Shared by Jake
Oh I do like the idea of "dumpster diving" designers being the real innovators!

Michael Cannell's piece "Design Loves a Depression" has some interesting suggestions about the future of design: that the flourishing of expensive, celebrity designers will come to an end, allowing the field to get serious about solving real problems and being more constructive by having to work within constraints.

[D]uring the Great Depression... an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

???American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,??? said Kristina Wilson, author of ???Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression??? and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. ???It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.???...

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II....

There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be ???standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,??? said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art....

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.

This reminds me somewhat of the argument made by Brian Arthur and others (most notably Arthur, I think) that tech bubbles don't create what's really valuable: they create a lot of potentially valuable wreckage and infrastructure that the next round of innovators use to do really serious stuff.

Oh I do like the idea of "dumpster diving" designers being the real innovators!

Shared by Jake
Ooo! gooey gear porn!

Image by Nick Winterhalter.

On photo sharing site Flickr there's a new group pool called Macro Machine Stuff (and things), where the main thrust of the user-generated and member found photographs are pure, delicious machinery eye candy. Macro and micro, or just focused detailed images of pumps, assemblies, wiring, gearing, engines, homemade boxes of all kinds, and all manner of unusual mechanical creations -- close up. It's pretty much machine art pr0n, and the photos are stunning.

Image by BentWright.

It's a small but quickly growing community, and is a fabulous addition to the RSS reader for an occasional dose of machine art beauty of the most mysterious kind; often, we have no idea what we're looking at, but love what we see. The occasional video is also a nice treat.

Image by BentWright. Ooo! gooey gear porn!

Shared by Jake
Today's WANT!

A lot of the search traffic to this site comes from people looking to hack the CriCut, an “open” CriCut, or downloadable CriCut patterns. These are all complex workarounds, but a simpler solution exists.

The Graphtec CraftRobo.

CraftRobo - An affordable, open, X/Y cutter

Why should you choose the CraftRobo over the CriCut?

1. It is cheaper. Starts at $274

2. It connects to your computer via USB.

3. It comes with software and thousands of fonts and clipart options, though you should use Adobe Illustrator to get the most out of it. No more $49.99 cartridges.

4. You aren’t confined to preset options. Your imagination (or whatever you can find on iStockPhoto) are your only limitations.

5. It works really well. I own one and it is a versatile, low cost personal fabrication tool.

Here are some videos showing it in action:

What you can make

To get a sense of what the CraftRobo can make, check out this great Flickr Photostream.

CriCut - An easy alternative

If you are unfamiliar with CriCut it is a CNC plotter that can cut shapes out of paper, foil, plastic, or other thin sheet materials. It is a great machine, has it’s own infomercial, serves a giant market, but is VERY expensive.

The units costs $299-499, and it will only cut clip art or fonts from special CriCut cartridges that cost $49.99 each. So to have the same fonts that you already have on your computer you could easily spend over $1000.

Note: CraftRobo = Not For Everyone

I use a CraftRobo and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t at least a little savvy with Adobe software or willing to get experienced with it. The CriCut’s great value is the simplified user interface. It doesn’t require a computer to function, provided you are willing to pay $50 for the privilege of using a font like Comic Sans. It is a closed system, but as with the iPod, a lot of people see that as a benefit rather than a drawback.

However, If you are up to the challenge of the CraftRobo or looking to Hack the CriCut for fun, please be in touch, I’d love to publish the results.

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Today's WANT!

According to the research-based predictions of urban affairs and planning expert Arthur C. Nelson about half the buildings that Americans will use in 2030 will have been built after 2000. This gives us Americans an opportunity to effect massive change on the built environment if we make deliberate choices starting right now.

I recently came across a post about the Hurriquake Nail on the always-inspiring tech blog NextBigFuture. The Hurriquake, designed by Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt, is a study in practical world-changing innovation: it combines simple building technologies like threading and a spiral shank, placed at exactly the right points along the nail so that it anchors deeply into wood, holding steady where it needs to most, and creates wobble-free joints at the points where wood planks are most likely to begin to weaken.

According to Next Big Future, the nails (which fit into a modern nail gun), "add $15 to the price of a home and make a house 50% more resistant to a hurricane or strong winds (or over pressures from a nuke)."

To underscore the importance of this statement:

If every building could survive 5PSI then there would be no building failures for category 5 hurricanes or less and potentially no deaths outside the 5PSI radius of a nuclear blast for anyone inside a building. This would reduce the casualties from a nuclear bomb by half or more.

This thought led me to revisit the concept of passive survivability -- an idea we've discussed on Worldchanging here and here. Buildings that can withstand forces of nature and war will mean fewer devastated families and landscapes in the face of the unthinkable. Getting all new buildings up to this standard would be ideal and not out of reach; targeting necessary facilities such as hospitals, which are most needed in the aftermath of disaster, is a logical starting point.

The Hurriquake nail is not brand-new; it has been widely used since 2006. In fact, NextBigFuture goes on to profile several other developments -- including blast-resistant wallpaper -- that could help secure structural integrity without leveling and rebuilding from the ground up. But I think it is a particularly apt example of the kinds of innovations we will need in the coming decades Taking advantage of the next 20 years to redefine our built environment as one that works harder to serve its inhabitants while extracting a lesser load from the planet will mean investing heavily in technologies like the Hurriquake nail, which provide the most improvement at the most accessible cost in both dollars and labor, and which can easily be integrated into built environments around the world.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Julia Levitt in Shelter at 8:27 AM)

Majel Barrett Roddenberry died yesterday. She was a hell of a lady, who loved Star Trek and Star Trek fans like no other.

Some knew her as the original Number One, some knew her as Lwaxana Troi, and everyone knew her as the ship's computer, but I just knew her as Majel, my friend Rod's mom, who always treated me like he and I were brothers.

Since we got the news yesterday, a lot of people have asked me if I can tell a story as a way to remember her. I've dug around in the attic of my mind for hours, and the best I can do is: We always had fun when we were working on Next Generation, but when Majel was on the set, it was a party.

Shared by Jake
Super cute indeed!

Super cute! Make a little chair out of a champagne cork holder via Lifehacker. Dot writes-

This is a fun and easy thing to do with those little wire pieces that hold in a champagne cork. And with New Years Eve coming up, you know we'll have a few of those lying around!

The resulting tiny chair makes a cute little christmas ornament, or dollhouse furniture, or just an interesting little nicknack! And a neat way to save a momento from an important bottle of champagne (like from a wedding, hot date, or special event)

This is very easy, and some would say obvious, but when I first saw this done I thought it was so cool. And I figured you guys would too !

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this! Super cute indeed!

Shared by Jake
If this turns out to be true I will be using "zuned" to describe epic FAIL whenever possible.

Wow, this is crazy - a few folks emailed us and said all the 30GB ZUNEs in the world all stopped working at the same time (today) it seems that there might be some type of date bug with them (Z2K9)? Some folks are reporting that taking their ZUNE apart and unplugging the battery and re-plugging it in works, but it's a bit unclear what's going on.

ZUNE meltdown.
ZUNE frozen.
Z30s frozen.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this! If this turns out to be true I will be using "zuned" to describe epic FAIL whenever possible.

Shared by Jake
I love the works but what I really want to know about are the techniques used!

What do you guys think of these pieces by Valerie Hegarty? I am partial to the last one myself! Very organic, less destructive. Though the cracked wall and painting are nice too. All very interesting... I couldn't find too much information about Valerie herself, other than that she lives in Brooklyn, but you can see more of her work here, if you're intrigued like I was. I love the works but what I really want to know about are the techniques used!

(author unknown)

Shared by Jake
Libby, you should definitely check this out and perhaps submit some of you own work!

Blanket Magazine has a short piece of Steampunk on the web this month, but that is mainly just the excuse I used to post.  Blanket magazine is:

. . . is a free PDF online magazine that is aimed at uncovering art + design + photography from the talented people who create it.

The name blanket came from the simple idea that we wanted to ‘cover’ all the areas of art, design and photography and bring them together in one magazine.

I've only skimmed the rest of the content so far but the images and graphics are absolutely gorgeous!  Download the PDF by clicking on the image above.  (Found via Mechanis)

read more

Libby, you should definitely check this out and perhaps submit some of you own work!

Shared by Jake
DJ Earworm is a master of sonic dumpster diving taking 25 pounds of corporate shit and polishing it into a beautiful dorodango. Yes, yes you can polish a turd!

Veteran mashup architect DJ Earworm deserves a friggin’ Grammy for this one:

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Via Ponnie, thanks.

Sublime, poetic, and menacing in equal measure, “United State of Pop” is the most beautifully presented –not to mention addictive– musical riff off MTV monoculture I’ve heard since Plunderphonics. As the friend who showed me this puts it:

This video is an example of what’s being called the “legofication” of pop music…[songs] so generic and standardized in [their] structure (not to mention pop videos in their imagery) that all the parts are interchangeable. DJ Earworm mashes up the top 25 on the billboard charts for 2008 to illustrate this point.

Go to djearworm.com to download the audio, and click below to see the full tracklist.

Read the rest of DJ Earworm and the “Legofication” of Pop Music

Post tags: Crackpot Visionary, Culture, End of the World, Music, Silly-looking types, Television

DJ Earworm is a master of sonic dumpster diving taking 25 pounds of corporate shit and polishing it into a beautiful dorodango. Yes, yes you can polish a turd!

Shared by Jake
Shall I make you one?

[Boris] wanted to help ease his sister’s seasonal affective disorder. The most common way to do it is with fairly expensive light boxes. [Boris] built one of his own instead.  Now his sister can blast her sadness away with over 10,000 lumens of CFL happiness.  This is pretty much the same method one would use to create a ring light for photography.

       Shall I make you one?

Shared by Jake
Sniff.

Bill Watterson and “Calvin and Hobbes” are two of the primary reasons I started making comics. Those of you who donate or subscribe to The Vault, have seen my earlier attempts to emulate his work (”it’s like Calvin and Hobbes but with a robot instead of a tiger!”).

I don’t know of a cartoonist that doesn’t list Watterson in his top three influences, so I won’t bore you with my treatise on how his work sparked my young imagination and ignited a lifelong love of comic strips and cartooning. I bet he wouldn’t be too thrilled with me aping his style to make a Joss Whedon/Serenity reference, nor would I be shocked if he didn’t get said reference.

I always looked forward to his snowman strips because they straddled a line between childlike innocence and subversion. I guess that same can be said for the whole of “Calvin and Hobbes,” but those particular strips (along with Spaceman Spiff) resonated loudly with me. My favorite was the snowmen looking on in horror after another snowman had been hit by Dad’s car.

Calvin’s Dad was a patent attorney. “The More You Knoooow!”

Related Comics & Posts

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• I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar. (11)

Sniff.

Shared by Jake
This is a really cool project that bears watching!

Thanks to the kindness of AfriGadget readers we were able to take a simple idea and far exceed expectations. We were looking for a mobile phone for our two young ladies in South Africa to start doing some AfriGadget mobile phone reporting on. Instead, we raised extra money and had 2 more smart phones given directly to the project!

What Next?

We’re off to the races with the Sony Ericsson C702 that you helped us buy, and the Nokia N95 that David Sasaki provided to Zintle and Lukhona when he was in South Africa earlier this month (pictured above).

The new phone from Michele is going into my bag with my Nokia N95 as I try to find another two mobile reporters in some other countries in Africa. I’ve got one eye on a likely candidate in Kenya, but want to try to get outside my normal stomping grounds in East Africa. If you have an idea of someone who has a good multimedia eye, likes to tell stories and would be good for AfriGadget, send them my way please.

Phones

These two individuals went far beyond what we expected and actually gave their Nokia N95’s to the project:

Michele Bowman, futurist at Fringehog (Nokia N95)
David Sasaki of Global Voices (Nokia N95)

Donations

We tried to raise $500, and received $595… Wow, thanks!

Jean Hopkins
Ken Banks
Heather Ford
Henk Kleynhans of Skyrove
Larry Bibayoff
Nicola from the UK
Matthias Zeeb
Elizabeth Meiners
Juergen Eichholz
Andre Vermeulen
Dr. Bakali
Russ Hersman
David D’Angelo of Serac Films
Alex Sauriol
Tielman Nieuwoudt
Georgia Popplewell
Ian Reclusado

Again, a big thank you to everyone who helped make this a reality. Let’s see if we can grow AfriGadget from the grassroots up.

(If your name isn’t linked above, and you would like it to be, please send me the URL you would like me to attribute it to)

This is a really cool project that bears watching!

Over the last 24 hours I've seen a lot of concern and speculation about what happens if one of my experiments somehow "goes out of control" and turns into some kind of "grey goo" event. It seems that there's a mistaken impression that I'm just randomly mutating things (perhaps with UV stimulation) to see what comes up. This actually couldn't be further from the truth, so let me explain what I'm really doing.

How Your Genes Work can be summed up in a single sentence: "DNA makes RNA makes protein." Your genes are instructions for making several different types of RNA, and those RNA molecules assemble the proteins that your body is made of and which make your body run. Some proteins are structural, some are enzymes used to catalyze chemical reactions (such as digestion), some are used to transport other molecules around (e.g. hemoglobin, which carries oxygen around in your red blood cells) -- proteins are everywhere. So, when I think about something I'd like for a cell to do, I start looking around for relevant proteins.

In the case of "let's detect melamine", I went to MetaCyc -- a browsable database of metabolic pathways -- and looked for proteins which interact with melamine. I found one, called melamine deaminase. It's the beginning of a metabolic pathway called the melamine degradation pathway, which -- go figure -- takes melamine apart. To use this reaction in our detector, we'll need to give some species of bacteria the ability to produce melamine deaminase, which means giving it the appropriate gene. To do that, we either extract the gene from a species that already has it, or we get a lab like IDT to make it for us. Then we insert the gene into a plasmid, which is a circular DNA molecule that a bacterium can "take up" in order to gain some new function.

So, no, there is no deliberate randomness going on here -- rather, it's a concerted effort to make just one type of bacteria do just one additional thing (or, really, some sequence of additional things). The whole experimental setup is also designed so that if I screw something up, the bugs die and that's it. And, naturally, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that stray spores, phages, and other contaminants don't end up in my experiments -- heat sterilization, alcohol sterilization, flame sterilization, you name it.

Do you need to worry about these synthetic bacteria degrading you? Only if you are a whiteboard or certain species of plastic fork.

Shared by Jake
Future Alert!

Once upon a time, there were a boy and a girl. The boy ran a tech conference, and the girl worked for a company that made DNA. She submitted a talk about DNA design software to the conference, and it got in, and she was very, very excited.

While preparing to give her talk, the girl mentioned to the boy that if she only had a salad spinner, she could kick off her talk with a cute demo. "I will find you a salad spinner," said the boy, and he did (thanks to kragen), and the demo was very cute indeed.

After the conference, the boy and the girl got to talking about other amusing things that people could do with DNA, and somewhere in there, someone had the idea that it would be really funny to take Lactobacillus acidophilus, otherwise known as yogurt bacteria, give it the gene to produce green fluorescent protein, and make yogurt with it. Or "glowgurt", if you prefer.

They were, however, rather busy with a number of other projects, both together and separately, and along the line they fell for each other like a ton of bricks and got married.

This is where the story actually starts.

Back in August, [Bad username: rabbi.vox.com] and I were in Houston for my sister's wedding. Naturally, we spent a fair bit of time also hanging out at mycroftxxx's place with his housemate pturing and the other residents of the House of Discord. One evening, we were all kickin' it on the porch, shooting the shit about science (like ya do), and glowgurt came up. This led to some speculation about other things one could coerce bacteria to produce, and [Bad username: rabbi.vox.com] hit on a brilliant one: essential micronutrients. In particular, Vitamin C.

See, most mammals synthesize ascorbic acid (as C is also known) on their own. A few, however, have deletion mutations which prevent them from being able to: guinea pigs, some bats, all monkeys, all apes, and us. These mammals must get ascorbic acid in their diets, or else they'll end up with vitamin C deficiency, known as scurvy.

Scurvy is serious business. These days we think about it when we think of pirates or sailors, because during the seafaring days, it was really difficult to lay in enough supplies of citrus fruit and other ascorbic-acid-containing foods to last for an entire sea voyage. It's a really unpleasant disease. Sufferers lose their teeth and fingernails, bleed from the gums and mucous membranes, and experience severe joint pain, as vitamin C is necessary for collagen synthesis. Over time, healed scars can reopen and knitted fractures rebreak. Untreated, it is fatal, usually due to brain hemorrhage.

Thanks to modern food distribution, scurvy is uncommon in the industrialized world, except among one population: the homeless, typically elderly homeless men. Infants who are fed unfortified formula get it too. In the Third World, the situation is much more troubling. It's difficult to conduct studies on the prevalence of scurvy in the populations most likely to suffer from it, because those populations are hard to get to: refugees. An estimate of 100,000 cases of scurvy in East Africa alone is likely an underestimate. And most of the victims are children.

The bitter irony is that scurvy is 100% curable: all you have to do is get vitamin C to people. Of course, this is a big challenge when the population that needs it most is remote and resource-poor: if there were reliable distribution channels and money to pay for distribution, we could get supplements to them. Or citrus fruit.

We can't re-engineer living people to make their own ascorbic acid. But we can engineer bacteria to do it, rather easily in fact. How does that help scurvy sufferers, though? One word: probiotics.

Every human body is home to billions and billions of bacteria. We are their universe, and we literally could not live without them. The bacteria we house help us digest food and provide us with some of our essential micronutrients already -- poor maligned E. coli, for instance, manufactures Vitamin B12. So, pick a bacterial symbiote that lives in the gut and that people are willing to eat -- like, oh, say, yogurt bacteria -- and give it the ability to manufacture vitamin B12, or to help us manufacture it ourselves. (We're only missing one enzyme from the metabolic pathway that produces ascorbic acid.) Make yogurt with it, and just give the stuff away. Teach people how to make more yogurt from the yogurt they already have -- microbes are totally the gift that keeps on giving -- and slowly, one bite of yogurt at a time, we can do to scurvy what Salk and Sabin did to polio.

There are some challenges. (There always are.) Giving a bacterium the ability to produce a new protein has the side effect of making it less competitive: it's spending more of its energy on producing that protein, and thus less on dividing like crazy. Over time, its unaltered relatives will outnumber it, and eventually its population will dwindle to the point where it dies out. Selection is a bitch like that. However, if we can figure out some way to tweak the altered bacteria so that their rate of growth is on par with unaltered bacteria, then we can shift the balance of the game. Can we do this at all? Can we do it without affecting the existing essential roles that lactic acid bacteria play in us and in every other organism out there? I'm not sure. But that's what research is for.

Another challenge is making sure that we don't overdo it. It's pretty hard to overdose on Vitamin C; the LD-50 in humans is unknown, but in rats it's about 12 grams per kilogram, so if the numbers are similar for people, I'd have to choke down nearly two pounds of Vitamin C at one sitting to have a 50% chance of dying from it. Doses on the order of six grams per day over the course of many months can cause diarrhea, headache and other uncomfortable side effects, and people with iron overload disorders (wherein the body is too good at utilising dietary iron) can have their problems exacerbated by too much vitamin C. But there are two pieces of good news here. First, it's much easier to limit the rate of bacterial growth than it is to increase it, and second, there's a lot of wiggle room. 40 milligrams per day is probably adequate, 90 milligrams per day is enough for anyone, and the maximum recommended daily dose is 2,000 milligrams. So if we produce a population density that will provide people with about 40mg/day, it's unlikely that we'll fuck anyone up.

It's gonna take a lot of work. I won't pretend otherwise. We're talking about making major changes to the way humans everywhere interact with an organism that is vital to our existence, and that's a sobering thought. But so is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people suffer from a disease that can be eradicated.

To me, that means we're morally obligated to try. We're also obligated to be damn careful. But we have to try. So we are.

Another project I'm working on, along with engineer Jonathan Cline and a research team at National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan, is a biological method for developing melamine contamination in food, which we've dubbed the "melaminometer". You might remember how last fall, there was a huge panic about contaminated pet food that was causing cats and dogs to die of kidney failure. This was traced to melamine, a triazine molecule which is 66% nitrogen by mass and can be used to make food products look like they contain more protein than they actually do. Unfortunately, not only is melamine not a dietary protein, it also pairs up with cyanuric acid to form insoluble crystals which accrete in the kidneys and cause irreversible, fatal kidney failure.

Oh, and the stuff has started showing up in milk products, including baby food, in China. The FDA has already banned all imports of Chinese dairy products out of fear for people's safety, and with good reason.

So why a biological detector? Well, as you might have guessed, with simple detection methods, melamine can masquerade as protein, and that's no good. The FDA uses chromatography and mass spectrometry, both of which are time-consuming and require a lot of equipment, plus someone who's trained to use it. A number of labs produce ELISA kits that can detect melamine very accurately and rather quickly (each test only takes about half an hour), but the kits aren't cheap and the cost adds up. We're aiming to produce a bacterium that lights up in the presence of melamine, in order to make available a test that is inexpensive, portable, and accurate.

You can read more about the work we're doing here -- that's right, we're keeping our notes on a wiki. Yeah, open science! Future Alert!

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.

This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a shift in focus, moving from defining strategy for Microsoft to a broader strategy for improving the lives of the world's poor. Bill Gates exemplifies what Tim O'Reilly is talking about when he says that those of us in the tech industry should increasingly "focus on stuff that matters."

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

These thoughts about Gates were sparked by watching Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Gates this week. What comes through in this interview is the optimism of Bill Gates and his belief that technology is a kind of magic. Good magic. Powerful magic. Software is magic that allows people to do things they dream of doing. What's most telling is Gates's belief that the best is yet to come, that we're still in the early stages of realizing what can be done with this technology.

The second half of the interview is the best part, when Gates is talking about his life after Microsoft and his interest in the work of the Foundation. (Many will find the first half of the interview about Microsoft's past and present product strategy and Gates's belief that they can compete with Google in search uninteresting or irrelevant.) The primary focus of the Gates Foundation has been to explore ways to reduce common diseases such as malaria and rotavirus that affect the world's poor. Here's a section from a letter from Bill and Melinda Gates.

More than a decade ago, the two of us read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that were long ago eliminated in this country. One disease we had never even heard of—rotavirus—was killing literally half a million kids each year. We thought: That's got to be a typo. If a single disease were killing that many kids, we would have heard about it, because it would have been front-page news. But it wasn’t a typo.

We couldn't escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

In the interview, you can't miss how committed Gates is to the efforts of the Foundation. He realizes that he's in a special position to see problems like the one above and formulate a plan backed by resources to do something about it. Yet he doesn't come across as a do-gooder. What excites him about the non-profit world is similar to what he enjoyed at Microsoft -- finding and working with smart people who are really engaged in issues and problems.

As much as I appreciate the goals of the Foundation, I found myself admiring Bill Gates as a person during the course of the interview. The truth is that while he was busy developing software, he's also worked on developing himself. He is the self-made American who has matured into a role model and leader. He is thoughtful and tactful where a younger version would have been brash and impetuous. Like Windows, improvement for Gates has required multiple iterations but the insistence on getting it right won out eventually. The newest release of Bill Gates is the best yet.

When he talks about improving education, he's not just analytical. He appears to be moved while describing his interaction with highly motivated teachers who see their profession "as a higher calling." Gates also tells us that he's watching courses on DVD while he exercises. He highly recommends "Big History" a series of lectures by David Christian, available through "The Teaching Company." I found it inspiring that he was "watching three hours on Modern Economics" over the course of a weekend while on a treadmill. That's lifelong learning in action. I just wonder how many present or former CEOs are that inquisitive.

Gates gives me hope at a time when I've grown tired of reading how the short-sighted schemes of Wall Street's top brass and other American executives have brought ruin to American business and our economy. They aren't leaders worth following. Gates is different. He deserves genuine admiration, in my view. He's more than a technologist. He's both a realist and an optimist. He's become a world leader worth listening to.

Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why.

This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of his time and energy to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a shift in focus, moving from defining strategy for Microsoft to a broader strategy for improving the lives of the world's poor. Bill Gates exemplifies what Tim O'Reilly is talking about when he says that those of us in the tech industry should increasingly "focus on stuff that matters."

In many ways, Gates represents the "best of us" -- it's not just what he's doing but how he thinks about what he's doing. He's a curious geek. He wants to find interesting problems to solve. He believes that smart, self-motivated people working together can make a difference. Bill Gates reflects the best qualities of a generation that has grown up finding the innovative ways to apply science and technology to impact our everyday life in mostly positive ways.

These thoughts about Gates were sparked by watching Charlie Rose's interview with Bill Gates this week. What comes through in this interview is the optimism of Bill Gates and his belief that technology is a kind of magic. Good magic. Powerful magic. Software is magic that allows people to do things they dream of doing. What's most telling is Gates's belief that the best is yet to come, that we're still in the early stages of realizing what can be done with this technology.

The second half of the interview is the best part, when Gates is talking about his life after Microsoft and his interest in the work of the Foundation. (Many will find the first half of the interview about Microsoft's past and present product strategy and Gates's belief that they can compete with Google in search uninteresting or irrelevant.) The primary focus of the Gates Foundation has been to explore ways to reduce common diseases such as malaria and rotavirus that affect the world's poor. Here's a section from a letter from Bill and Melinda Gates.

More than a decade ago, the two of us read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that were long ago eliminated in this country. One disease we had never even heard of—rotavirus—was killing literally half a million kids each year. We thought: That's got to be a typo. If a single disease were killing that many kids, we would have heard about it, because it would have been front-page news. But it wasn’t a typo.

We couldn't escape the brutal conclusion that—in our world today—some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can’t be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

In the interview, you can't miss how committed Gates is to the efforts of the Foundation. He realizes that he's in a special position to see problems like the one above and formulate a plan backed by resources to do something about it. Yet he doesn't come across as a do-gooder. What excites him about the non-profit world is similar to what he enjoyed at Microsoft -- finding and working with smart people who are really engaged in issues and problems.

As much as I appreciate the goals of the Foundation, I found myself admiring Bill Gates as a person during the course of the interview. The truth is that while he was busy developing software, he's also worked on developing himself. He is the self-made American who has matured into a role model and leader. He is thoughtful and tactful where a younger version would have been brash and impetuous. Like Windows, improvement for Gates has required multiple iterations but the insistence on getting it right won out eventually. The newest release of Bill Gates is the best yet.

When he talks about improving education, he's not just analytical. He appears to be moved while describing his interaction with highly motivated teachers who see their profession "as a higher calling." Gates also tells us that he's watching courses on DVD while he exercises. He highly recommends "Big History" a series of lectures by David Christian, available through "The Teaching Company." I found it inspiring that he was "watching three hours on Modern Economics" over the course of a weekend while on a treadmill. That's lifelong learning in action. I just wonder how many present or former CEOs are that inquisitive.

Gates gives me hope at a time when I've grown tired of reading how the short-sighted schemes of Wall Street's top brass and other American executives have brought ruin to American business and our economy. They aren't leaders worth following. Gates is different. He deserves genuine admiration, in my view. He's more than a technologist. He's both a realist and an optimist. He's become a world leader worth listening to.

I am having a great time looking at these antique wrist watches, which I found on oobject! Most of the ones I've shown here are from WWI, and were government issue. They started handing out wrist watches to soldiers so that they wouldn't risk their lives fumbling around for a pocket watch, and the cool-looking grates over the face of the watches are to protect the glass from breaking. Though the grates have lost their functionality, I'd still love to have a watch with grating on the face. Would you?