Raspberry Pi today. Jam tomorrow

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Raspberry Pi project – a philanthropic effort to create the contemporary equivalent of the BBC Micro of yesteryear – has graduated from idealistic vapourware dreamed up in Cambridge to a finished, deliverable product manufactured in China. (In a nice touch, the Pi device comes in two flavours, Model A and Model B, just like the BBC machine, which was also designed in Cambridge.) Over the next few months, we’ll see container-loads of the little computer boards delivered to these shores. The time has come, therefore, to start thinking about how this astonishing breakthrough can be exploited in our schools.

Here are a few suggestions.

First, we need to jettison some baggage from the past. In particular, we have to accept that ICT has become a toxic brand in the context of British secondary schools…

Natural geometry

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Nature’s pentagons, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I’ve always wanted to see the Giant’s Causeway in Co Antrim, and yesterday finally achieved that ambition. It’s a remarkable geological phenomenon, 40,000 interlocked basalt columns which were the product of an ancient volcanic eruption. We got there at the end of the day, as the sun was setting, and it was quite magical — and almost deserted, despite being one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. I had expected only hexagons, but in this stretch the columns seemed to be mainly pentagonal in cross-section. And the light was wonderful. We ran into another photographer who was similarly transported by it.

Larger image here.

Who decides what gets sold in the bookstore?

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That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?The realities of our emerging ebook landscape — as experienced by Seth Godin.

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

And there’s the conflict. We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

That’s amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?

Er, no, Seth. It’s the way these companies propose to reconfigure the world.

Why I’ll be avoiding Pinterest

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At last: someone twigs it.

A woman named Kristen decided to look into the legality of Pinterest. After all, she’s a lawyer with a passion for photography.

What she found scared her so much, she shut down her Pinterest boards entirely.

Kristen’s investigation began after she saw photographers complaining about copyright violations on Facebook. She wondered why Facebook could get in trouble for copyright violation and Pinterest couldn’t.

She browsed Pinterest’s Terms of Use section. In it she found Pinterest’s members are solely responsible for what they pin and repin. They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.