The New York Times featured Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton in it’s Sunday Review section.
Eben Upton, an Englishman, is the co-inventor and chief engineer of the popular Raspberry Pi device, an affordable credit-card-size computer that children, as well as adults, around the world are using to learn programming.
READING “Why Nations Fail,” by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It talks about the institutional history of countries to understand why they ended up the way they are. You wonder why countries are still poor even after decades of aid. What’s happening is, their institutions are set up so when you pour money in, it’s extracted by the elite. It gives you a renewed appreciation of how precious and hard won our inclusive institutions are.
LISTENING I love Thirty Seconds to Mars. It’s got that L.A. sensibility — that shouty, big rock music that I enjoy. I just bought a house north of Cambridge with a back acre of woodland. If I want to listen to music while I’m out there whacking weeds or chopping wood, I listen on my new Makita BMR100W contractor’s radio. You can turn it up really, really loud.
WATCHING Prime Minister’s Questions. Watching it makes you feel proud to be British. There’s a wonderful Jon Stewart piece on this and how political discourse in the U.S. is somehow more tame and polite. It doesn’t matter to me which direction it’s going or who’s scoring a really painful point, it’s that they are having the discussion.
Also Science GIFs. It’s a lot of short, punchy video clips of amazing science stuff, often chemical reactions, that make you go, “Wow.”
FOLLOWING xkcd.com, which has these little whimsical cartoons by a guy who used to work for NASA.
Also @Pentametron. It’s able to look at how many syllables are in a tweet and then finds pairs that make little bits of iambic pentameter.
PETTING I have house cats; a breed called Singapura, which is a pedigreed version of a Singapore drain cat. The Wikipedia page, last time I checked, had a picture of my boy cat Raffles.