One Laptop Per Child is an effort to produce a $100 laptop that can be distributed en masse to the school children of the world.  The first pass attempt at the hardware was going for $200, featured a 400 MHz CPU, flash for storage and wifi. And it’s powered by winding.

That’s great, but the second generation machine looks very interesting, both the screen and keyboard portions, as we’d conventionally describe them, appear to be multi-touch displays, offering a number of ways to use the device. You have to check out these pictures to see what I mean.

Nicholas Negroponte’s TED talk describes the concept:

I’m not convinced this is the educational silver bullet it’s sold as, but I’m interested to see how it develops over time.

This has to be the coolest picture NASA has produced in awhile.  It’s a shot from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Phoenix lander descending toward the surface under it’s parachute.  The original image that was released was a close-up, but apparently Phoenix was floating past this picturesque crater at the time.  Live mission status can be had at Spaceflight Now.

I have a problem with this saying.  I think it’s good and healthy to have a posture of skepticism when encountering any argument, especially one that is not backed up by evidence.  You could say this evidence is essentially data.  Data itself can easily be very unwieldy, and statistics is a tool with which a complex set of data can be summarized.  For an example of this power, see Hans Rosling.

That said, often this old chestnut is whipped out when the data is not on the side of the debater.  When I hear someone use this saying, it makes me want to examine the foundation of their argument more closely, because it is typically riven with cracks.

Really, at face value, “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is saying that you can’t trust statistics, and by extension data, and hence nothing is really knowable.

I’ve long had a poor opinion of the plastic clamshell packaging encasing many products, especially electronic gizmos.  Considerable technique is required with the scissors to avoid major injury, and indeed the packaging has been blamed for 6400 emergency room visits in 2004.

Seth Godin approaches the packaging from a slightly different angle, highlighting how ridiculous it is that the packaging is designed to prevent thieving in retail stores, and yet is still used by sites like Amazon and New Egg where that threat doesn’t exist, due to the desire of manufacturers to eliminate multiple modes of packaging.

Let’s hope at least a few companies will redress this issue, I can tell you I’d be more likely to order a USB hub from whichever company didn’t use the clamshells, rather than from technical specs.

This is what my wife was saying half-way through Das Boot.

Mario Batali describes how to sauce your pasta properly in this video.  Summary: you’re using too much sauce.  You’re still using too much sauce.

The Library of Congress has a Flickr stream up that updates as they scan images from their archives.  There’s a lot of interesting content available.  This photo of ‘Auto-Polo’ reminds me of Whirlyball, except significantly more dangerous.  I see they have a pro account.

Truly new thinking always has to break through a barrier of skepticism before gaining wider adoption.  I’m sure this is true of Urban Farms, an idea that at first blush sounds slightly crazy, but may have real benefits.  It seems that in a world of increasing transportation costs, producing food right in an urban center could have some desirable economic motives, although frankly I have no idea if the numbers would really work out or not.

Technically, what first comes to mind is the difficulty of distributing sunlight into the structure.  But maybe you don’t need full on sunlight to grow some vegetables, and incident light could be diffused somehow over a wider area in the building by light piping.At any rate this might actually be something worth seeing in Vegas if it gets built.

I may start a regular feature on Mr. Fusion, and today’s story is a piece in Wired discussing transforming garbage into jet fuel.  It sounds a little more limited that Doc’s banana peel and beer can approach, and “5000 degree plasma arcs” would seem to rule this out for installation on your stainless steel sports car anytime soon, but it’s a start.