Carl Sagan "A Glorious Dawn" - gets autotuned:

Thoman Friedman has been writing a lot about China's supposed push toward green technology. While I am still not sure how much sustainable technology is actually being developed in China, I think that Friedman's recent claim, that Chinese leadership in green manufacturing and technology may spur a new technological race similar to what we experienced with the USSR last century, is pretty interesting.

Here's a blurb:

I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet. 

Cell phones are everywhere in the developing world, so it's an obvious way for users to interact and communicate, right? Well, not really. Read this great article by AppFrica fellow Josh Goldstein on the crisis in African in SMS costs.

Here's a clip:

In Uganda, for example, the cost of a user-to-user message is 5 US cents. A premium message (any message not sent from a single user to another) is 10 US cents, despite high levels of competition and low cost. Since it’s rare for a mobile network to grant a discount to a premium service provider, entrepreneurs must attempt to scale in an environment where, according to ResearchICTAfrica, the average Kenyan already spends over 50% of her disposable income on communication. This is not a promising environment for innovation.

Here's my hyperlink convergence experience of the day. On, of all places, Talking Points Memo, I learned that Lauren Bacall has a Twitter page. In between dissing Paris Hilton and talking about Bela Lugosi's drug problems, she says... er tweets "Almost forgot if you have not seen 8½ I suggest you do or else be condemned to hell." (Is this the real Laurn Bacall?) Ok! Stop whipping me Guido Anselmi, here's the trailer:

Do I have to write anything about this? If you don't know what this video is, read more about it here. It is an exemplary testament to worst practices. Thank you "Software & Information Industry Association."

OK, not really. Or, maybe? I don't really know, but apparently, female Iranian pilgrims are being fingerprinted, or molested when they enter Saudi Arabia. Or not? Actually, I have no idea what's going on, because the only sites that I can find covering Iranian/Saudi Arabian relations are terrible Iranian Shia propaganda websites (see articles like this). One of these sites, Ahlul Bayt News Agency, also has a page on "Zionology" featuring, among other articles, a page that looks like it is a repost of chain email spam, entitled "A List of Jewish People That Help Control the World." By the way, this list of evil includes "Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch." Nice one. Sigh.

Here is what Wikipedia says about Luganda, the primary non-English language in Kampala:

Typologically, it is an agglutinating language with subject-verb-object word order and nominative-accusative morphosyntactic alignment.

Last year, in my perpetual and possibly fruitless attempt to be maximally employable, I spent a few hours too many learning how to analyse quantitative data with "R." Now, I am thinking about spending more time with Python... but maybe I should just dive into... Scala? Perhaps a more important question is, do I really want to do any more coding? Update: Also, how do you pronounce "Scala?" This guy knows (try the same vowel sounds as "Java").

Photos of Jason and Erica's HIV mural project in Swaziland, where schoolchildren, and many children out of school, were given an opportunity to express themselves about the HIV crisis in the Swazi kingdom.

Did you know Hardball's Chris Matthews was once a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland? Back then, the country didn't even have codified legal system. Check out this clip from the show, where Matthews flashes a pic of SZ's Peace Corps Group 5, which includes Atlantic City's favorite son - Jason Keiner!