I woke up this morning just after 6 to a loud crack and looked out the
window and saw a security guard high up in a tree across the street
snapping off branches for firewood. This is definitely going to be a
unique Christmas.
With no extended family, with the heat, with a minimal amount of
presents, with a lot [...]
One of my best friends, Adam McHugh has recently started a blog and I think it is well worth reading. He is a pastor ministering at the Claremont Colleges (where Claudia and I as well as Adam all went) and is doing some really profound writing. My only question is whether or not he can [...]
Great article in the economist comparing a poor American with a Congolese doctor.
When Americans hear the words “poor” and “white”, they think of someone like Mr Banks. He has half a dozen cars in varying states of disrepair parked outside his trailer, car-parts everywhere and a pile of crushed Pepsi cans below his porch.
…thousands of [...]
So yesterday I spent some more time working on my Mondrian website. I love writing code that generates code - which is how I made the example I posted yesterday. Yesterday, as I moved closer to getting something I would actually deliver to a client I began to realize something about beauty that Mondrian’s art [...]
And now for something completely different. A client recently asked for a Piet Mondrian look and feel for some work I was doing for him. I don’t think I will use this, but I created a randomly generated Piet Mondrian lookalike. Every reload gives you a new one!
Apparently Narnia is experiencing a bit of a revival thanks to Hollywood. I love CS Lewis’s books and my wife and I have recently reread most of the Narnia series. In Oxford we visited his house and even considered living in it for a while. But it was a bit out of the way, so [...]
Truckloads of emergency relief supplies are maybe two weeks away, Mr Patel tells this village — bags of vitamin-enhanced maize, dried beans and cooking oil. And the bad news? There is not enough for everyone who needs it.
Mr Patel asks these uniformly impoverished people, who live in mud huts, to choose who among them will [...]
Last week some villagers discovered a hill full of thousands of dead
birds. It is the hungry season, so people rejoiced at the manna from
heaven. Samples have been sent to South Africa for testing, but this
could be very bad news indeed.
Dozens of villagers used pails to collect the fork-tailed drongos,
which range through much of sub-Saharan Africa [...]
Billions of dollars are being spent to change behavior in Africa and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. A lot of work still needs to be done. For instance, a small survey of middle class Malawians revealed that about 20% think that you can catch HIV/AIDS by sitting next to someone. So when I saw this [...]
This is great news:
Opportunity International, one of the world’s largest microfinance organizations, today announced that it received a $2.2 million grant over three years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that will go toward a project to develop a trans-African network of new commercial banks for the poor. In addition, the project will reach [...]
