Thai woman takes 25-year-long bus ride

Here's a story of a woman from a rural area of southern Thailand who boarded a bus 25 years ago for a shopping trip. Unfortunately the bus was going to Malaysia. So she apparently survived by begging in the streets before a group of students recognized her Thai dialect and were able to return her home.

I once heard a similar story that may possibly be apocryphal, but here it is anyway: According to a friend named Laura who I happened to know while I was a student in France, her father was much older than most parents of kids our age. He was in his 60s or 70s when she was in college. According to Laura, her father had grown up in Baltimore and that one night when he was 19 or so he and his friends went out drinking and ended getting completely soused. Laura's father was the first to pass out, so in the wee hours of the night his friends decided to play a prank on him by stowing him away on a ship docked in the harbor.

Apparently the ship unwittingly sailed away with him onboard and he was taken to France (I think this was in the late 40s or early 50s). Instead of coming back to Baltimore, though, he stayed in Europe and worked odd jobs in France and Italy for the next 30 years without ever contacting his family. She said he eventually came back to the states and married her mother, but that he essentially fell off the face of the earth that night in Baltimore. Even if it's not completely true, it's such a good yarn that it's interesting when other stories like that of the Thai woman surface.

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13 of Every 100 Americans now Officially Clueless

A survey of world attitudes about climate change revealed this week that 13 percent of Americans have never heard of global warming. Of course, maybe even more troubling is how many of compatriots actively refuse to believe in global warming. Here's Reuters:

The United States emits about a quarter of all greenhouse gases, the biggest emitter ahead of China, Russia and India.

Thirteen percent of U.S. citizens said they had never heard or read anything about global warming, the survey said.

It amazes me how flippant we Americans continue to be about this issue. I can't even imagine how tortured this must make climatologists and other scientists who've been ringing alarm bells for years trying to make us take global warming seriously. I really do wonder if this might eventually tarnish Bush's reputation among historians of the future when they look back at how little was done on this issue while he was in office.

Indoctrinating with Linux

You may already have heard about the $100 laptop. It's an initiative by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT and a group called One Laptop Per Child. The idea being, shocker!, to supply a laptop to every child in the developing world.
The computer uses a rubberized keyboard, small AMD processor and flash memory instead of a hard drive. The organizers are also developing a customizable version of Linux for each nation that receives the devices. Here's Negroponte on the decision not to use Windows and Office:

In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint," Mr Negroponte said.

"I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools."

We all like to believe in the power of technology, but you have to wonder if the poorest people on Earth have more pressing needs than using computers in the classroom. It's not even clear that these computers will improve education on a grand scale when families are so poor they need children to begin working at a young age. I'm not sure how a cheap laptop solves that.

Possible outcome? I wonder if the majority of these laptops will eventually end up being used by local businesspeople -- the typical small entrepreneur who finds computer access important. If that's the case, it might still be beneficial... just not in the way OLPC imagines.