Octopus’s Garden
Here’s some art:
I started this piece several months ago. Somewhere along the line I went mad with power and blacked in way too much, and once I realized it, I sort of stopped liking it. I’ve been trying to use more contrast of both black vs white and texture vs space, but I think this one would have been better sticking to the texture play. Now it’s a bit too heavy, but it’s still technically worth showing I suppose, so here you are.
I could probably help the balance of this piece by putting a bit more black in the white areas of the top right quarter, but for the moment I’m sick of looking at it, so I’m calling it done.
Rescue
If you’ve been following my twitter stream you’ve probably already heard that one of my cats is diabetic. She’s fine, never actually got to the point where she was acting weird (which made figuring out what was wrong a bit difficult) but my brain has been pretty cat centered last couple weeks.
Chyna is the cat with diabetes. We’ve got her on special food and we’re giving her insulin injections twice a day (which I mind much more than she does). The vet shaved a patch on her back to make it easier for us at first, so now she looks like she’s got a sunroof. We couldn’t help laughing at her for the first couple days.
The drawing below is of Tricky, the other cat (because she’s the one who was finally willing to look at my phone and give me a good face photo). She added to the sick cat confusion by puking all over (just hairballs) just as Chyna got her infection so we took the wrong cat to the vet at first.
This week’s Illustration Friday is “Rescue.” The first thing I thought of was rescue animals, cats and dogs. (And since I’ve been sick this week, drawing a cat was an easy option.) Chyna was a rescue cat, Matt got her from a foster program before I met him. Tricky was also I suppose, just not officially. She was a pregnant stray when she adopted us.
We’ll probably always go with rescue cats, I’ve never really understood why so many people pay hundreds from breeders when there are so many unwanted cats in shelters. My friend Kim got a beautiful kitten from a shelter last year (Olive is lovable, though bitey, but that’s cats for you).
I kind of get it more with dogs. Breed plays into personality quite a lot, plus, no matter how much the experts say dogs are never too old to be retrained, it’s obvious early habits make a much bigger difference with an animal that can rip your throat out if it gets too scared. Abuse and poor training can really screw up a dog, while with a cat the worse you’ll get is a nuisance.
Rescue dogs can be a bit of a gamble, though the rescue dogs I’ve met have been wonderful, including a shepherd mix that probably saved my niece from a coyote when she was three (nope, not exaggerating). When we went to get Kim’s kitten, she was thinking she might get a dog instead.
We found an absolutely sweet 9 month old dog, a Pharoah Hound mix (I’d never heard of them) that was quiet and friendly, and seemed like she’d be a great pet for Kim. We asked at the desk if they thought she would make a good first dog, and we were told, regretfully, No.
The dog was “trained” on puppy pads, which means it had learned to go to the bathroom right on the floor, which is, you know, fantabulous. Also, the dog had chewed up every bit of wooden furniture in the house, while left alone all day as the owner woked.
That’s the tragedy of rescue animals. You get a fair number of animals like Chyna and Tricky, born strays from stray parents. You’ll find animals that are left behind when an owner dies, or becomes homeless, or just gets too old to care for it. Too often though, the pets you find in shelters are animals that are abandoned, or returned, because the ownder simply doesn’t want them anymore.
The cat isn’t as cute as it was when it was a kitten and it scratches up the couches, pees on the carpet. The dog is too much work, and it hasn’t been trained, so now it’s unmanagable, even dangerous. Sure, those that are abused or starved, those animals are far sadder. It’s so easy to justify taking back a “bad” animal. We forget that animals are living beings and not toys. Someone else will take them.
I have been a bad pet owner. Now Matt and I have cats that are such prizes it makes me cringe with regret. The drawing I did of tricky doesn’t express what a sniffy cat she is. If you’ve ever had a sniffy cat, you know what I mean. When we first got her she couldn’t figure out how to sit on a lap and now she’ll run to curl up with you as soon as you sit down. When I pick her up, she meows and struggles in complaint, but the whole time she purrs so loudly you can hear her across a room.
Chyna does everything timidly, primly, as though she’s made of glass, and you feel a bit like she is when you pick her up. When she’s upset she hides her face against you. At night when I brush my teeth, she likes to attack my socks. She is always utterly happy to be in the same room with us. It takes my breath away.
Fast Drawings
For this week’s Illustration Friday, “Fast” I thought I’d do a set of quick sketches.
Click on any image to see a larger version. Everyone knows cheetahs are the fastest land animals:
According to wisegeek, cheetahs run up to 70 mph. I run about 0.70 miles per hour on a good day.
The fastest water animal, I had to look up.
This is a sailfish, which I had heard of but had never really thought about much. They’re actually pretty cool looking, like a dinosaur mixed with a swordfish. Like the cheetah, sailfish travel 70 mph, so in a triathlon I suppose they’d be about evenly matched. Until they got to the biking portion, because everyone knows fish can’t ride bikes.
Finally, the fastest animal of the air is the aptly named Sir Not Appearing in this Film. Wait. I mean the aptly named swift.
Swifts fly through the air at 106 mph, making them the fastest animal in the world (probably not great in the triathlon though).
I’m pretty happy with how the sailfish and the swifts turned out. I got the cutout effect by reverse selecting the subjects, and darkening the paper grain to add in a more noticable texture. The cheetah is ok, but I always have a tough time with cats for some reason. This one looks a bit like a monkey or a hyena, but as my cats go, it’s acceptable.
Striped African Tree Rat
Last month my dad had a Realtors’ conference in DC, so Matt and I decided to make a vacation of it, which gave us a chance to actually see my parents this year (it’s not easy to get to Oregon).
Dad didn’t have a whole lot of time for touristy things, but he was able to join Matt, Mom and I at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum before the conference started. Everyone else wanted to see the rocks and gems section. I wasn’t too enthused about that part, until I remembered that it’s only gems I could care less about. I actually quite like rocks. In the display I was especially fascinated by all the cool rock formations, the amazing variety of shape and texture. The above reminded me of nothing more than an alien city, and I though several crystals made such pretty patterns that they’d also make excellent computer backgrounds.
I didn’t need to warm up to the rest of the museum, I mean, who wouldn’t love looking at deep sea animals, frozen hunting scenes, and dinosaur bones?
I guess my dad loved it even more than the rest of us.** I enjoyed the bones, and they made such cool light patterns in on the floor that I think I’m going to need to draw them at some point, but my favorite part of the museum were the current animals. True, they’re dead, but it’s pretty rare that you get to look at animals up close, to get a sense for their details, scale, and posture. We have a natural history museum in Cleveland, and it’s actually quite good, but it’s hard to compete with the National Museum.
** I am SO not responsible if you try to kiss the T-Rex and get yourself kicked out or arrested.
I probably spent far too long in the mammal room, taking photos of creatures great and small. When I get an opportunity like that it’s hard to think about anything but how many great photo-references I’m getting for drawings. Natural-ish zoos are great, but sometimes the animals move too quick to capture, or don’t appear at all. When they’re stuffed, it’s not exactly a problem. I especially liked the bats. I don’t often get to look closely at bat wings, and I can’t wait to do some sketching.
Now for an apparently unrelated aside.
I have to tell you a story. Almost ten years ago, I started my first year at the University of Notre Dame. There are small differences in the natural worlds of South Bend and Eugene, possibly caused as much by perspective, my newfound freedom, as distance. I saw birds hopping around amongst the fall leaves and noticed that the way they moved made them blend perfectly with the leaves rolling in the wind, effectively hiding them. Some differences however were not due to mere observation. The climate in South Bend is more extreme, there aren’t as many evergreens. And within my first few days there, I started to glimpse a timid little creature with dramatic markings on its face and sides, which I didn’t recognize at all.
It never occurred to me to ask anyone what they were, instead I referenced my mammal book, which I’d conveniently brought from home.
It took me a while, but I eventually found an entry that seemed to match the creatures. After closing the book I immediately forgot what they were called, confusing several adjacent pages, and mentally labeled my find the Striped African Tree Rat. I couldn’t imagine how they’d made it all the way to Indiana. Possibly they were an invasive species, brought over in fruit boxes. There certainly seemed to be a lot of them.
I didn’t think too much more about it. The world is flat does not just apply to computers and germs, little creatures can get all over the place thanks to our carelessness, so really, it seemed only mildly strange.
About a year later, I went on a week long trip to Sunriver, Oregon with a couple of my fencing buddies and my godfather Mike. We’d been there for a couple days when the four of us were hanging out on the second floor porch, among the pine trees. I looked out at the endless poles of tree trunks, and on a tree just fifty feet away, I saw one of my Striped African Tree Rats.
They’ve spread, I thought, and before I really had a chance to think, I pointed it out. My godfather gave me his best incredulous look. “Meagan. That’s a chipmunk.”
I know. You’re thinking I’m a moron. Maybe I am.
But last month, with Matt and my parents, I was wandering around the small mammals exhibit when I came across unexpected redemption. In fact, I came across a chipmunk. Behold:
*Ok, yes, I know Cambodia is nowhere near Africa but you have to admit, it’s a freaking chipmunk.
Personal Space (for cats)
We all know cats are territorial animals. When you’re looking to add a second cat to a household, one of the common recommendations is to pay attention to the gender of the cats. The best combinations are Male and Female or Male and Male. Female and Female is about as bad as it gets in terms of creating catfights.
Matt and I didn’t necessarily have a choice when it came to our second cat, or we did, but Tricky (the cat) made it for us. We’d been wondering for a while what to do about the stray cat on Matt’s street that we were both trying to deny we were growing attached to, and when we realized she was pregnant, we felt like we had to adopt her. (Morepictures of kittens and the sleepy mom posted earlier).
We expected problems between Tricky and Chyna, particularly during the pregnant and kitten problem, but we hoped they’d sort of settle down when we moved out, sort of resetting the whole territory issue. It worked to some extent, but there’s always been an undercurrent of tension that rises and falls depending on how much we’re home, the weather, kitty whims. The two of them could be curled up together on the couch and the next day fighting like mortal enemies. Which, in some respects, they probably are.
It took us a while to realize that the largest factor in our cat’s relationship was Matt and my cleanliness.
The apartment is good sized for a one bedroom, about 950 square feet. The bedroom is large, 17X12. For two people, it’s squished, but livable. For two cats, we thought it would be fine, and sometimes it is. Their square footage is more limited than ours because Matt and I are both allergic to cats: they aren’t allowed in the bedroom. That knocks their shared area down to about 750, which you’d think for two small animals, would still be enough.
When we first moved into the condo, we didn’t have nearly enough space. For Matt and me it’s fine, but our stuff is another matter. Between the two of us, we just have too much crap for one small apartment. Slowly we carved through it, donating or throwing away things we didn’t really need. By the time we got married, the boxes of un-placed crap had shrunk considerably, but the newly found carpet space was quickly swallowed up by new boxes: wedding presents.
In theory we ought to have been able to put most of the wedding stuff AWAY somewhere, getting rid of whatever its replacing, but right now we are STILL working on thank you notes (we’re awful) and we don’t want to put anything away until the notes are sent. So we have a permanent collection of stuff piled in one part of the living room. Thanks to this accumilation of stuff, we have now found the exact tipping point for cats that like each other and cats that hate each other. It’s actually pretty fascinating.
When you factor in furniture, appliances and boxes, actual usable space for our cats is probably around 500 square feet. The pure number isn’t the only factor though, much of it has to do with perception. The dining room table for example, doesn’t really take away any space from the cats. If anything, it adds square footage because the cats are able to use the floor beneath it, the chairs (some of their favorite playthings when they’re friends and playing together) and, even though we try to keep them off, the table top itself. This isn’t reality however, because while their usable space is unaffected, there’s a clear disruption in their perception of space: in the form of a big wooden object. This is further complicated if there happens to be clutter on top of the table, or on the chairs. The couch is similar: although it’s their most frequently used pieces of furniture, it’s clearly taking up part of their territorial space.
Our cats are tenuously friends, and they have exactly enough space. The slightest change in perception can make them enemies again. If a stacked box is moved down to the floor, the cats have less space than they did a second ago. The air fills with growls and hisses, often nowhere in the proximity of the guilty box.
My favorite variable is Matt’s drying rack. This is one of the typical college dorm types, light narrow wood, collapsible and flimsy. While it’s being used it’s a nuisance to Matt and I, but doesn’t change the cats’ actual space at all. In spite of that, Matt’s drying rack is guaranteed to cause new fights every time he uses it.
I have to think that purely open space wouldn’t be ideal either. Chyna likes her hiding spots even when she and Tricky aren’t clawing at each other. Tricky meanwhile likes climbing on top of things, being up high. The more open space they have, the happier and less touchy our cats seem to be, but this needs to be balanced with their “safe” places for them to be comfortable. I just think it’s interesting that this can all be changed by something as simple as a wet sweater.
I WARNED You
Still bogged down. Since there have been no votes either way, I’ve decided that what everyone REALLY wants is to see pictures of my cats. MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ok, actually mostly these aren’t pictures just of our cats. A couple years ago we had just one cat, Chyna (the orange one) and lived in a neighborhood with hoards of stray cats. One of them, a grey-brown tabby took over the territory behind the apartment and sort of adopted us. We decided to adopt her perminantly at about the same time we realized she was pregnant.
Tricky was such a tiny cat, under a year herself, and malnourished. All the kittens ended up much bigger, and you can see from her big feet that she probably should have been bigger than she is.
I guess it’s obvious that kittens are tiny, but it’s pretty amazing to see first hand. They pretty much looked like lumps when they came out to the point that it was hard to tell at first how many there were. It was actually a couple days before we were able to verify that there were 6, instead of the 5 the vet had guessed.
Two black kittens, two tabbys like Tricky, a grey and white, and a spotted tabby with white markings.
Kittens defy gravity.
Chyna was a little nervous about all the weird smells coming from the kitten room. (Actually, I think she just likes to hide.)
As the kittens got bigger I started to modify their box, giving them things to play with and on and scratch. It wasn’t long before they were all able to climb out of the box.
They may look cute, but trust me, they’re little monsters. Cute monsters.
They did seem to enjoy some of the constructions I made for them. It gave me good ideas for when we have room to make perminant kitty structures.
They pretty much destroyed everything they touched. Including the skin on my back.
Even though they got out of the box within a couple weeks, it wasn’t a total loss since they apprently liked hiding behind it.
The more enthusiastic the kittens got, the more nervous Chyna got.
You can’t really blame her. They’re fearless little furballs.
All the kittens had distinct personalities. The spotted tabby, the only girl of the bunch, was very social and liked sitting on my shoulder. I miss her. Fortunately we were able to place all the kittens. The two black cats went with a friend from school, I think they’re named Fred (or Frank?) and George. One of the tabbys, which had extra toes, was adopted by my friend Amy and named Zoe (it’s a boy though), the other Tabby went to our friend Justin — named Loki (it fits) the grey and white kitten went to our friends John and Holly and is named Baxter, and the spotted tabby, Lucy, went to a waitress/owner of our favorite Lebonese place. Sadly, she’s the one I never see. 
Tricky was pretty exhausted. I think she was a bit worried as the kittens disappeared one by one (Baxter being the last one left, got cleaned six times as much as usual), but once they were all gone she didn’t seem bothered. She’s plump and healthy now, and extremely happy to be an indoor kitty. A couple of the photos have larger versions if you click on them.
My Cat is a Sim
If you’ve ever played the Sims, the addictive game of doing nothing (you create mini-people and live their lives), you may be familiar with a frustrating glitch in the original game. It goes something like this. Your Sim is flithy and crying about being so filthy. Since it’s not smart enough to go take a bath on its own, you instruct it to do so. The Sim goes to the bath only to find that you’ve installed it in the wrong spot.
Once you notice that the bath is in the wrong place, the obvious thing to do is move it, but you can’t do this. That’s because your Sim is busy not using it.
Your Sim goes to take a bath. It sees that the bath is inaccessible and displays a thought bubble with a totally incomprehensible set of squares (which I eventually realized means “blocked”). It spins in a circle and tries, unsuccessfully, to use the blocked bath again. This continues forever until your Sim pauses to cry a little more, then it starts all over again.
In the game this is beyond annoying, I’ve actually had characters die under similar circumstances (got stuck trying to go down the stairs and ended up starving to death). When my cat does it though, it’s almost funny.
Matt and I have converted our dining room into an office/studio/computer room. When I’m sitting at my desk, Tricky likes to curl up on my lap, which is pretty typical cat behavior. Occasionally things don’t go as smoothly as she’d like.
There are two main paths Tricky uses to get to my lap. One is from below: she can crawl onto a low shelf near my legs. The other is from the back. She climbs onto the very top of Matt’s chair, which is somewhat lower than my chair, and jumps from there to the back of my chair, then over my shoulder to my lap. This was cute the first few times she did it, but quickly grew tiresome, especially when claws were employed to keep her from falling off one chair or the other. Or one back or the other, when she missed the chair.
When Matt’s not here, we turn his chair around so she can’t reach my chair from the back. The other pathway wasn’t intentionally blocked, but a box on the shelf made it impossible for Tricky to climb up that way.
So my cat goes CRAZY.
First she tries the low path, jumping up behind the box, sort of twitching in place, looking for a way around it. Then she jumps down and climbs up on Matt’s chair, eying the distance and realizing she can’t make the jump. Then she jumps off the chair and goes up on the shelf behind the box again, to see if anything has changed. This can go on for twenty minutes or so before she gives up and leaves, but she’s usually back, following the same routine, within minutes.
This would be extremely funny if it weren’t so pathetic. For one thing, the whole time she’s doing this she’s mewing tragically. I’ve even picked her up and put her in my lap, but she usually jumps right back down. She doesn’t want that, she wants her path cleared. The other reason it’s pathetic is that apparently my cat’s intelligence is roughly equal to a glitchy computer character.
Or maybe not. Dr. Temple Grandin is an animal behavior specialist famous for revolutionizing slaughterhouses and a number of breakthroughs into animal psyche (she’s also autistic). Grandin says that repetitive behavior in animals is a sign that something is wrong.
Animals exhibit repetition, like a bigger cat at the zoo pacing in its cage, when a basic need is unmet. The big cats, for example are exhibiting searching behavior, because they have nothing to hunt. In other words they’re bored, but pathologically so.
My cat is a notoriously clingy cat. She needs to be pet all the time and will roll over in front of my feet for attention whenever I walk pretty much anywhere. She’s gotten better, but she really does NEED much more attention than most cats. She was also a stray for the first year of her life.
So maybe my cat is pacing back and forth behind my chair like a zoo cat because she needs more affection. She’s got abandonment issues, or wasn’t loved as a kitten, or she associates touch with a food source, or she has kitty PTSD, or, or…
Or maybe my cat’s just dumb.
The Joy of Lying to Small Children
Yesterday I spent a couple hours at the Great Lakes Science Center. With Santa Claus.
Matt started working at SecureState back in April, and a couple weeks ago, when they brought up the charity effort of the holiday season, he volunteered to be Santa. I haven’t spent much time in the science center but I always have fun there, it’s more of a children’s museum than a boring-type museum and I’m pretty immature so it all works out well.
Transforming Matt into Santa Claus took a desperate twenty minutes with various padding experiments. Matt’s got the sparkling blue eyes, the red cheeks, the glasses, but other than that there’s really not much resemblance. 
The biggest problem was that the pillow thing doesn’t work. We tried four different pillows and they all created a square belly. Even the feather pillow. We were afraid we would have to let him go as a skinny Santa, and that would have been awesome because he looked more like the Grinch than anything, but eventually we managed a somewhat natural lump of fat using a towel for the belly and a scarf as man-boobs. He looked ok from the side, and while sitting, but the silhouette from behind was very decidedly NOT jolly enough. We did the best we could, and the kids young enough to believe in Santa didn’t seem to notice. Anyway, the red beard peaking out from the white was a much bigger giveaway, so I guess the uneaven towel fat wasn’t that big a deal.
When we got there, the rest of the SecureState group were setting up for the event. The room had a bunch of freaky science-y equipment up on a stage, which we hoped the kids would ignore, but Matt and I agreed must be some kind of super energy weapon for the REALLY naughty kids.
Since I didn’t quite know what I should be doing, I wandered around for a while trying to keep out of the way. I had a plan if any of the kids asked me who I was supposed to be. I figured I’d tell them that I’m half-elf. The pointy ears are recessive. Duh.
I think the plan was for all the kids to come in with their families and sit down and be called up, table by table, to get their food, their quality time with Santa, and of course, their presents. (And no, they weren’t creepy disfigured smily-faced children, that’s just my way of protecting the innocent and such.) Of course it didn’t happen that way, but eventually everyone settled down, and Matt seemed to be doing a good job Santa-ing. I mostly stayed on the other side of the room because I figured it would be weird for the kids if I accidentally called Santa “babe” or you know, kissed him. I mean, the fake beard was a pretty good reminder, but just to be safe.
After the presents were handed out, they actually had LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. Ok, so it was a pre-teen dance team, but they were actually very good. I’m not sure all the kids enjoyed it, because, yeah eight year old boys love nothing more than ballet, right? Many of the kids were too young to sit still and watch dancing, but I saw at least one group of completely enthralled girls, and, hey, I was pretty impressed.
The older group had serious skills, and the kids in the younger group were surprisingly good for their size (guessing 7-11 year olds) and TOTAL hams. They were adorable. Also, at one point, their music broke down and while it was being fixed they improvised with Christmas carols. They actually sounded good. If you’ve ever heard, or been in a children’s choir, you realize how completely unlikely that is.
The day seemed to go well. The kids all looked very happy and even the parents and organizers were far less harried than you would expect in an activity involving just under a hundred children. We’d planned to leave before everyone else in typical Santa style, and enjoy the museum for a while, but since Matt was sweaty, overheated, and you know, still Santa, we decided we’d wait it out and then go to lunch instead. Once the kids left I got to take my turn sitting in Santa’s lap. I got a little freaked out when I saw the photo because I look even younger than I usually do: I look more like just another one of the kids sitting on Santa’s lap than an adult being a smartass. I’m 27, I swear.
Missing Instincts
Matt and I have two cats, Tricky and Chyna. Both were rescue cats and with both we have to wonder how they possibly survived for more than a week on the streets.
Chyna just isn’t that bright, but Tricky has some oddities that seem like they ought to have reduced her likelihood of survival. My favorite example is how she begs.
It doesn’t at all surprise me that a stray cat would be good at begging. Tricky’s got the techniques down pat: she mews pathetically, paces behind you, and stares wide eyed at whatever you’re preparing. It doesn’t matter what you take from the fridge: celery to shrimp, if Tricky is in the mood to beg, she’ll be appear as soon as you step into the kitchen.
The weird part is what she does if you give in to her charms: nothing. To be more specific, she looks at the piece of ham or shrimp or cheese you’ve laid down on a plate for her, then looks back up at you like: what is this crap? Apparently Tricky doesn’t like people food. Sometimes she’ll play with it.
This isn’t limited to people food though, I think tricky only eats cat food socially. Often I’ll wake up in the morning to have Tricky making “feed me” noises only to go to her bowl and find it still half full from the night before. As soon as she sees that I’m about to pour new food in her bowl she starts eating the old stuff.
When she was a stray, sometimes Matt and I would put out food for her: everything from dry science diet to canned popular cat food with the nutritional equivalent of Doritos. She always mewed eagerly, then promptly ignored the dish as soon as we put it down for her. At the time we thought this was because other people must be feeding her too, but now we’re not so sure. She has kitty rickets. When we finally adopted her we thought she was fat but it turned out she was pregnant (with six little kitty fetuses), and even then we had to coax her to eat the food we put out for her.
Part of the issue may be that Tricky was clearly a hunter. It took her a while to learn to play: at first she merely “caught” whatever we were playing with and quickly “killed” it, then lost interest. Possibly she would more happily eat chipmunk corpses than kitty kibble, or even cooked chicken. It seems unlikely to me however that Tricky could have survived for nearly a year without relying somewhat on trashpickings or charity.
Chyna is even less interested in people food, she doesn’t even beg. While we’re eating dinner, sometimes she’ll climb onto our laps and want to sniff what we’re eating, but then shows no further interest. It’s kind of weird, but we’ve never bothered to discourage it since she isn’t actually trying to take the food. In fact the only non cat food that either of them like is tuna, which must be a cat universal.
Tricky and Chyna are both happily plump kitties now, so they’re clearly getting enough to eat. We should count ourselves lucky that we can leave dinner unattended without having it be snatched by a greedy cat, so I’m not complaining. It’s just another one of those peculiarities that makes me wonder what’s going on in those little brains.
$100 Laptop Plug
And speaking of laptops…
Actually, it’s $200, and for those of us in rich countries it’s $400. I’m talking of course, about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Get one, Give one deal.
I did a whole analytical post on the design of these tiny laptops last year, so I won’t repeat myself with full details. About their design I will simply say that they are cute, green (in color, not sure about eco) and look like they were made by fisher-price (they’re not). Judging by their appearance they should be pretty durable, a necessity for computers designed for children in any country.
The philosophy behind this computer is that the best way to educate kids in developing countries is to give them super intuitive computers and let them teach themselves. The software is designed to help kids learn as they go, with simple graphics and interface. I believe the operating system is open source, so as the kids grow, learning to program along the way, they can change it to suit their needs. To me, that sounds like a good deal for kids of this country as well.
I haven’t had a chance to play with one, but I ran into a guy in the Chicago train station who had one. He wasn’t at all tecky, and claimed that it was very easy to use and understand (which it would have to be). Basically, these are machines that are meant to be teachers. Learning is mostly self directed, but with ample opportunities for cooperation using the kid friendly graphic network.
As I understand it they aren’t particularly powerful. Since the purpose isn’t to run high quality graphics or store lots of data, it doesn’t need to be. For $400 dollars you can buy a laptop that is much more powerful than this one, but I’m pretty sure you can’t buy a computer that is more suited to a child’s needs for any amount. It was just as cute in person as it is in pictures, but one thing to note for any adults that might want to use them: the keyboards are TINY.
I’m mentioning this deal is because last year, they stopped it immediately after Christmas, with no guarantee that they would bring it back. That meant that while you still had the option of donating a OLPC laptop to a kid in a developing country, you can’t actually get one. With any luck they will bring it back next year, but the guy who runs the program doesn’t seem to like doing that, so who knows? Not sure what he has against people in developed countries having the OLPC computers. I think people who come up with wonderful ideas are not always the best people to sell them.
If I had the cash to spare, I’d buy one just to play with it. I’d like to learn to program, and I figure something that is designed to teach children to program might help me as well. If you are looking for a way to start a child with computers, the OLPC laptop seems like the best choice. I’m pretty sure it’s at least a better investment than an Xbox or a PS3, but that could just be my Nintendo bias sneaking out.
*Photos from OLPC Photostream on Flickr and OLPC website. Linked to source.
