Rants, The Sky is Falling

I just saw an article in Science Daily which talks about a “Digital Dark Age.” The introduction sums up the idea:

“What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer’s hard drive?”

The article mentions 8-inch floppy disks as an example. Remember those, from the 1980s and ’90s? They were the floppy disks which were actually “floppy,” not those 3.5-inch ones some old people still use today. The “floppy disks” of this era are CDs, DVDs, and flash disks, and you may not foresee them going away any time soon, but it’s inevitable; what happens when those are phased out for “newer, better” storage formats? The year is 2020: where will you find somewhere to plug in your now-ancient USB flash disk (let alone your circa-2001 floppy disk)?
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Books

Skeletons on the Zahara cover
Skeletons on the Zahara cover
I’m resisting writing about the USA’s presidential election because I fear it will turn into a lengthy rant, and I know you guys don’t care what I think. In lieu of that I figured I’d write something that was a little more interesting. I just finished Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King. This is another book recommended and given to me by a fellow VSO volunteer, which means I paid nothing for it. It also means: if you’re a volunteer in Kenya (even non VSO) I will give it to you for free!

This was a fascinating story of an American trade ship that crashed on the West coast of Africa in 1815. The crew ends up being robbed and enslaved by the locals, which sounds like it was more common than you might think in the nineteenth century. I wonder if would have steered clear of the merchant marine line of work if I lived during those times. Anyways, the men experience the harshness of life on the desert, constantly shifting to find clean water and shrubs for their owners’ camels.
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Kenya, Teaching

Two of my three classes finished today and they’ll take their exams next week. I didn’t have any failures last semester but this time around we had some irregularities. For instance, the students reported to school two weeks late! I don’t know why, but they did. The IT instructors had assumed this meant we’d have two weeks tacked onto the end of the semester but we were wrong to assume. When I thought we were halfway done with the semester we learned that we only had two weeks left. Ahhh! So I had to rush my last assignments, tests, and lectures, but I think I managed OK.

One metric I have is the number of students who correctly answer a certain question on my final test; last semester every student got it incorrect. I’m not sure what I did differently this time, but everyone got it correct. Woohoo! It’s a simple logic-based programming question and I ask them what the following code should print when it is executed: Continue Reading