SPOT the canoes

Follow this link to a full screen map showing the recent progress of The David Thompson Columbia River Brigade. It leaves Invermere BC on Friday June 3rd and arrives in Astoria Oregon at the Pacific Ocean on July 15th.

TEDx Waterloo

TEDx Waterloo was over a month ago and it was an excellent event. My favourite speaker was probably the long-distance swimmer Vicky Keith. The open science topic was interesting; Edwin Outwater from the KW Symphony was far more interesting than I expected and Abby Sunderland, the kid who was lucky to survive her attempt to sail around the planet isn't a super polished speakers, but has an incredible story. TEDx isn't TED, but it was a fun event.

Kirk has paddled on

Kirk Wipper, a truly great Canadian, died two days ago. He gathered hundreds of canoes at his Canadian Canoe Museum and was awarded the Order of Canada. I had the pleasure of spending some time with him on the final day of the 2008 David Thompson Brigade thanks to the efforts of Linda and Eric Williams.

Use Facebook? Read this

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/10/highlights-eben-moglens-freedom-cloud-talk/
Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone

Ecovative TED talk

I posted a message about Ecovative a couple years ago when I first saw these guys at a Rensselaer business plan competition. It was obvious they were the best of the lot, had a great intellectual property position, an enormous market to work within, great timing and had the desire to make it happen. They were ranked 3rd of 3 by the brain-trust panelists and "VCs"! Now they have a contract with Steelcase (office furniture) and are featured at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html

Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone

PlayPump video

I failed to get this video to upload to my Wordpress blog), so I am attempting to send it to this blog and perhaps I can cross-link it. If you haven't read my comments about PlayPump, the short version is that the product costs four times more than the standard pumps used in many countries and somebody is creating a future water problem for a school & village when they remove a fully functional Afridev pump and install a Playpump. The video shows kids having some fun, playing with the pump.

So it seems the BlackBerry video format might be the issue, since Blogspot doesn't seem to want to show it either. Hmmm, this could take some work.

I'm in Malawi

I am in Malawi as part of an Engineers Without Borders placement. The bulk of my updates will be on an alternate blog where you can subscribe to receive an email notification when I post something new.

This map doesn't show Balaka where I am living, but it is east of Ntcheu (which is spelled incorrectly on this map).

I went to an internet cafe to upload some files. Silly me. I plugged my laptop into their network and the fastest internet site in town painted the Google search logo over a period of about 10 seconds. They need some bandwidth over here. My BlackBerry has EDGE connection speed which is better than so called broadband here.

Next summer

Plans are progressing for the 2011 David Thompson Brigade.

The Monkey Business Ilusion

How did you do? I was off by 3 and failed the important parts.

Hawking at Perimeter

Stephen Hawking gave a presentation at Waterloo's Perimeter Institute yesterday, chronicling his life's work in theoretical physics. He has been a leader in joining the physics of the very large (cosmology) and the very small (quantum mechanics). How a black hole leaks off energy is a little beyond my ability to properly articulate, but it fundamentally changed how physicists understand the universe.

Hawking is known for his sense of humor and while his ALS condition make the delivery of jokes somewhat a function of context (and the quality of his text-to-voice computer) the slides shown above are examples: the first showing what he wants on his grave stone and the second a comment about life in the universe while being featured on an episode of the Simpsons.