One Laptop Per Child Power Generator

It's a yoyo! Well, not really. it does 20W ave, but only when it's moving (so when you pull and then it retracts).

Is Christianity Good For the World?

The article

Religious people too often confuse their religion with spirituality. They are a bit different... It is quite possible to be spiritual and not religious.

Mainstream media covers horse race

Perhaps obvious, but now some numbers behind it:

In all, 63% of the campaign stories focused on political and tactical aspects of the campaign. That is nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates (17%) or the candidates’ ideas and policy proposals (15%). And just 1% of stories examined the candidates’ records or past public performance, the study found.

The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

Via Paul Krugman's blog.

Charlene

Dairy, New Hampshire

I got back from canvassing. Canvassing is what they call going house to house trying to convince people to vote for Barack Obama in the primaries. I was in Dairy, New Hampshire.

A lot of the volunteers had interesting stories. Amongst the volunteers, one of the most interesting was this guy who was a blogger for belowboston.com because he lives south of Boston.

This other guy was a consultant for companies to do mergers, haha. A republican job. But he says actually a lot of Wall Street is Democratic. He was also telling me about ETFs (Exchange-traded Funds). He says it's the new thing that's sort of like mutual funds without fees.


This is a pumpkin that Dan, one of the campaign staff carved for a pumpkin carving contest. haha. It's pretty good. He used a stencil from the internet, actually, in the Demoines Register.

If you like Barack's message, you should strongly consider sending money to his campaign. I've already contributed $200, and I'm trying to resist sending more money since I think I should be saving some. But I do spend a lot of money on stupid things so I thought I should spend some money on something worthwhile.

the day the music died

Great article that clearly articulates what went wrong with the music industry and explores some possibles for its future.


READ IT

RIP Oink.

Help Me Read

I think I need to have a little device that's just a webcam attached to an mp3-player like thing that can take pictures of pages and then read them aloud to me. yessss...

Canvassing for Obama

Tomorrow, I'm going to New Hampshire to knock on people's doors and be like, hi, we'd like to talk to you a little bit about Barack Obama.

Come back for updates...

Hand Crank Generator

I think I'm going to make a hand crank generator for my final project in Power Electronics. I'd like it to an mp3 player and speakers so that we can have a hand crank music box that plays mp3s, haha.

Speaking of Religion

here is what some people have to say about suicide bombers. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who wrote the Selfish Gene and made up the word "meme." these days he's wholly devoted to spreading atheism.