I love Holland — have done ever since I lived and worked here in the 1970s. And every time I come back I’m always taken aback by the sheer density of bicycles. The photo shows the scene that greeted me on coming out of the Centraal Station in the Hague this afternoon. Our host at dinner tonight was a very senior corporate executive: he’d come to the restaurant by bike. Can’t imagine any of his British counterparts doing that.
Here’s a really good idea — double-decker trains. I caught one from Schiphol to the Hague. Just over 25 minutes. The Swiss are not the only people who know how to run a railway.
Er, toothpaste. Going through security at Stansted today on my way to a symposium in the Hague, I was asked if I had any liquids in my hand luggage. I answered cheerfully “no” because I hadn’t. But then my carry-on bag was diverted for the full treatment and opened for examination. After a while, the nice lady doing this pounced on my tube of toothpaste and said “Ah! This is what triggered it”. “But”, I said politely, “that’s a paste, not a liquid”. “I know”, she replied, “but the rule is, if you can spread it with a knife it’s a liquid”.
Afterwards, I wondered why this hadn’t happened before — and realised that generally toothpaste goes in the checked-in luggage. You learn something new every day.
Curious, too, the symbolism in learning this on the anniversary of 9/11!
Jim Gettys, VP of Software for the One Laptop Per Child project was in Cambridge today and gave an impromptu seminar at the Computer Lab. It was a fascinating insight into the amount of hard work and ingenuity that has gone into the design of this elegant little gizmo:
Jim had three of the laptops in his bag and left them out for us to examine.
I took notes as he talked and may blog a full account later. But, looking back, the headlines are:
Wireless networking is central to the project, and it does mesh networking in a really neat way. My Airport card picked up the mesh immediately, and it was interesting to see the neat way the OLPC interface represents other wireless nets. They’ve done a lot of hard thinking about power consumption and have come up with some very neat tricks for paring down consumption. The CPU is off much of the time, for example. The display (a custom-built 7.5″ 200 dpi TFT ultra-low power consumption screen) is readable in bright sunlight. Jim had a nice slide of the laptop alongside a traditional HP laptop in blazing sunshine. Guess which screen is an unreadable black? The laptop has a built-in camera — rather like the iSight built in to Intel Macs. Kids love this, apparently. There are plans to sell OEM versions of the laptop in developed countries — but for considerably more than $100. Conventional file systems are pretty baffling to a young kid who doesn’t know how to read yet. So the OLPC has, as its central idea, the concept of a time-ordered journal. (This also helps with decisions about what to throw away: you’re less tempted to keep old stuff). The OLPC Chat protocol is “loosely based” on Jabber. Open source software is a key and integral part of the project. Making the machines look very much like a kids’ toy is part of the anti-theft strategy. (Any adult with one who isn’t a teacher will be suspect.) Also it helps that it doesn’t run Windows (makes it less desirable to thieves). The project is running into ‘political’ difficulties in certain targeted countries. These difficulties are partly caused by certain Western companies — but, interestingly, not Microsoft. Now I wonder which large chip manufacturer might be involved?
After Jim had finished, he was mobbed by a few people. The students went straight for the laptops, though!
All in all, it was a terrific event. Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for organising it.
Postscript: The “bunny ears” on the laptop are in fact WiFi antennae!
Hmmm… I fed the following text (from Die Zeit ) to Windows Live Translator Beta:
Der Oberkommandierende der US-Armee im Irak, David Petraeus, hat einen Teilabzug der US-Soldaten in Aussicht gestellt. Der Einsatz der US-Streitkräfte im Irak habe die Sicherheitslage insoweit stabilisiert, dass die Zahl der Soldaten bis Mitte Juli 2008 von derzeit 168.000 auf dann etwa 130.000 zurückgeführt werden könne, sagte der General in seinem mit Spannung erwarteten Lagebericht vor dem US-Kongress. Bereits im Dezember könne eine erste Kampfbrigade von etwa 4000 Soldaten die Heimreise antreten. Einen Termin für einen vollständigen Rückzug aus dem Irak wollte Petraeus nicht nennen. Ein “voreiliger Abzug” könne “katastrophale” Folgen haben, warnte er.
And this is what came out:
The Commander-in-Chief of the US army in Iraq, David Petraeus, promised a partial withdrawal of the US soldiers. The employment of US armed forces in Iraq has the security situation stabilized that the number of the soldiers to in the middle of July 2008 from at present 168,000 can be attributed to then about 130,000, said the general in its with tension to expected report on the situation before the U.S. Congress to that extent. Already in December a first combat brigade of approximately 4000 soldiers can begin the home journey. Petraeus did not want to call a date for a complete retreat from Iraq. A “hasty departure” can have “catastrophic” consequences, warned it.
I then fed it to BabelFish, which produced this:
The Commander-in-Chief of the US army in the Iraq, David Petraeus, promised a partial departure of the US soldiers. The employment of US armed forces in the Iraq has the security situation stabilized that the number of the soldiers to in the middle of July 2008 from at present 168,000 can be attributed to then about 130,000, said the general in its with tension to expected report on the situation before congress of US to that extent. Already in December a first combat brigade of approximately 4000 soldiers can begin the home journey. Petraeus did not want to call a date for a complete retreat from the Iraq. A “hasty departure” can have “catastrophic” consequences, warned it.
Very similar, I think you’ll agree. What a coincidence.
Hmmm… Do I want one of these? Needs cushions, I think. A bit too Wittgensteinian in its raw form. Get it from here.
Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.
BBC News reports that
The UK government has responded to an electronic petition that called on it to ensure the BBC’s iPlayer works on non-Windows PCs. More than 16,000 people have signed the petition since it was created. In its response, the government said the BBC Trust had made it a condition of launching the iPlayer that it worked with other operating systems….
The BBC has said that a Mac version of the iPlayer will be released in the autumn followed by versions for Windows Vista and mobile gadgets. Big deal. And no mention of Linux.
From Scobleizer…
One of my friends caught his teenage son having a party because his son posted some pictures of that party to his Facebook page. Let’s just say that “dad” isn’t allowed into his Facebook profile anymore. This is yet another example of the problems that Facebook users are facing. Forget the fact that many of you believe that parents should have transparency into their kids lives. This was a case where a kid put some content up that he didn’t want someone else to find yet they did. Same thing as an employer finding a photo of you doing something that they would find to be a fireable offense.
There is going to be a lot of tension about Facebook until it adds much better privacy controls. Some things deserve to be open to the public (and to Google). Glad to see Facebook is recognizing that. But other things should only be kept for close personal friends. I wish I could set Facebook stuff to be shared with the audience I want to share that media with (whether or not I usually want to make my stuff totally public).
This one will run and run. The issue is surfacing all over the place. At the panel discussion after my Keynote Address at Leeds Metropolitan University last Monday, for example, there was an interesting discussion about whether lecturers should be in Facebook (i.e. whether their presence was an intrusion on what should be regarded as a ‘student’ space).
Interesting quote from the maverick American cultural critic Kenneth Burke…
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
Sound familiar? Burke wrote that in 1941.
[Source]
Engagingly snotty piece about Dave ‘Vote Green to get Blue’ Cameron.
Apparently Cameron offsets his carbon emissions by donating to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land.
The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide ‘treadle pumps’ to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like ‘step machines in a gym’, according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.
What might once have been referred to as ‘back-breaking labour’ is now spun as ‘human energy’. According to Climate Care, the use of labour-intensive treadle pumps, rather than labour-saving diesel-powered pumps, saves 0.65 tonnes of carbon a year per farming family. And well-off Westerners – including Cameron, and Prince Charles, Land Rover and the Cooperative Bank, who are also clients of Climate Care – can purchase this saved carbon in order to continue living the high life without becoming consumed by eco-guilt. They effectively salve their moral consciences by paying poor people to live the harsh simple life on their behalf.