Burnin’

Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab chairman and co-founder, is working to bring $100 laptop computers to schoolchildren in developing nations. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created.

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.

The idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of “One Laptop per Child.” Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt. Additional countries will be selected for beta testing. Initial orders will be limited to a minimum of one million units.

Five initial companies who have committed to this project are AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat.

Wired: Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They’re heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt down.

Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting, servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single computer technician’s salary.

Hessel has a personal stake in this vision: He’s the CEO of OrganiTech, a Wilmington, Delaware, company working toward making such farms a reality. The design and layout of the automated farms are more related to the semiconductor plants of Silicon Valley than the lettuce fields of Salinas Valley. “This is a factory, not a farm,” says Hessel, whose own background is in the chip industry. “We just build lettuce instead of CPUs.”

The vertical farm model is one of Hessel’s ultimate goals, and OrganiTech has been busy laying the groundwork to make skyscraper farms possible.

OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000 bags of lettuce leaves per year — that’s a yield similar to a 100-acre traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a head.

We’re visiting St. Augustine, Florida this weekend.

St. Augustine is the oldest continually occupied European settlement in the continental United States; only San Juan on Puerto Rico predates the city as the oldest settlement within the territory of the United States. The city was founded by the Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés on August 28, 1565, the feast day of Augustine of Hippo, and consequently named by him San Agustín. This came 21 years before the English settlement at Roanoke Island in Virginia Colony and 42 years before the successful settlements of Santa Fe, New Mexico and Jamestown, Virginia.

Over the next one hundred years, the city was defended by nine wooden forts. Following an attack in 1668, it was decided by the Queen Regent of Spain, Mariana, that a masonry fortification be constructed to protect the city. In October 1672 construction began on the fort that would become the Castillo de San Marcos. In 1670, Charles Town (modern-day Charleston, South Carolina) was founded by the British. This was one of the events that spurred the fort’s construction, being just two days sail from St. Augustine.

The Castillo is made of a stone called “coquina”, literally “little shells”. The coquina was very effective at absorbing the impact of canon balls, causing very little damage to the walls themselves, but much consternation for enemy ships.

[update] We took the scenic route home, heading up A1A to Jacksonville Beach before crossing the St. John’s River by ferry at Mayport, a village with docks lined by old shrimp boats. We continued north across Big and Little Talbot Island before reaching Amelia Island, where we were impressed by the large dunes (and equally large waves) that give the beach character.

Christian Science Monitor: As China began to go online, observers made brash predictions that the Internet would pry the country open. Cyberspace, the thinking went, would prove too vast and wild for Beijing to keep under its thumb.

Now these early assumptions are being sharply revised. Under an authoritarian government determined to control information, China has grown a new version of the Internet. As former US President Bill Clinton noted recently, China’s Internet is very unlike the cauldron of dissenting voices that is the hallmark of the Internet familiar to Americans. Instead, it’s heavily filtered, monitored, censored, and most of all, focused on making money.

The success of Beijing’s strategy - to harness the network’s business potential while minimizing it as a conduit for free speech - has some concerned that it has established a medium and new censoring tools that other countries can adopt.

“The biggest danger is that China creates a very large market and testing ground for surveillance and filtering software,” says Danny O’Brien with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

As Chinese Web companies seek to enlarge their markets particularly in developing countries, the question looms about whether they will export their values as well. Chinese tech firms have an eye on emerging markets in Africa, South America, and India. These firms are probably peddling censorship tools, says the free-speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

Part of the Chinese success has been co-opting American tech companies with the lure of its lucrative consumer market. Microsoft blocks bloggers from posting politically sensitive words in Chinese; Google shuts down for several minutes when a user in China looks too many times for forbidden words like “Falun Gong;” and Yahoo recently admitted turning over private e-mail information that helped lead to the jailing of a Chinese journalist.

“I do not like the outcome,” Yahoo chief Jerry Yang said of incident. But it’s a decision he said he had to make when he decided to do business here.

Unlike other authoritarian regimes, notably North Korea and Cuba, which depend on keeping the Web away from the people, China has promoted access - a fact that initially surprised observers. Chinese leaders, says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, knew they needed the Internet to attract global business and trade. Access is abundant and cheap, and those who cannot afford a home computer rely on more than 2 million Cybercafes nationwide. An estimated 134 million Chinese will be online by the end of this year, according to the Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, and nearly one-quarter use broadband.

The country’s Internet Service Providers remain controlled by state-run companies, giving the government a window on every user’s connection. It’s an open secret that around 30,000 telecom workers are dedicated to policing the net as part of the country’s “Great Firewall.”

Thanks to R Conversation for the pointer.

Step right up and get a good look at the Baptist Belt. Come on. It won’t bite.

More studies in American cultural geography are also available, care of Valparaiso University.

KETV: ABC sportscaster Brent Musburger was ticketed at the intersection of 9th and T Streets in Lincoln after Saturday’s Husker game.

Lincoln police said Musburger was a passenger in the ABC crew’s rental car.

One witness said a traffic officer had just waved traffic through the intersection when he spotted Musberger drinking a beer.

The witness said he saw other passengers with alcohol, but Lincoln police said only Musburger was ticketed.

The driver was not drinking.

Musburger was given a $144 citation, including court costs.

[UPDATE] This is classic. There’s a Brent Musburger drinking game. “It may be the only way to listen to a Musburger broadcast without throwing a hammer through the screen,” says its propagator and fellow Big 12 fan.

Here’s one of the rules of the game:

Rule #8: Mentioning a Big 10 school during a non-Big 10 game. Whenever Brent does this, the first person who names the Big 10 school’s mascot gets to make somebody drink for 11 seconds, since there’s 11 schools in the Big 10.

A group of right wing Christian soldiers wants to take South Carolina. And these Cailfornia-based idealogues are already talking about secession from the union as a legitimate goal, a road the Palmetto State has already been down.

Fox News: Nearly 140 years after the Civil War, another group of Americans wants to secede from the union.

Christian Exodus, a California-based group, wants God to be its commander in chief. Decrying what it perceives as the unjust secularization of the United States, it wants a sovereign state of its own.

But rather than eye the Golden State — a “lost cause,” says the group’s founder — it’ll settle for South Carolina.

Cory Burnell, Christian Exodus’ founder and president, told FOX News that the group narrowed its focus to the Bible Belt state based on an electorate that is already “Christian-leaning,” has its own ports and — unlike its neighbor North Carolina — is no hub of liberalism.

Christian Exodus’ mission, according to its Web site, is to scrap the “tyrannical authority” of federal government in favor of a constitutional republic, with the Ten Commandments rather than the U.S. Constitution as government’s guide.

Phase One of the group’s “plan of action” in breaking down the wall between church and state is to enlist groups of 1,000 members to move into 12 designated House districts in South Carolina, with the goal of voting 12 “Christian sovereigntists” into the state government by 2008.

If by 2016 group leaders have not achieved the kind of government they want, Christian Exodus will throw down the gauntlet and seek independence.

Direct from the horse’s mouth:

ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.

ChristianExodus.org offers the opportunity to try a strategy not yet employed by Bible-believing Christians. Rather than spend resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, we will redeem States one at a time. Millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level. Therefore, we must concentrate our numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government we can control through the electoral process.

ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to reacquire our Constitutional rights and, if necessary to attain these rights, dissolve our State’s bond with the union.

The hippies tried to do a similar thing (minus the secession scheme) with Wyoming–the nation’s least populous state–thirty five years ago. It didn’t work.

The first artist one encounters in the Lowcountry is Jonathan Green. But let’s also look at the fine work of Leo Twiggs.

“Veterans with Flag,” 1970-71 (batik and paint on cotton mounted on board)

The Chronicle of Higher Education: In the middle of one of the interminable brouhahas over the Confederate Battle Flag here in the South, I heard of an African-American artist who was using the symbol in innovative ways: He was painting it in batik to infuse it with new meaning. These images were no paeans to a lost cause, no emblems of a mythic past. They were, however, in the hackneyed phraseology of contemporary criticism, “comments” on society through “appropriation.” In this case, theoretical cliché comes close to truth. Leo Twiggs, with gentle but unswerving irony, takes the flag and claims it as part of his Southern heritage. Tattered, disappearing almost on its support, the standard about which there is so much controversy becomes in Twiggs’s hands an ambiguous metaphor of unresolved conflict, yes, but also of a shared history. In addition to the Civil War, it calls to mind equally for Twiggs the suffering of slaves, the turmoil of Reconstruction, the indignity of Jim Crow, and even the promise of the Civil Rights era, and, of course, the aftermath, when this piece of cloth, venerated by some, reviled by others, continues to inspire argument and dissension. Twiggs transforms the image through shaping a new iconography for it, one in which he finds the possibility, albeit remote, of accord.

The other day I finished reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I wrote about it on AdPulp, for my first response was to celebrate the book’s scathing indictment of modern American culture, branded culture in particular.

There’s more to say. In 1973, Vonnegut wrote the book as a 50th birthday present to himself. Here is some of what he had to say then.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

I’m just coming around to Vonnegut (and I’ve not read Faulkner at all…shame on me), so it may seem obvious if not embarrassingly so for me to say, this Twainian gentleman is a great American. That he’s also a great writer, goes without saying.

Vonnegut is now 82 and the author has a new book out, collections of his writings from In These Times, Chicago’s progressive magazine. Here’s some of what he has to say now.

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists . . . plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, . . . the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

Mary Minow of Library Law Blog had the good fortune to see a pre-release copy of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics (Free Press: forthcoming in October, 2005), by editor and annotator, David Dodd. Dodd is also chair of the California Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and director of the San Rafael Public Library.

MM: How unusual to see a Deadhead who is a library director!

DD: Actually, there are a few of us around—there’s even a Deadhead Librarian listserv. I hear from people all the time!

MM (a little taken aback): Really. The Grateful Dead is well-known for allowing and even encouraging fans to make recordings of their live performances and even to distribute them to their friends. Did you have any problem getting permission to publish the lyrics in your book?

DD: I think that taper ethic goes a long way to differentiating the Dead from pretty much anything else in the business world. The marketing model of allowing free distribution of the music just flew in the face of all the common wisdom. In a way, the file-sharing programs that are the target of such vilification from the mainstream music business world today are the direct descendants of the Dead’s approach. That said, they have been (rightfully) quite cautious in allowing this project to go forward as a print-on-paper book. Over the years, I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Ice Nine Publishing, who granted permission to me to use the full text of the lyrics on my Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics website, but the permission to publish that site as a book came after a long period of having the project back-burnered. Problems, no; patience, yes.

MM: What’s it like, really, to publish a book?

DD: I really think that the writing and publishing of books in the US today is a cottage industry. This is my third book, and each has carried with it a greater or lesser degree of do-it-yourselfness. The first book, an annotated bibliography about the Dead, published by Greenwood Press in 1997, was pretty much completely DIY: I delivered camera-ready copy, complete with index. The second book, The Grateful Dead Reader, published by Oxford Univ. Press in 2000, was laid out by Oxford, but my wife Diana and I did all of the permissions work on our own. We even held an Amish-style proofreading party, with a group of Deadhead writer friends spending the day going over the entire book! And this book has required that I do all the permissions work, hire a reference librarian to do fact-checking, coordinate the illustrations, and be very hands-on with the design of the book, and with the indexing. You don’t just sign a contract, turn over a manuscript, and sit back and wait for the book to appear.

MM: So, why do it?

DD: Each time, I’ve said “never again!” But I think it’s like going backpacking: you forget how painful it is, and you remember the good stuff. And if, like me, you love books, then there’s something extremely appealing about helping to make books happen. Fame and fortune are elusive, but at least I can walk into almost any public library in the country and find my books on their shelves. That’s very satisfying.