Sander's Reflexions

(Yes, I'm back after a 3 years retreat)

Recently I created a Facebook account and was faced with some of the complexity of live, or rather the simplicity of social media. I wonder if other people here recognize my 'problem' and how they handle it.

I would say that my life has many dimensions. I'm a philosopher with philosophical friends. I'm a dancer with friends from zouk and salsa. I'm daddy of a wonderful daughter and thus also one of the parents at school. I've got my profession giving me colleagues and professional relations. I'm a neighbor active in the neighborhood. I'm a sailor. I'm a son and a brother. I'm living in several completely different spheres. I'm glad to have multiple spheres to choose from. I wouldn't like to live in only 1 sphere. And then there is only 1 Facebook account!

Some things you like to share with one group of people, other things with other people. I don't think my philosophical friends are interested in my party pictures. And my dancing friends might not be interested in my philosophical reflexions. (http://sandersreflexions.blogspot.com/2005/04/reflexion.html)

What I'm really missing is a way to create views or spheres in the social media. Especially, because some spheres are more active than others. I want to be able to choose one of the spheres and see the updates of those friends and share things with them and only them.

So, friends out here in the virtual world. How are you handling this?

After my previous posting on energy I searched for some more figures on energy consumption. I wanted to get a rough idea of the energy consumption of families (in The Netherlands). So I looked for the figures for energy consumption per year of gas, electricity and petrol.

An average car drives 13000 km/year. With an efficiency of 15 km/l the total usage of petrol is 866 l/year. The energy (more correct heating value) of one liter of petrol is 35 MJ, which is equal to 9.7 kWh/l. The average energy consumption of a car is thus 8400 kWh/year.

An average Dutch family uses 1600 m3 natural gas a year. The heating value of Dutch natural gas is 32 MJ/m3, which is equal to 8.9 kWh/m3. The average energy consumption on gas is thus 14200 kWh/year.

An average Dutch family uses 3300 kWh/year electricity. However, this is the net usage. Power plants have an efficiency of nearly 60%. The gross usage is thus 5500 kWh/year.

The total power consumption of those three resources is 28100 kWh/year, with a distribution of 30% petrol, 50 % gas and 20% electricity.

What do we save if we replace a 60 W electrical bulbs by an energy saving 10 W CFL? The saving is 50 W * 3 hours/day * 365 days = 55 kWh/year net, or 92 kWh/year gross. This is only 0.3% of the total energy consumption of a family! I think we're often not focusing on the right topics for energy saving.

Note, that I assume there is only 1 car per family. The current figure is already somewhere between 1.0 and 1.1 car per family. I also do not take care of the energy loss due to transport and refineries.

References:
http://www.vrom.nl/Pagina.html?id=9288
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heating_value
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardgas

Have you ever wondered why polar bears in the zoo pace up and down? In Dutch we even use the expression ‘ijsberen’ for pacing up and down. Why do they do that? It’s just because they have to walk. It’s not a choice. It’s their default behavior. Just like many people have to talk, even when there is nothing to say.

I just read a wonderful book, ‘The curious incident of the dog in the night-time’. It’s very well written and read it cover to cover without interruption. It’s about a boy who seems to have some form of autism. It’s written from his perspective. It shows a world where emotion is mostly limited to fear, except for the happiness created by mathematics. It’s a world that has very strict logical rules. However, most rules don’t make sense to ordinary people.

I intentionally wrote ‘seems to have some form of autism’, because nowhere in the story the word autism is used. The behavior of the boy looks like autism, but his thoughts are not. His thoughts are too rational, too conscious. E.g. in the book there is a passage

because there were too many and my brain wasn't working properly and this frightened me so I closed my eyes again and slowly counted to 50 but without doing the cubes.

Eric Chen has rewritten this passage to a more realistic autistic reaction

There are too many lines striking me. I tried to cover my eyes and scream so that these lines would go away, but they won't.
I screamed more.
The world became flashes and dots of light and lines. That mades me sink into darkness and sleep.
[Quote from Autism Myths]

People, even autistics, do not think ‘my brain wasn’t working properly’. They just start doing something ‘strange’.

The film Amadeus gives an example of such uncontrolled behavior. Mozart’s mother in law is giving him a lecture. Her fulminating words fade out and the Zauberflote fades in. The creation of the music just seems to happen to him. (I’m not saying Mozart is autistic. A guy that flirts with all the girls can’t be autistic.)
I believe that’s what happens with autistics too. They lose control and start doing something they can do well. It’s not their intention to do so. They don’t decide to do so to relax. It just happens.

Polar bears just have to walk. Doing mathematics is the default behavior of some people. I have to admit. I sometimes have the strange habit to check (large) numbers on divisibility by 9. I see a number and just want to know whether it can be divided by 9. No, I’m not really autistic. I failed the test, low AQ. I’m using a trick for the division by 9. An autistic would just know, without doing any computations.

For those interested in autism I suggest to visit the site of Eric Chen. He gives an alternative description of the Theory of Mind for autistics.

Finally, I would like to note that there is a strange mathematical mistake in The Curious Incident. In one of the mathematical pieces it says that it is not very exceptional to have 5698 times head when throwing coins. If everybody on the world would be throwing coins there will be a million people with 5698 times head. Well, that’s a big mistake! The chance to throw 5698 times head is 1 out of 2^5698 = 1.9 * 10^1715. Yes, a number with 1715 zero’s There are only 10^80 atoms in the universe! and it’s barely 4.3 * 10^17 seconds old! So, a sequence of 5698 heads is a good approximation of impossible.

Several years the environment was not an issue. Suddenly, this year it returned to the headlines, mainly due to the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. So I thought, let me contribute a tiny bit to the discussion. I wrote a letter to the Dutch newspaper Trouw and yes, it got published. What’s the point? A 5 km large open air ice skating rink, Flevonice, has been opened. It uses coolers with a total capacity of 9.6 megawatt, which is equivalent to the reduction that can be obtained by replacing 1 million ordinary light bulbs by compact fluorescent lamps (CFL).



OK, the calculation in my letter is a bit biased. Of course the coolers are also not working at full capacity. They needed this capacity for initial ice creation at 10 °C. After startup the machines are probably running at 10 to 20 % of their capacity. But I had to make a statement. I could also have stated that it is equivalent to the capacity of 200 cars (50 kW), but that wouldn’t make a statement. Or, I could have said it is equivalent to 5 wind turbines (2 MW), but that would not impress at all, since there are about 500 wind mills in that province.

Let’s fiddle a bit more with those figures. The cars use maybe only 10 to 20% of their capacity when they are cruising. But also the average power of a wind turbine is 10% of its capacity. And light at home is also switched on for about 10% of the time. So let’s compare these capacities. One running car is thus equivalent with the saving 1000 CFL’s. And 40 cars are equivalent one wind turbine. Why is everybody talking about wind turbines and CFL’s? There are millions of cars out there and a saving of a few percent on the energy consumed by cars will have more effect than can be obtained with CFL and wind turbines.

Want some more interesting figures? An average boiler used for the heating of a house has a capacity of 25 kW, a small car. And, shame on me, I have still 6m2 of single glazing in my living. These are hung sash windows. Isolated glazing with two layers of glass does not fit in the frame. The heat transfer of non-isolated glazing is approximately 6W/m2K. When it’s near 0 °C outside this results in a heat transfer of 6 * 6 * 20 = 720 W. A figure that outnumbers any savings that can be made by CFL’s. Luckily I’ve recently found some thin isolated glazing, Van Ruysdael glass. I know what I’m going to do in 2008!

Last week my daughter’s school distributed a little procedure. It was quite simple and I’m sure it will work. But I realized that it will only work with humans. I mean, if these instructions are translated to a computer system they will probably fail at the first use of the procedure. And most people don’t understand why the computer system should fail. Well, I’m amazed these instructions don’t fail with human operators. I’ll explain this with the procedure I received from school.



This procedure is meant to inform all parents as soon as possible of an urgent event, e.g. when school is closed because all teachers have got the flu. The procedure is illustrated with the scheme on the left. The school calls parent A on top of the list. He (she) calls parent B, C and D. They call the next parents in the scheme and finally on the bottom of the scheme parent B, C and D are calling parent A. In case some parent cannot be reached the next parent on the list must be called and after a while a second call should be made to the parent that could not be reached.

This procedure sounds quite solid. Care has been taken of parents that cannot be reached and at the bottom the loop is closed when parent A gets called. I’m sure this will work with humans and nearly every parent will get the information and it will probably be known at school which parents could not be reached.

Now, imagine that the parents have smart phones and the instruction can be programmed into the phone. When a parent has received a message he/she presses a special button on the phone to repeat the message to the other parents. The scheme is put into the phone and we don’t need the printed scheme any more. The instructions are very simple, so it shouldn’t be too hard to translate it to a piece of software. Well, there are many things that will go wrong with this automated system. Just some examples:

1. There is no instruction for 2 unreachable parents in a line. If parents E2 and E3 cannot be reached, and parent E2 also not on the second attempt the instructions end. No attempt will be made to call parent E4. Parent B will wait indefinitely for a call of parent E4 (or E3). Parent A will also wait indefinitely for a call of parent B. The school will never be called.
2. The example above assumes that the parents B, C and D at the bottom will wait for both parents to call them before they will give their report to parent A. Likewise parent A will wait for three calls. This is not in the instruction! In another valid implementation B immediately calls A when he receives a call from F4. And parent A on his turn immediately calls school. This will result in 6 calls to school (if none of the lines is broken).
3. If E2 cannot be reached on the first attempt and E1 passes the message on to E3, but E2 can be reached on the second attempt, the instruction says he has to call E3. Then E3 gets the message twice. And the second time he will again pass the message to E4. There is nothing that says that a message should only be passed on once.
4. There is no explicit instruction for A to call E1 and F1 if B cannot be reached.
5. If parent A is not reachable, the school will probably call parents B, C and D directly. However, it is not in their instructions to call school at the end. They will try to call A twice and stop.
6. The instruction says nothing about informing other parents that someone could not be reached. Humans will likely do it and the names of parents that could not be reached will be known at the end, but it’s nowhere in the instruction. A computer system won’t do it.

A computer programmer who wants to make a solid implementation of the procedure will have to take all these (and more) problems into consideration. But, to get to a satisfying result he has to know the intended result of the procedure. How many parents must get the message? What is an acceptable loss? How long should parent A, B, C and D wait for all calls to return? Is it required to know which parents could not be reached in the first attempt? Should it be known if they didn’t get the message after two or three attempts? It could even happen that they have received the message, but that the information about it never gets back to school. (This is a fundamental problem. Two parties can never be sure that a communication was 100% successful in finite time. If P1 sends a message to P2 and P2 sends a confirmation to P1 and confirmation message gets lost. P1 doesn’t know whether P2 has received the message or not. And P2 will not know whether P1 has received the confirmation. P1 can send a confirmation of the confirmation, but that message might also get lost. Etcetera.)

When the programmer knows what the requirements of the procedure are he can work out the instructions that will meet the requirements (as long as the requirements are feasible). However, these instructions will be much longer than the 5 lines of the instructions for humans. They will contain details for every exception that might occur. If these instructions are given to ordinary people they will not work. Humans get confused by the details. They will be afraid to do something else, because they have got such a detailed instruction. They will stop following the instruction, and just say ‘I don’t know’.

One of the big differences between humans and computer systems is the way they handle instructions. Humans can very well cope with vague instructions. In general, humans perform excellent when instructions have very little detail. With computer systems it’s the opposite. The origin of this difference is that humans understand the intention of the instruction. They will act according to the intention and not exactly follow the instruction. The instruction is only a guideline. It’s different for a computer system. It doesn’t have any clue about the intention of an instruction. It just follows every letter of the instruction.

I know Persia as a very religious country. I’m not just referring this age with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Persia has a long religious history. Zoroastrianism originated in Persia and was the dominant religion in the early history of the Persian Empire from the 5th century BCE till the 7th century CE. The Persian Empire reached from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. It included the area that is nowadays known as Iraq. This area was the origin of Manichaeism (Saint Augustine was a Manichaean before becoming a Christian) and Mandaeism. Christians and Jews have lived there (and still do). From the 7th century on the Islam was the dominant religion. So when I went to an exposition on 30 centuries of Persian art and culture I expected quite some objects with religious imprint.

This exhibition of Persian art and culture was in the Hermitage Amsterdam, a small branch of the famous Russian museum. I had a look at the 200 objects that were displayed. After the first round through the museum I thought something was missing, so I made a second round. I was not mistaken. There were only 2 objects which related to the religious history of Persia, two calligraphies of a text from the Koran. No other objects referred to religion. There were even a dozen objects from around the 12th century with animals on it. Something that would not have been done by Islamic artists.

So, either religion has not been that important in Persia after all, or.. our Russian friends with their communistic background have removed or disregarded all religious objects.. Are the communists still manipulating history in their aim to eliminate religion?

Last month my daughter and I have visited Archeon. We had a look at the way people lived in the prehistoric age.

"Daddy, why are those people so poor?"
"They didn’t know how to make things."
"Why didn’t anybody tell them?"
"Nobody knew it. It was not yet invented."
"But God could tell them how to do it."
"Yes, that’s something to think about."

I never knew that real magic existed, but last weeks I’ve been enchanted. Or do I have to say that I was bewitched. There were lots of other things I had to do, but I couldn’t free myself of the magic. I was trapped. Trapped in a book. But now, the book has been read. The spell is broken.

I had something like a symphony, those 7 books. Yes, I know a symphony generally has 4 parts. But there are several themes and at the end all themes come together is a big final, an adagio with some loud chords like the end of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Well, okay, it’s just a children’s book. Nevertheless, it was funny to read those 7 books in the last 3 months.

The revelation of the face makes a demand. The face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon. Levinas teaches us that we are most human in the encounter with the Other. But what happens when we sit in a car? We are armored. We don't see the face of the other. The other doesn't see our face. We can't smile. We can't wink. We can't even give an angry look. We are not there. The other is not human anymore.

So, wouldn't life be much better if a car could express emotion? Imagine a car that senses our emotion and smiles, or winks, or frowns. It could swing a little on a happy song when we're happy. Or even better, it would even smile at us when we are sad to make us happy again.

Really with emoticars our life would be much better. A traffic jam would be less boring. It would be a social gathering with smiles and gestures. Less aggression on the roads. More relaxed people.

Once upon a time, when kings were still kings and dwarfs were dwarfs, when good and bad was obvious, then the fairy tales were simple. But alas, those times are gone. In our postmodern time things are less simple. Let’s take a simple fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin. Let me give you a very short summary.

Long ago there was a miller who told the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king wanted to marry her if she really could. Of course she couldn’t. But as usual in fairy tales the (un)expected creature, a dwarf, appears and turns the straw into gold. However, his price is her first born child. After her marriage to the king and after the birth of her child the dwarf returns. She can only save her child if she guesses his name. At the end she discovers his name is Rumpelstiltskin and they live happily ever after.

Times have changed. How can such a fairy tale be updated to version 2.0 or 2007? We don’t believe in dwarfs anymore. So, who is going to turn the straw into gold? What about this version?

The king enters a village and sees a pretty girl. He starts to flirt with her. A moment later he encounters a miller who lies that his daughter can spin gold out of straw. The king says he’s going to marry her if it’s true otherwise they will both go to prison. Then he discovers that the pretty girl is the miller’s daughter. He knows that the miller was lying. How’s he going to save her? He locks her up into his castle with a pile of straw. At night he disguises himself as a dreadful creature, goes to her room and tells he can turn the straw into gold if she gives him her first born child. [Gold enough! Who cares about another lie?] A nice reflection in the story: the creature wants to have straw instead of gold, because gold is cold and straw keeps you warm.
The girl marries the king and they get a child. The young mother however is very scared that the creature will return. And the king is upset, because she lied to him about the gold and did not tell about the creature. Then she’s tells the truth to her dad, the miller. The miller goes to the king to explain what happened and ask for help. Of course the king cannot reasonably belief the story of a creature turning straw into gold. He tells the miller that he’s a liar and is going to arrest him. Then the miller discovers that the king must be the creature. Finally, the king admits and together they make up a plan. The king will disguise again as the creature and ask for the child. She can save it if she guesses his name. The miller prompts the name to his daughter. The creature disappears. So, in the end they still live happily ever after.

Nice rewrite, nice turns, isn’t it? Good and bad isn’t that obvious. A little lie here another lie there. This all just happens because king and creature are turned into one person. Little change, large effect.

Of course I did not work out this story. I’m not that creative. This version has been written by the creative people of Xynix. They made a libretto on music by Händel, turning the whole into a wonderful and humoristic opera. Unfortunately they have already revised their website that contained some nice pieces out of the opera ‘Gold’ http://www.xynixopera.nl/2004/xynixopera/xynixopera.html

Since last week nothing around me is safe any more. I’ve started tapping on everything. Every object has its own sound. There is rhythm everywhere. You just have to listen. And I listened to and watched STOMP. These guys are great. Watch this:

Basketball and kitchen,
Floating metal drummers,
Pail drummers,
Waterphonics,
Brooms,
Many other things...

My daughter fell on the ground and had hurt her hand. One full drop of blood came out of the palm of her hand. A little catastrophe. After many tears and some tender care there was a serious problem. ‘Daddy, is it my left-hand or my right-hand?’ ‘Don’t you know anymore? Which hand do you take your pencil when you make a drawing?’ ‘My right-hand. But is this hand my right-hand or my left-hand?’ ‘Do you use that hand for writing?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I handed her a pencil. Of course she took it immediately with her right hand. ‘So, this is my right-hand?’

This is one of the smallest experiences of what I think might be called embedded cognition. Jelle can tell you much more about this. See his weblog ant on the beach.
In brief my understanding is that our knowledge is not completely in our brain. Our brain contains little pieces of knowledge, associations between events. We don’t have a complete program. The responses of our brain depend on our previous response or thought, the signals it gets from the body and the situation we are in. In fact it depends on the complete environment.

Another example is the performance of a dance, for example salsa. A dance is the result of the actions of 2 people, the music and small events in the environment, such as a slippery floor. It’s very difficult for me to tell exactly what all the moves are in certain figures. But still I can dance them. I know the move when it’s time to make it. I happen to be in a certain position, my lady happens to be in a certain pose and then I know what to do. Sometimes it happens that my lady is in a slightly different pose and then (when I’m lucky) I also ‘know’ what to do and make another move that I thought was the right one. The figure suddenly evolves into another figure. After such a figure my dance partner sometimes asks to do that again. Quite embarrassing, because I can’t even remember what I did. The figure just emerged.

So how do we think? Do we think? Are our actions just reflexes? (Ah! finally I’m back on reflections/reflexions). Last week I was browsing through one of those piles of papers that are scattered through my home and I found a reference to an interesting idea that has not yet been taken seriously enough. It’s very simple mathematical model of the associative brain by NG de Bruijn: A model for information processing in human memory and consciousness (1994).
In brief, the model contains two mechanisms: a huge number of simple cells that are able to store a simple relation A->B and an activation mechanism that enables those cells randomly for a certain time window. Enfin, the result is a ‘thinking soup’ that is able to store associations and might be able to (re)produce knowledge. With the computing power we have today it must be possible to make a simulation of this ‘thinking soup’. And I think this thinking soup might be fit into the embedded cognition theory.

Telling stories is an important part of our life. It’s a daily activity I wrote about before. See Stories and The emperors new clothes. Now, I just came across some interesting research. Dr. Michael Gazzaniga has located our storyteller in the left hemisphere of the brain. In his research with split-brain patients he discovered that they would tell stories with facts that were known by the left brain and made up a story for the actions done by the right brain.

Dr. Gazzaniga and Dr. LeDoux showed P.S. a picture of a chicken claw in his right eye and a snow-covered house in the left eye. P.S. pointed to a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left.

''I'll never forget the day we got around to asking P.S., 'Why did you do that?''' said Dr. Gazzaniga. ''He said, 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken.' That's all the left hemisphere saw. And then he looks at the shovel and said, 'The reason you need a shovel is to clean out the chicken shed.'''

Dr. Gazzaniga hypothesized that P.S.'s left hemisphere made up a story to explain his actions, based on the limited information it received. Dr. Gazzaniga and his colleagues have carried out the same experiment hundreds of times since, and the left hemisphere has consistently acted this way.

''The interpreter tells the story line of a person,'' Dr. Gazzaniga said. ''It's collecting all the information that is in all these separate systems that are distributed through the brain.'' While the story feels like an unfiltered picture of reality, it's just a quickly-thrown-together narrative.



Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: 'I wanted to go get a Coke.'


So storytelling is on the left side. It’s generating an ‘afterthought’. But does this also imply that our cognition and our consciousness are in this same area? Is all linguistic processing in this area? What about this woman who could still write with her left hand.

Kathleen B. Baynes of the University of California at Davis reports another unique case. A left-handed patient spoke out of her left brain after split-brain surgery - not a surprising finding in itself. But the patient could write only out of her right, nonspeaking hemisphere. This dissociation confirms the idea that the capacity to write need not be associated with the capacity for phonological representation. Put differently, writing appears to be an independent system, an invention of the human species. It can stand alone and does not need to be part of our inherited spoken language system.



Did her writing still have a storyline? Or was she just writing down what she heard? It could be that the story telling is not specific for the left. But that only the speech part is. That is not really surprising. It would give problems if both hemispheres control speech. That would be speech with a double tongue.

Ah!! Still so many questions. But I getting more convinced that our storyteller is important to give meaning to our life. Or is it just telling stories, because it is the only thing it can do. Just like apples falling from the tree? Life has a meaning, because the storyteller tell so?

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that one on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfumes of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean


Constantine P. Cavafy

About a month ago Microsoft launched its newest version of Windows. Vista is the new mastodon ready to drown you. 100 more ways to go astray. "It’s like a digital candy store", states Microsoft. That’s an appealing thought for technicians, but what about the 99% of the normal people? My mother, my nieces? They will make a mess of the system in a few days if they are not already lost within a day. I don’t believe that it’s the revolution we’re waiting for. Well, what happened with other dinosaurs?

Maybe the real revolution is near. Last month I wrote about the One Laptop per Child project. They are not only reinventing the laptop. They are creating a new device with a new interface. They have left the desktop, office, managers and other administrative analogs. Children don’t live in offices. Creative thought is not stimulated by offices.

The new concepts of OLPC interface are the neighborhood, journal and activities. Exit desktop, exit file system, exit applications. Hey, is this revolution not already going on? What are the main activities of most people on a PC? They browse on the internet, communicate with friends (chat, mail, msn), write weblogs, and share pictures and movies. They do this in interactive environments like hyves, MySpace, flickr. Wikipedia is another example of a collaborative environment where people share their knowledge, without being bothered by an administrative hierarchy.

On top of these concepts OLPC placed education. Education is their prime objective. They want to challenge children. Not only discover and communicate. Creativity should go beyond expression in text and images. Children should be able to create their own activities. Invent their own games, to stage their own stories, like they do on the playground. So, not unsurprisingly, some ‘scripting’ environment is being provided as well. On an OLPC children can play with eToys. Squeak Etoys was inspired by LOGO, PARC-Smalltalk, Hypercard, and starLOGO. It looks like LEGO is a digital virtual world.

Digital LEGO? That reminds me of LEGO Mindstorms. The idea of the ‘programmable brick’ originates from Mitchel Resnick’s research group at the MIT Media Lab. Yes, the MIT Media Lab is where several OLPC people come from and Resnick is one of the advisors of OLPC. Resnick is also the designer of starLOGO and author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams(1994). I’m reading this book.

Resnick’s research group is called ‘Lifelong kindergarten’. That’s a nice vision for the future. No more offices. Just kindergarten!