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The Environmental Compliance Division at the Coast Guard base where I work is tasked with cleaning up decades worth of environmental problem areas on base and instituting sustainable operating procedures in the way the Coast Guard serves America. According to ARSC’s newsletter, we “recycled (kept out of landfills) 1330 pounds of toner cartridges in 2007″ and kept 1005 pounds of alkaline batteries from landfills by recycling, five times the amount of batteries recycled in 2006¹.

To clean up past bad practices, the ECD has started planting trees in contaminated areas, which draw pollutants out of the ground and prevent them from contaminating the water table. The fans on short poles visible amid the trees in these photos are drawing petroleum hydrocarbons out of the soil and atomizing them into the air.

Active Phytoremediation Project Area Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City (Click for Larger Image)

From the information sign in front of this field:

From 1941 until 1991, the surrounding area was used as a fuel farm for aircraft refueling. The fuel farm consisted of multiple underground and above-ground storage tanks which were decommissioned and removed from the site. Evidence of a release was observed during the tank removal activities, resulting in impacts on subsurface soils and groundwater by petroleum hydrocarbons.

Phytoremediation was the selected remedy to control and contain contaminated groundwater migration and to remediate impacted soil and groundwater. Phytoremediation is an innovative and cost-effective technology that refers to the use of plant-based systems to remove, degrade, or stabilize environmental contaminants present in soil and/or groundwater.

Active Phytoremediation Project Area Aircraft Repair & Supply Center, Elizabeth City (Click for Larger Image)

Both poplar and willow trees have been planted across the site to remediate subsurface soils and groundwater. The use of both poplar and willow trees within a phytoremediation plot can capitalize on the favorable phytoremediation potential specific to each species.

The phytoremediation project is being performed in a combined effort with the United States Coast Guard, ARCADIS, North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, United States Geological Survey, and North Carolina State University.

Wikipedia entry for Phytoremediation.

¹“ARSC Environmental Goals,” The Flyer Volume 1, Issue 2, Feburary 2008.

Recently I needed a way to quickly sort a large dataset on the fly, but the classic bubblesort algorithm was too innefficient. Luckily, a quick google search revealed a Quick Sort v2 Algorithm by Anthony Baratta, who took and modified the Quick Sort Algorithm from 4 Guys from Rolla, who adapted it from an algorithm given in the book Data Abstractions & Structures using C++ by Mark Headington and David Riley, (pg. 586).

Because Baratta’s article was followed with user comments, everyone on the Web was free to contribute criticisms, questions, and, most of all, improvements. Two people posted fantastic advances to the code as well, with one person posting a modification to sort on dates, and another posting a modification to deal with extremely large arrays.

Without these two updates, the original script posted would have left me struggling to overcome these oversights, but thanks to the collaboration and copyleft principles of people online, I can use this code without having to spend days banging my head against my monitor to understand and adapt it.

Like any science, Information Science builds on the knowledge of those before us.

Charles Rosen’s Shakey was an early AI that could move withot bumping into things

Science Fiction is rife with intelligent machines. C-3PO in “Star Wars,” the HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” KITT from “Knight Rider,” Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the Terminator, Sonny from “I, Robot,” the agents from “The Matrix,” and the deceptively artificial humans from the movies “A.I.” and “Westworld” are commonplace in our fictional futures.

Video games are filled with AIs who compete against human players. The better the AI, the more challenging gaming experience. Since computers started decisively beating the best chess players on Earth, grandmasters have started coaching competing chess AIs against each other. Artificial Intelligence is already integrated into our interactive entertainment, and holds promise for more real-world applications as well.

But is AI really “intelligent?” The father of modern computer science Alan Turing, described a test for determining a machine’s capability of demonstrating thought: a human judge enters a chat room with a human and a computer program, if they cannot identify which is the human and which is the machine, then the machine qualifies as intelligent. This procedure is known as the Turing Test.

A.L.I.C.E is a ChatBot that holds promise for one day passing the Turning Test. ALICE scans sentences given to it in online chat for keywords and returns one of hundreds of appropriate responses based on the context of the conversation. You can chat with ALICE online at alicebot.org.

ALICE does not understand sentences, it feigns understanding. However convincing, ALICE is not intelligent in any sense, it merely pretends at being human.

Actually understanding the meaning of sentences is an incredibly complex task for computer programs. Consider the following two sentences:

“The cat chased the mouse because it was hungry.”

“The cat chased the mouse because it looked appetizing.”

We can easily deduce that the ambiguous pronoun “it” refers to the cat in the first sentence and the mouse in the second, but consider the wealth of personal knowledge and experience required for our minds to make this distinction. The conundrum in AI development is giving a computer program this level of intuition.

Cyc (pronounced “psych”) is one attempt at a computer program that can actually derive meaning from language. Since 1984, researchers have been plugging facts into this program, trying to teach it common sense. Using facts like “Creatures that die stay dead” and “When Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, he took his left foot with him,” Cyc makes its own assumptions about the world.

I visited cyc.com and played the “FACTory” trivia game, where Cyc give the player the assumptions it has made from the facts in its database and asks if they are true, false, or don’t make sense at all. One true assumption Cyc had made was, “Devices are typically located in toll booths,” but I had to think about it. “Condominiums are typically located in modern homes,” was an obviously false assumption, and “Ones are typically located in police stations,” failed to make sense to me or any of the other players either.

At the present moment, Web Developers all over the planet are adding another layer of complexity to the World Wide Web, one that will allow computers to read and process our existing websites. This new layer, called the Semantic Web, holds a great deal of potential for AI development. Already agent programs are running tasks for users on the Internet, retrieving data for them using this new logic layer. Science Fiction has speculated on the possibility of a sentient World Wide Web, maybe the Semantic Web is a step in that direction.

Bees Forsake Their Own Reproduction for the Benefit of the Hive Photo by Todd Huffman

Humans are funny animals. We cooperate at a level of sophistication seen nowhere else on planet Earth. Teachers, food servicers, law enforcement, medical workers, farmers, entertainers, engineers, truck drivers, and a bazillion other specialized laborers make our survival in its present convenience possible. The majority of us would die in a few weeks without our worldwide social support network.

Homo Sapiens behave altruistically toward one another. Human altruism is so strong that it even goes beyond our own gene pool. We are so nurturing that we adopt and care for members of other species like cats, dogs, houseplants, ant farms, hamsters, snakes, lizards, and other pets. We undergo Herculean efforts to save beached, stranded, or wounded whales.

Homo Sapiens care a lot.

We aren’t alone in this regard. In nature, we see cooperation and self-sacrifice everywhere. Primates like Chimpanzees and Gorillas work in cooperative altruistic fashion, as do pack animals. My two pet cats will often spend quality time grooming one another’s fur on the couch, taking turns licking those hard to reach places like on top of the head and chin. Another cat was documented mothering orphaned skunks. It’s obviously natural for members of a species to care for one another, and sometimes even outside their species.

Drone bees work tirelessly to feed their hives, even though they have no hope of reproducing themselves. Their queen, however, shares their genes, and if she survives to reproduce, the drone’s genes will survive as well. Lacking higher brain functions, the altruistic behavior in bees must be instinctual, carried within their DNA. The success of bees is living proof of the success of altruistic genes.

British evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton figured out that when an animal’s genetic relatedness to another (r) multiplied by how much altruism would benefit the recipient’s survival chances (B) was greater than the personal cost to survival of the altruistic animal (C), then the genes for altruism would propagate. Expressed mathematically as rB>C, it is known as “Hamilton’s Rule,” and some consider it the E=mc² of biology.

Hamilton’s Rule

The science of Game Theory provides an example of altruism’s strength in numbers. In each round of a game called the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” two players have the option to either act altruistically or betray the other player. If they cooperate, they both get three points. If they betray one another, they only get one point each. If one betrays and the other acts altruistically, the betrayer gets five points and the altruistic player gets zero.

Scientists have devised all sorts of strategies for winning this game, and those strategies put into algorithms and put into competition on computers. Of all the strategies put into this virtual world, the “Tit-for-Tat” (TFT) comes out on top. This strategy’s first action is altruistic and after that it simply does what the other player did on the previous round, rewarding altruism with altruism and betrayal with betrayal. When TFTs exist in the community, the other more altruistic strategies succeed with them, forming a cooperative community.

Between the success of TFT’s and mounting support for Hamilton’s Rule, we are finding that being good to one another not only makes moral sense, but logical and mathematical sense as well.

Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976.

See also my previous post Nice Guys Finish First exploring the math behind the Prisoner’s Dilema in further detail.

Fossil-hunters once pulled only bones out of the dirt. Then they started pulling up whole skeletons as one big rock, using X-rays and MRIs to catch images of the organs of dinosaurs in the rock. Then they started examining pollen particles accompanying the fossilized bones.

I wonder what important evidence we are destroying today, when we exhume fossils, that future innovations will cherish?

Iron Concretion from a Fossilized Dinosaur Heart

See the complete flickr set here.

“The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals.”
- Neil Shubin

Your Inner Fish

There’s a fascination to tearing apart an old house, tracing its history through what you find hidden behind the plaster. Electrical wires and pipes will run up to the attic and across, instead of taking a direct route through a wall, or worse, run up the outside of the house to enter a second-story bathroom. Awkward plaster intrusions will run between ceilings and walls, where air ducts were added after the house was built. Lead and asbestos hide under new layers of paint and insulation made from safer alternatives. Doors are shaved into rhombus shapes so they can fit into doorframes no longer rectangular from decades of shifting. Bad wall and floor joists are sistered up with new ones for seemingly redundant support. Other times, you just stare at the work of some carpenter long gone and ask yourself, “What on Earth were they thinking?”

The human body is like an old house. Our ancient ancestors started out with one design, a multi-celled organism, which morphed into animals with faces, which morphed into animals with legs and heads, which morphed into animals on two legs and big brains. The end result is a body that has nerves doing loop-de-loos through our body, running absurdly obtuse routes from our central nervous system to the areas of the body they service, holes pushed through muscles to make way for the male’s external sex organs, leaving a weak spot prone to hernias, and flexible throat muscles good for speech, but leave us prone to choking and sleep apnea.

Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish is a comprehensive exploration of all our human evolutionary traits, and traces them to our ancient ancestors. I was a bit self-conscious reading this book in public. What would you think of someone intently reading a book titled “Your Inner Fish?” You’d wonder what psychiatrist recommended it, so you could avoid using them.

The book’s title is misleading in scope. This is not just a book about our inner fish, but our inner shark, inner worm, inner moth, sponge, single-celled organism. Haeckel’s Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontology may not be true, to the endless delight of Creationists, but understanding why it isn’t true opens the doors to understanding how different species can all start out looking the same as embryos and yet their organs develop into different specializations.

Several of my grade school teachers would explain the human appendix as once aiding in the digesting of raw meat, like cave people supposedly did. This was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong on soooooo many levels. All my teachers had to do was look inside modern animals with functional appendixes to understand how wrong they were. That’s how we know our ancestors’ appendixes were for digesting cellulose found in plants. Comparative Anatomy is indispensable to understanding why our bodies work the way they do.

Shubin draws this fact out through recounting his adventures in fossil hunting, which sound so interesting that they made me want to go on finds myself. He describes fascinating experiments where biologists patch tissue from one animal embryo to another, producing growths that reveal the purpose of different genes, or scientists evolving algae from single-cell to multi-celluar life in the lab by introducing single-cell predators to their environment, or tying a hair around a newt embryo to cause it to grow into twins.

Shubin’s down-to-Earth, hand-on explorations make this book a gateway for laypeople to the biological sciences. The thrill of fossil-hunting, extracting DNA with common kitchen ingredients, or simply looking at the biology of other animals and appreciating how we relate to them make this book a keeper. It will change the way you look at everything in the Animal Kingdom.

Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up without someone getting 15, the game is a draw.

Once two players have figured out all the strategies to winning the game, it becomes easy, and imperative, to prevent the opponent from winning. Just like Tic-Tac-Toe, two experienced players will have games that always end in a draw, which is important for teaching an advanced Artificial Intelligence why nobody wins playing Global Thermo-Nuclear Warfare–sorry, had a flashback to the 1983 movie War Games there.

In the research paper The Game of JAM: An Isomorph of Tic-Tac-Toe, John A. Michon notes how this game promotes a different way of thinking about a classic problem (he refers to this game as “Number Scrabble”):

Although the games are mathematically equivalent, they are likely to differ psychologically, because they require different sorts of information. Number Scrabble is a numerical game requiring addition and subtraction of numbers, whereas Tic-Tac-Toe requires a spatial representation, which can only be disposed of with some difficulty, even by fairly experienced players.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Numerical version are Mathematically equivalent, and we can plot this out visually. In the table below, all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to 15.

Plaing Tic-Tac-Toe on this grid is the same as playing the numerical version. You can find a shockwave demonstration of this principle to play for yourself. This website calls the game Add Fast.

Taking the number five opens up four paths to victory. The numbers {1, 3, 7, 9} each open another path. {2, 4, 6, 8} are the least valuable strategically.

This seems like a cool game to play with your kids. When they get good at it, show them the relationship to Tic-Tac-Toe. Or you can learn the number-grid, and amaze your friends by kicking their butts at this game.

Three Gorges Dam Before Filling Reservoir Image Courtesy Wikimedia Click for a Larger Image

When Three Gorges Dam goes fully online in China in 2009, after 17 years of construction, it will be 607 feet high and 1.4 miles long. Its reservoir will be 410 miles in length and 3,700 feet in width. It will be the largest dam on Earth, and probably the largest dam our planet will ever see.

The dam’s reservoir will require the relocation of over 1.5 million people. 13 full-sized cities were leveled by the people who lived in them, brick by brick, to prevent the buildings from interfering with boat traffic. Some 1,300 archaeological sites will also be submerged.

The dam also contributed to the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin. The weight of the dam and reservoir can cause induced seismicity, or earthquakes. Over the fifteen days it took to initially fill the reservoir, there was a measurable wobble to the Earth’s spin.

Three Gorges Dam 2006 (top) 2000(bottom) Image Courtesy NASA

According to a Chinese official, the dam has three main functions:

The first is to avoid floods. That’s the most crucial function. The second is to generate electricity. The third is to improve transportation.

In 1954, the river flooded, killing 33,169 people and forcing 18,884,000 to relocate. The dam will prevent such events from occurring in the future. The dam’s 32 generators will produce 700,000 kW of electricity, with a total capacity of 22.4 million kW, which will reduce coal consumption by 31 million tons per year, cutting the emission of 100 million tons of greenhouse gas. In the educational video game, Civilization IV, the dam is a World Wonder, providing power to the entire continent.

All of this comes at the astoundingly low price of 180 billion yuan ($25 billion dollars).

So remember, when talking heads say humans are too tiny and insignificant to impact the environment, refer them to Three Gorges Dam, a project with many pros and cons that has literally made the Earth tremble.

Sources:

• Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes, 2006.
• Wikipedia Entry for Three Gorges Dam.

Tracked Debris Orbiting Earth Photo by NASA

All the politicians and military strategists were buzzing about China’s missile test in January 2007, where the country blew up one of its old satellites in orbit. After the debates about the diplomatic and militaristic implications of this demonstration had settled down, scientists took the opportunity to get on their soapboxes and complain about the real problem with China’s missile test, the fact that it put between 500 and 800 pieces of junk into Earth’s orbit.

Each bit of space trash orbiting our planet is a potential hazard to satellites and future space travelers. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network currently tracks 13,000 pieces of space junk larger than four inches in diameter. This includes more than 2,000 spent rocket stages. Every time we launch something into orbit, we produce more space trash. There have been about 4,000 launches worldwide since the dawn of space flight.

Space is junk-filled enough without our adding to the mix. The NASA Spaceguard programs is currently tracking 2,700 Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and adding more to the list every day. 700 of these are at least half a mile wide, big enough to cause global climate catastrophe were one to hit Earth.

The Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan region of Mexico is the likely candidate for the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all life on Earth. Some scientists theorize the impact vaporized carbonate rocks, releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and generating a dramatic greenhouse effect that shifted temperatures as much as 10 degrees. Other’s theorize the asteroid put enough dust and smoke into the atmosphere to block out the sun for up to six months, long enough to kill off most plant life and doom the entire food chain of animals relying on them. Whatever the mechanism, the impact was a climate shattering experience for planet Earth and traumatic to all life here.

Six months after a repair mission to the Hubble telescope corrected the satellite’s focus, the human race was treated to the incredible sight of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding with Jupiter. The train of over twenty fragments produced a trail of black smudges in Jupiter’s atmosphere. When you consider the fact that 1300 Earths can fit inside this largest planet in our solar system, those smudges start to resemble bug splats on a windshield, as in that’s what would happen to our home world.

Impact Scars in Jupiter’s Atmosphere Photo by NASA

Luckily, we have Jupiter’s magnificent mass to serve as the clean sweep for our solar system. Some scientists wonder if highly evolved life is even possible in solar systems that lack giant planets like Jupiter to reduce the amount of large debris floating throughout them.

But having Jupiter doesn’t mean we can lower our guard. In addition to tracking NEO’s, scientists are formulating plans for how to deal with an asteroid on collision course with Earth, should we find one. Missiles are ineffective, because they would simply produce more debris; however, asteroid tugboats, solar sails, and attaching rocket boosters to asteroids are just some of the options we have on the table for nudging these rocks just enough to pass us by.

The ability to escape off-world is another possibility, but only so long as we keep the space surrounding our planet free of debris. In April 1994, the space shuttle Endeavour took a ding on its window measuring a half-inch in diameter. This was caused by an orbiting paint chip. Anything much larger might have destroyed the shuttle and its crew, generating even more space debris.

There is now so much junk orbiting our planet that some scientists fear we have reached a critical mass, and that collisions are now inevitable. Each collision would generate more debris, which generates more collisions, and a chain reaction occurs that fills our orbit with so much trash it would not only prevent us from venturing into space for a very long time, but also destroy weather and communications satellites with all the benefits they bring us as well.

So while the Pentagon assures us no space debris poses a threat from their recent shoot-down of our own satellite, we do need to worry that the U.S. and China’s military demonstrations could bring about escalating weapons technologies in space, where even a small war would ground all humans on Earth for centuries.

Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This was a huge advance over my 1977 Atari 2600 game console, which ran “Pong” and “Space Invaders” on a scant 128 bytes of memory. Today my dual-core Pentium uses a gigabyte of RAM, about 7.8 million times as much memory as the Atari, and, after upgrading to Windows Vista, even that doesn’t cut it anymore.

From bits to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and, with impending DVD technological advances, terabytes, our computing power grows exponentially. This empirically observed fact is known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated component doubles every 18 months. In other words, computers double in power every year and a half. This Law of Computing has held true now for over 40 years in an explosion of processing power that allows for what history will record as the Information Age, the times in which we are currently living.

Now it’s time to familiarize ourselves with a new measurement, the exabyte. We can thank research firm IDC’s white paper The Expanding Digital Universe for introducing us to this latest milestone, which estimates the human race collectively produced 161 exabytes of data in 2006.

So what’s an exabyte? To visualize this number, it’s helpful to begin at the smallest measurement of data, the bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, “on” or “off,” “true” or “false.” Up one level from this binary state we have the byte, which is 8 bits. If you open Notepad on your computer, type any one letter and save the file, you have generated one byte of data, which you can verify by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”

Every additional character typed and saved will add another byte to the file’s size. Every 1,000 characters is a kilobyte, and every 1,000 kilobytes a megabyte. A 90,000-word novel translates into about 0.5 megabytes¹. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, or 500 billion novels. That’s 77 novels written for every person on Earth², and we are producing 161 times that much data, 230 billion CDs worth³, or nearly 12,400 novels for every person on Earth every year.

We produced more data last year than has been produced in the last 5,000 years of human history. That’s just for 2006, and that’s only the beginning. “In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes,” that’s 12 Petabytes short of having to adopt yet another term of measurement, the Zettabyte.

The search engine Google is named after the largest number the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner could think of, the googol. It is the number one followed by 100 zeros. By one recent estimate, it takes 450,000 computers networked on server farms to run the Google search engine, indexing 8 billion Web pages every year. I wonder when we’ll be talking about our hard drives (or maybe they’ll be flash drives by then) in terms of googlebytes?

And then we still have the googolplex waiting for us in the distant future, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes.

¹500,000 characters in Novel based on a Microsoft Word Count and Character count of one of my novels, which came out to 450,000 characters for a 82,000 world novel. So this is a very conservative estimate.

²1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes translates to
1,000,000,000,000 megabytes which translates to
500,000,000,000 novels divided by 6.5 billion human beings

³CDs hold 700MB of Data
700,000,000
161,000,000,000,000,000,000
230,000,000,000

The Invertebrate Exhibit

Giant Hermit Crab

Awesome moment at this exhibit was getting to see one of Zoo staff feeding the Pacific Octopus. It ballooned up from a little white ball into a red explosion of tentacles. The Zookeeper fed it a muscle and a hermit crab, and had to fight octopus a bit to keep it from climbing out of the tank by climbing up her feeding staff.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

The Reptile House

Emerald Tree Boa

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard some variation of this in the Zoo:

Guy: Yo that snake’s all like, “Wassuuuuup?” and that snake’s all like, “Just chillin’.”

Girl: Tee hee hee. You’re so funny, I wan’t to have sex with you now.

So geeky guys take note: Chicks dig it when you anthropomorphize animals at the zoo… unless said chick has a brain.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

Comparing Brains Left to Right: Fox Squirrel, Orang utan, Human, Asian Elephant, Fin Whale

A display that has a warning sign that you are about to have your preconception challenged is always cool. Mostly displays here, but very thought-provoking ones.

My favorite was the “Is a Cow a Tool?” display. I’d never thought of cows as being a tool for carrying around milk and meat for us, but there you go, we developed them to serve that purpose.

Check out the Complete Flickr set

Clan Apis

Clan Apis chronicles the life and times of a single worker honey bee, Nyuki, who’s delightfully wise-ass and wholly enchanted with her life in a hive where her personal experiences are no different from those of the her thousands of neighbors.

Dr. Jay Hosler’s understanding of entomology, evolution, and natural science allows him to fill Nyuki’s life with all the minutiae of the honey bee’s world. From the details of her life as a larvae, joining the swarm to establish another hive, and defending that hive from other bees and animals. We even learn the physiological effects of the bee ageing process, what happens when bees get old and how they die.

Dr. Hosler’s literary knowledge gives the story another layer. The irony of a dung beetle named Sisyphus, forever rolling his boulder of poop along. The bee characters all have names like Nyuki, Dvorah, Hachi, Zambur, Abeja, and Melissa, which mean “bee” in Swahili, Hebrew, Japanese, Farsi, Spanish, and Greek respectively.

While the his decision not to anthropomorphize his bees’ physiology ensures Disney will never have anything to do with the story (that and its realism, Hosler’s worker bees are female), Dr. Hosler’s choice does not make it difficult to distinguish characters from one another and keeps them entirely bee-like, instead just of being dumb humans with bee-features.

Dr. Hosler’s combination of literary, artistic, and scientific talents create some wonderfully witty moments that stick with the reader long after. My favorite of these is his recounting of the evolution of life in the sea, as things get more complex and more crowded, a lone amphibian, struggling to find some breathing room, struggles to find its way onto land, the first human ancestor to do so:

Although Nyuki’s life is wholly ordinary and unexceptional for a honey bee, her attitude, her perpetual ionian enchantment with her world makes her exceptional and unique.

You can purchase Clan Apis online through Amazon.

So I got my OLPC XO-1 in the mail about a month ago, and I’m still wrestling with my opinion of it. Personally I think it’s the bee’s knees. Everyone who comes into the comic shop fawns over it. I’m the envy of the local geek crowd.

I love it when people ask me, “What’s that?” and I get to extol the virtues of Nick Negroponte’s beautiful vision of supplying underprivileged children all over the world with their own laptops to learn art, reading, mathematics, programming, science, and connect them with the entire world as their classroom. Just like so many people here in America have done through the Internet.

“Huh. But don’t those poor kids have more pressing concerns, like survival, that need to come first?” they always reply in some form or another, and the heart-bubbles floating around my head all pop and I wake up, blinking dumbly.

Which brings me to my conflict. While I dig the OLPC XO-1, will it serve its purpose of enlightening young minds all over the world? Even I laughed at Newt Gingrich when he suggested we provide the homeless with laptops, but now I’m not so sure.

People get stuck in this idea that other nations need to repeat every step of America’s history to achieve America’s quality of life. China can either work through America’s entire history of building a middle class that will demand its own fair workplace standards, or Americans can exert economic pressure on China to do away with its sweatshops. Similarly, third-world countries can step through fossil-fuel power plants, or they can skip straight to renewable energy.

Why reinvent the wheel? The OLPC is a shortcut for lesser-developed nations. Why not help them skip being a second-world country and go straight to the Information Age, with all its collaborative memetic innovation? I say get them into the Global Village ASAP. The sooner they start using LEDs, solar panels, and well-water pumps, the sooner they’ll start contributing their own inventions, software, art, and literature to the world.

On the downside. This laptop is hand-me-down softwares and technologies. The hand-me-down 433mhz processors with hand-me-down 256k RAM. Hardware-wise, this brand new laptop is my brand new PC from 1993. Software-wise the hand-me-down Sim City is the same one that ran on my Apple IIe in Junior High, but I’ve got a better opinion of the rest of the software suite further down.

So is the $200 price tag justified? The software’s open-source, so there’s $0 of the total. A refurnished Thinkpad runs $200-$300, but this is brand new. Former OLPC CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen, is now working on a $75 laptop. How they intend to accomplish this when they couldn’t accomplish it with the OLPC is anybody’s guess, but the competition among charities will definitely spurn more innovation. The $200 price tag is very prohibitive to the OLPC’s ultimate success.

On the plus-side, the hardware has features that are uniquely perfect for the OLPC’s intended recipients. Practically speaking. This is a rugged little #$%@ of a machine. A fully charged battery runs for hours (three hours for one of my sessions). The twin wifi antenna are rubberized and folded in to serve as a locking mechanism for the laptop when closed. With flash memory storage, I don’t have to worry about bouncing it around and wrecking the hardrive, and stuffing all the main components behind the screen means it doesn’t make your sperm-count decline uncomfortably when it sits in your lap.

The keyboard is a rubber mat, which is awesomely spill-proof and would feel great if it wasn’t so tiny. I read one hacker’s first mod to his XO-1 was to convert it to a Dvorak keyboard layout. What’s the point? I’m reduced to hunt-and-peck mode using my forefingers when I type on it, but that’s okay because the keyboard isn’t meant for my adult hands, and when my friend’s five-year-old daughter got her hands on the laptop, she looked like a pro typing utter gibberish into it’s Journaling Software.

The monitor flips completely around and folds flat on the laptop, turning it into an e-book reader. This is a really nice feature, and one that makes this laptop a real keeper for me. If nothing else, I’ve now got a screen bigger than my cellphone to read all the free books I download from Project Gutenberg, and a laptop with the battery life to survive a long flight.

So this is a sweetly innovative, however overpriced, bit of technology. Which brings me to the second most common objection I get to the OLPC, “Are kids in third-world countries even going to be able to use that thing?”

The assumption here is that this learning toy is beyond the technological grasp of children living in villages without electricity. That somehow people deprived of Best Buy, Cinema Multiplexes, and the mind-numbing inanity of American Idol lack the cognitive foundation for Computing 101. Whenever a Baby Boomer raises this objection, I just remind myself that they are from the same generation that couldn’t program a VCR.

The reality is that the OLPC’s linux user interface sorta takes me back to my Commodore 64 days, when computing was just the basics. Only my Commodore’s interface was a command line, (LOAD *,8,1 anyone?), whereas the OLPC is cartoony and graphical. Kids will get into this thing and make it sing in ways the developers never anticipated. Just like kids run technological circles around their elders in modern America.

The OLPC provides plenty of pre-loaded software that will educate in a well-rounded fashion. The Video, Picture, and Sound Capture capabilities using the built in video and microphone introduce students to multimedia. The journal provides a creative writing outlet, while the Paint and TamTamJam softwares allow for art and music creative outlets.

Etoys and Turtle Art introduce kids to programming logic, while Pippy introduces kids to the joys of Python Programming, the easiest, most advanced programming language out there. Through these, kids are introduced to mathematics, building their own software toys, and logical constructs.

Most of all, the web browser introduces them to the world’s knowledge. The chat introduces them to world’s people.

They’re doing all this on an open-source operating system, where they can eventually incorporate what they learn into publishing their own improvements and innovations to the World Wide Web, where the rest of us will enjoy them.

That’s dream worth supporting, not to mention a huge return on our investment.

French Astrolabe, 1600s

The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate these dimensions. You have to see for yourself in person.

You can view the complete flickr set here.