This is an email I just sent to Facebook, via their feedback form. Hi there! Apparently someone complained about one of my posts, claiming that it violated your Community Standards. I reviewed those guidelines at length and determined that the post very clearly and unambiguously violates none of them. The post was a parody bit […]
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Bringing Geeks To Nairobi: Request For Comments
[Update: a clarification here, based on thoughtful feedback: this idea is something I discussed extensively with local tech people in Nairobi when I was there. All of them were very enthusiastic and excited about this idea. I don’t want to give the impression of, as one commenter put it, White Saviorism. Kenyans do not need […]
Rise
It’s New Year’s Day of 2014, and I’m feeling confessional. (Not in the legal or moral sense, more in the poetic sense.) I get the impression that I am widely regarded, by those who know me and those who follow my work and my social network postings, as an angry person. I can’t really deny […]
Digging For Fire: Introduction
This is the first draft of my introduction to my upcoming book, which is currently (tentatively) entitled Digging For Fire: Seeking Innovation In East Africa. This may not make it to the final book, or at least not exactly like this, but I thought I’d post it as a teaser. There’s a trunk, sitting in my living […]
An Unfortunately Open Email To Any NSA Employee Who Might Be Reading It
This is an email I just sent to myself, in case anyone is reading my accounts. Maybe you’re not reading this. Maybe you’re just collating it, my words encoded on a hard drive in some weird anonymous building out in the middle of Cheap Real Estate Land, where the only sound is the big trucks […]
Finding Innovation In Africa — support my IndieGoGo campaign!
My campaign is live! Wonderfully, we raised over $2500 in the first day — a quarter of the way there! There’s still a ways to go, though, and I’d love your help, either by kicking in some cash (and getting a copy of the book in return) or by sharing the love. Here are a […]
Africa Book – Crowdfunding
So I’m finally in a position where I can make the trip to Africa I’ve been wanting to make for most of my life, to write a book about technology in sub-Saharan Africa — the technology industry, but also how technology is evolving there and how Western governments and companies can help Africa develop its […]
Righteous Kill
Like most Americans, I’ve been thinking a lot about guns these past few months, since Aurora and Sandy Hook. And like most Americans, I’ve come to a series of conclusions and convictions about the gun control debate; a position I find morally and ethically solid. And I’ll tell you about it. But first I want […]
Behavioral, autonomic, mechanical compared to Marr’s tri-level hypothesis
As I mentioned in my last post, my model for cybernetic systems bears a lot of resemblance to David Marr’s tri-level hypothesis, which he defines as computational, algorithmic and implementational. I’ll quote from the site linked above: The computational level is a description of what information processing problem is being solved by the system. The algorithmic level is […]
Behavioral, autonomic, mechanical: a model for building badass robots
[Update: since I started writing this, a Twitter friend helpfully pointed me at Marr’s levels of analysis, which upon quick study appears to be pretty much identical to this idea, so I’ll be framing this in his terminology at some point.] This rides on the tail of the previous post. I’m just trying to get […]