-
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own. OLPC…
-
kateoplis: Chacaltaya mountain in Bolivia with an elevation of 17,785 ft once had one of the highest glaciers in South America. The 18,000-year-old glacier had the world’s highest ski run – the first built in Latin America. After losing 80% of its area in the last 2 decades, it finally disappeared in 2009, much faster than scientists had predicted. All that remains is a bedrock. Photo…
-
gingerhaze: thedailywhat: Nostalgia Overload of the Day: Walden Media, the children’s film production company behind The Chronicles of Narnia series, has purchased the right to adapt Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? for the big screen. Initial reports suggested that the role of the red-hatted rogue would be played by Jennifer Lopez, but it…
-
But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emergence—it actually seems to be quite a random thing. That’s a vision of technology that’s diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popular culture of…
-
One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says. Former “Seastedders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation (via bmdesign) Neal Stephenson’s Snow…
-
I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet…
-
I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have…