Start Small: Stuffed Mouse

What worthwhile task can you learn in four hours? Computer programming? The basics of another language? Some sort of knitting perhaps?
Well, maybe. But while you’re doing any of the above, your mind would surely be wondering why you were learning that and not learning the art of Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy.

Anthropomorphic taxidermy – the practice of mounting and displaying taxidermied animals as if they were humans or engaged in human activities – was a popular art form during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Yes. And now you too can stuff your own mouse on a Wednesday afternoon in London.

All materials – including a mouse for each student – will be provided, and each class member will leave at the end of the day with their own anthropomorphic taxidermied mouse. Students are invited to bring any miniature items with which they might like to dress or decorate their new friend; some props and miniature clothing will also be provided by the teacher. A wide variety of sizes and colours of mice will be available.
No former taxidermy experience is required.

Which is good, because I haven’t got any of that.

There are some general notes at the bottom of the page, including:

Please do not bring any dead animals with you to the class

Which is the sort of specific request that immediately indicates that one or more students have done this before.

Eww.

Halo

Spotted while watching the kids’ Sports Day this morning – a halo around the Cape Town sun.

When I say the Cape Town sun, I’m obviously aware that it’s the same sun for everyone. I’m not suggesting that there are multiple suns or that each city has its own sun. I was just in Cape Town when I saw this sun.

The halo is caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals which make up cirrus clouds high up in earth’s atmosphere. I’m not talking Felix Baumgartner high, just 20,000 ft or so. Allegedly, these clouds are often the precursor to stormy weather (many were seen ahead of the recent Hurricane Sandy), but our forecast looks pretty good, so it looks like this halo is cirrussy in the wrong place.

Fairly incredible

I saw this on Dvice yesterday and had to share it.

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

Basically, rather than handing the tablets out, which is their usual m.o., they literally put the boxes containing one tablet per child in the village and then they left. No instructions, no lessons on what they were or what to do with them, nothing.

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village.

Poison Arrow, or The Look of Love? Either way, great taste.

And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

Something is nagging me about the ethics of all this, but apparently, we’re told to gloss over that and appreciate the seemingly huge advances that this could mean for education and the spread of literacy in previously illiterate communities.

And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

All in all, it’s a fairly incredible story. I wish all my experiments went this well.

Did you?

Here’s an interesting one. Have you shared, tweeted, retweeted or emailed any of these photos around?

Yes, it’s Buzzfeed’s list of 9 viral photos that AREN’T Hurricane Sandy.
And I’ve seen these two in the last 10 minutes alone.

This is a photoshop job. As if you couldn’t see that from the way the flag is blowing.

And this was from a wet day in September. Dedication, sure, but no hurricane here folks.

There will undoubtedly be some remarkable photos from Sandy’s visit to NYC and surrounds, so go have a look at the others so that you don’t get fooled. Oh, and if you shared any of the last three on that list, you need psychiatric help.