Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

“It’s an education project, not a genetic engineering project.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm.
Mission Statement: To increase the Darwinian fitness of the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-energy, internet-enabled velociraptor with content designed for collaborative, practical, self-empowered survival

Those crazy Olin kids… Go check out www.velociraptorz.org/ and buy a t-shirt.

Now, I haven’t actually used Windows on XO for more than a few seconds. There are something like three at the OLPC offices AFAIK. But with the announcement of a viable form of XP on the XO the blogosphere has had a field day. CNET has finally posted a reasonable, if non-technical, side by side comparison of the two versions of the machine. The results in the actual article are fairly ambiguous, but blogs, both secular and FOSS have decried that kids prefer Sugar over XP.

But more surprisingly, the great majority of blogs about the subject have been in Espanol.

The popular turn-based strategy game, Battle for Wesnoth, has been bundled and customized for the XO.  It’s pretty big at 77mb, but it’s a great game and I’m very happy to see it as an activity on the XO.  Thank you Jeremy Visser!

http://jeremy.visser.name/2008/10/25/battle-for-wesnoth-for-olpc-released/trackback/

Oh man, what’s the name of that day coming up?  I wasn’t supposed to forget it.  November 6th?  Was that it?  Something about Treason and Gunpowder…

Ah yes.

Remember, Remember,
the Fifth of November,
the Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot.

I know of no reason,
the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Where will you be?
Want to roast mini-marshmallows over candle flames in harvard square instead?

At Internet Superhighway a pair of internet revolutionaries. Drew up this fractal heart based on the Sierpinski trangle on the whiteboards provided by Mel, Greg and Olin crew.  Pretty cool, but so far my favorite take on the subject were the fractal cookies from Evil Mad Scientist(s).

Hrrm, now for Sierpinski heart cookies?

My memes are overwhelming.

I’ve received more disappointing spam this week.  I don’t know if spamming has changed and I’ve fallen behind or if I’m just not getting it these days.  But I got an email the other day with Subject: ” Job Offer”.

This is to inform you that Greenwood children foundation is interested in offering you a part-time paying job…

via Appropedia (Sustainable technology wiki):

Toilet. Internet. OLPC.  Bollywood. SRLY?

The world becomes a weirder place day by day.

But akvo.org looks like a really interesting group interested in Open Source sanitation information available over the internet.  The posters are designed with a Bollywood-esk look to garner enough interest to go to the website.

As silly as this idea is, I love it.

(note: they’re using a beta revision of the XO hardware (B2).  You can tell by the green hinge case.)

At the first monthly Internet Superhighway event Kevin Driscoll sported this name tag with his ICQ #.  I was browsing through photos of the event and I was inspired to look up my oh-so-historic ICQ#.

Christina Xu (also the photographer of the above photo) is writing her thesis on the history of instant messengers.  That has to have influenced my desire as well.

I needed to figure out my ICQ#, so I went to check out the ICQ.com.  I haven’t been here in ages.  But I started searching for my #, aaaaaand unfortunately didn’t find anything. :(

So instead I started thinking back to when I first got an ICQ number.  I had one or two before one stuck in, I think, 7th grade.  I can recall one occasion in 9th grade where I had the # memorized and was giving it out.  And if I had the number memorized once?  Perhaps I could recall it.

I knew that it started with 10, then 22, and had a 23 at the end.  Figuring out from ICQ that #’s back in the day had 9 digits, I had but to figure out the other 3 digits, and their order.  Amazingly enough, it came to me: 102239023.  I even remembered my password.

If you are still rocking ICQ via Pidgin or other multi-protocol clikent please feel free to add me!

(11:29:54 PM) registrationppd@hotmail.com: avhtfqekonHey check out http://www.itsovergiveup.com/

I signed into msn messenger for the first time in many months today.  At first I thought that this message could possibly not be spam.

Ha, this is an image to define an election. I ran into this at the Internet Superhighway event here in boston last week.

I’m debating printing out a ton of these and pasting them up around cambridge.

read more | digg story