Category: learning curve

Halo

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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

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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?

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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.

#Rabbit4Nic – Friday morning update

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Hello.

Please accept my apologies for what will almost certainly be a very disjointed blog post.

I’m a bit snowed under, but I think that after yesterday’s exceptional efforts by online South Africa, people deserve thanks, recognition and a quick status update of where we stand right now.

First things first  – do we have rabbit?

Almost, yes:

  • We have one rabbit coming down from Charné & Ilse Stapelburg in Pretoria. He’s being picked up this morning and should be with me on Saturday morning.
  • We have another rabbit pledged by Nicolene de Klerk in Bloemfontein. He’s being picked up on Monday for delivery to Cape Town on Tuesday.
  • We have a third  rabbit from Bernadette Beckley. I’m following up on that at the moment. Should be arriving Friday afternoon!
  • Finally, we have another potential rabbit, pending (probably delicate) negotiations with its young owner.

So yes – as good as. And a huge thank you to all those who have donated their much-loved toys for Nic.

And from yesterday – and I will post about this again in more detail when I get a moment – big some thanks are due too:

  • @capetown – who coined the #rabbit4nic hashtag and was instrumental in getting the campaign going.
  • @StephanieBe – whose own blog post was widely shared and made a big difference.
  • @anib – who quietly assisted in spreading the word and also thought of getting in touch with:
  • @youmagazine – Herman and his online team at You and Huisgenoot have been really great in finding readers with bunnies!
  • @Woolworths_SA – Who were copied on literally hundreds and hundreds of tweets, and have helped in the search.

There are many, many others who blogged, reblogged, share and retweeted the original post. I wish I could thank you all personally.

We’re (“we’re”, hark at me!) The appeal is on the You website today, mentioned on the front page of the Cape Argus and probably lots of other places I haven’t been told about. I was on Talk Radio 702, Cape Talk 567 and Radio Tygerberg yesterday as well. For someone who runs a blog in his spare time, it’s been completely overwhelming. My inbox is full of prayers, media requests, suggestions and good wishes.
I’m going to be playing catch up for a while. Bear with me.

Finally, I – like everyone else – have been completely blown away by the response to the #Rabbit4Nic campaign. While I think we did absolutely the right thing by concentrating the search specifically for identical rabbits for Nic, so many people have offered other bunnies that it would be wrong to stop this here. I’m going to chat with Nic’s parents over the weekend and I think the intention will be to make something more from this.

As ever, I will keep you informed.

Just another letter to the newspaper

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As “the powers that be” (the er… democratically elected government) in New Zealand pass the first part of a law to allow “gay marriage”, people continue writing letters to newspapers. This one is from Jasmin, age 14 (and homeschooled) in Scargill on New Zealand’s South Island and enlightens us as to the potentially horrific consequences of homosexuality spreading.

Yep – you read it right there. The ducks are coming and they’re going to take over the world. Human liver pâté and Human a l’Orange will be the dishes of the day in their cosy nested pairs.

If the Romans did indeed practise homosexuality, then 2,000 years on, we should actually all be pretty good at it by now. And by using Jasmin’s logic (this was not necessarily my best decision), that means that the ducks are probably already more equal than us. Even if they are currently disguising it very well by not taking over the world just yet, this remains a concern.

I agree with Jasmin’s sentiment that she doesn’t want her children to compete with ducks, (although I am disappointed that this indicates her intention to procreate).
I don’t want my children to compete with ducks either. Frankly, the image of them hanging around ponds and rivers, fighting with the local wildfowl over scraps of bread sends shivers down my spine. And once the ducks realise that they have the evolutionary advantage over us because they’re not gay, they surely won’t hold back with their heterosexual pecky beaks and their lack of opposable thumbs.
Carnage will ensue on the riverbank.

But then, none of this really bears any weight for me, because I do believe in evolution and I trust that eventually Jasmin’s kind will disappear from the human race pretty quickly once they realise that the only way that they can guarantee the eradication of homosexuality in the human race is actually not to breed.

Just like the ducks didn’t.

UPDATE: The dark truth about ducks, via @JacquesR