for awhile.
Mascots for Beijing Olympics
The Mascots for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing have been announced. They’re adorable little cartoon characters. That said, the only thing that scares me more than the one holding a pistol (or the one holding a sword) is the one holding a pistol and sword, riding a horse.
Greetings from Idiot America
I haven’t posted much material related to Intelligent Design, mostly because the argument seems so stupid. It shouldn’t even be called an argument. This Esquire article (full text) was too good to pass up though. It focuses on Intelligent Design, but also touches on the broader dumbing down of America.
The Creation Museum ranks up there as one of my favourites from this whole debacle. This is a photo of one of their displays, featuring a giraffe and Adam naming a Sabertooth tiger. Nice kitty.
