Oct/091
Counting Money
I'm sure each of you have your very own way of counting money notes, but just as there are many ways of folding a t-shirt, there are many too of counting money. Please do not miss how they do it in Pakistan (0:51).
Oct/090
XXXXXXX
"XXXXXXX": this is what the parking enforcing officers enter in their system when the vehicle license plate is not visible. The problem arises when you decide to customize your plate to match these "magic numbers", in this case all the parking tickets for all those people with dodgy plates will get sent to you. The result: $19.000 in fines.
Oct/090
XO goes to Uruguay
The OLPC (one laptop per child) project, which initially was targeting India as the first country to adapt it, has shifted direction, and now Uruguay is the first to start a plan by which all primary school students and about 18.000 teachers will get a XO unit.
Oct/098
Oli otya? Gyendi! – Uganda I
I recently traveled to Uganda, where Yael -the amazing woman that I'm fortunate to share my life with these days - is now working. Uganda is in the East side of Africa, just over the Equator and its your best bet for getting to know a bit of Africa if it's your first time there. (continues)
Oct/092
Small Update
I don't even know why you would be interested on this, but it suits as an excuse for my 6 days silence. Also you must admit that it is quite cool when you say that you had to migrate your blog to a new server because bla bla bla... Anyway, you should get now better loading times and it should allow me to type a bit faster, or not :)
Oct/092
More Nobel
More in the Nobel price. Barack Obama has been awarded with the Peace Nobel Price for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples". He and me agree on the same, it may be a bit soon for him to stand by such "transformative figures". It is true that his speech involves great changes on foreign policy but those changes hasn't been achieved yet, and it looks they will need long time, as we have been seeing in his attempts for nuclear disarm.
Looking around I found this article which nicely combines two of my previous posts in its title. - Obama's prize: Noble hopes in an ignoble world. Ignoble is the source of the "Ig" in the Ig Nobel Prizes, what The Globe and Mail meant with it: an exercise for the reader :)
Oct/093
Nobel Prize (The real one)
The other day I was writing about the Ig Nobel Prizes and today the traditional ones have been unveiled. Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith were hailed by the Nobel jury as "the masters of light" for setting the foundations of today's networked society.
One of the prizes goes for fibre-optic cable, which enables us to transmit digital signals at tremendous speeds and volumes using a fraction of the energy used by the traditional copper wires.
The other prize went to the base of the "Electronic Eye" of today's digital cameras, the CCD sensor. CCD devices are not the ones capturing the light in a digital camera, which is done usually by and photoelectric cell. Instead they manage the transfer between the signal coming out of this light sensor and the processing unit in the camera. In very simple terms a CCD is a device able to transfer electrical charge from any place on it's surface to an output pin where it can be processed by another device.
Oct/090
Photosketch
Photosketch is an Internet sourced photo montage software that is able to create a "professional" image based on a set of doodles and outlines of how you want the final image to look.
The video has come technical explanations but further information can be found in the official papaer.