• Probably the most entertaining and funny safety video I have ever seen, featuring a man with a fish head, a matador, and a geeky-looking nun.

• Hip and casual crew. “Captain Chaz” made the pre-boarding announcement and invited us to see the cockpit of his cool new Airbus. The whole crew is “a team” (e.g. “inflight crew members, prepare for takeoff).

• Purple lighting reminiscent of a trendy lounge or nightclub. Trance techno music playing when you enter the cabin (and continually in the cabin).

• The inflight entertainment seems good, but I haven’t used it as I am working on my laptop using the nice 110VAC power in every seat.

A bonus is that some of the flights seem to be quite empty, probably because the airline is relatively new. On my flight to DC there were no more than 30 people and everyone had 3 rows to herself.

While Dubrovnik is a nice place, it is clearly overrun with tourists. It seems that prices have shot up a lot in the past few years and are now on par with pretty much anywhere else in Europe (Greece, for example). Still, it is a very beautiful place and was worth going. The train back (from Ploce) was interesting, a relic from the 70s or 80s.

I am not an expert on Afghan society, so it is difficult for me to interpret the Bookseller of Kabul, but I did find the repetitive theme of male domination to be somewhat reductive: it sometimes seems to be the only defining feature of the family.  Additionally, the work is in fact a type of ethnography, it lacks reflexivity that might lend greater credibility to the events. Seierstad is completely transparent in all the episodes she portrays, as if she were invisible and suspended from the ceiling.  Although she acknowledges she frequently fought with the Kahn family in the foreword, her realationship to them is never mentioned again  It seems unlikely that a Norwegian women could live with an Afghan family without influencing the course of their lives: portraying that would have added greater depth to the book.  Also, the book itself is problematic: Seierstad depicts the characters and their relationships in an almost entirely negative light.  Is the family aware of the book?  If so, what were their opinions and how does the author construe her relationship to them?

Without doubt, the Bookseller of Kabul is a captivating and well-written book, but it at times it seems to only tell part of the story.

1. $100 is a lot of money. In many low-income countries educational expenditures are less than USD 20 per student per year. It is hard to justify spending 5 years of a student’s budget on a laptop. If the project reaches its goal of 100 million laptops, this will mean a total expenditure of roughly $10 billion dollars. Could this money be put to better uses?

2. Theory over evidence. The OLPC mission is based heavily on the theory of constructionism as described by Papert, Kay, and Negroponte. However, actual research on 1:1 student computing (i.e. providing each student with a laptop) really don’t show the kind of results predicted by OLPC.

3. The challenge is not inexpensive hardware. The root causes of poverty today are to be found in complex social, political, and cultural relationships on both micro and macro levels. Information access and education are the this way to address this, but these do not require large numbers of computers. In fact, my experience is that these goals are best served by programs initiated at the community level.

I do think that the $100 is an impressive and socially-conscious piece of engineering. I do like the use of open hardware and open source software. However, I really don’t like the unsubstantiated claims made in the name of education and poverty alleviation for the world’s poorest children.

1. There is no reason to use ordinary gasoline (or petrol) other than that everyone already does and that we are all used to it. If you used natural gas you could fill up your house in your own home (it is the same gas used for a gas range), save money, cut maintenance costs, and reduce emissions.

2. Natural gas is probably not the best technology out there: electric cars and plug-in hybrids are now a realistic alternative. However, combining natural gas with a hybrid could be a great idea.

3. Regardless of innovative fuel technologies, Fords suck. After 120 thousand miles they will inevitably break.