Sunday Morning Coffee

It’s been unseasonably cool so far this spring in Abu Dhabi, but yesterday it was hot: 99F. And this morning my iPhone tells me that the weather is about to turn … seasonable. For those of you who think in Celsius (something I haven’t yet learn to do...

OLPC for Haiti

Almost three years ago, I signed up for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Give One, Get One program. For $400, I donated one of the program’s laptops to a child in the developing world and received one myself. I was interested in Nicholas Negroponte’s idea...

Penguin Books of the Future

I’ve written here about how much I’m looking forward to the Apple iPad (yes, still, despite the faulty MacBook I wrote about in my last post). This week I’ve been teaching from two Penguin Books editions, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly,...

MacBook Screen Rot

I still love my MacBook, even though it’s developed a case of screen rot. I don’t regret switching to Mac as my primary computing platform, but let’s face it, Macs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Macs hardware is elegant, but in...

USB Lightsabers

Well, Chani, how many of these should I buy? (I’m thinking six: a Jedi and a Sith each for me and my two boys.) They’re available from ThinkGeek. And, while I’m there, I’m might get myself one of these, as well:

Stellar Diversity

I’ve always been interested in astronomy, and at a young age I learned all about red giants, white dwarves, and black holes. I spent a lot of nights during the second semester of my freshman year in college at the telescope in the science center while I was...