How a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind.

William Kamkwamba’s parents couldn’t afford the $80 yearly tuition for their son’s school. The boy sneaked into the classroom anyway, dodging administrators for a few weeks until they caught him. Still emaciated from the recent deadly famine that had killed friends and neighbors, he went back to work on his family’s corn and tobacco farm in rural Malawi, Africa.

With no hope of getting the funds to go back to school, William continued his education by teaching himself, borrowing books from the small library at the elementary school in his village. One day, when William was 14, he went to the library searching for an English-Chichewa dictionary to find out what the English word “grapes” meant, and came across a fifth-grade science book called Using Energy. Describing this moment in his autobiography, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (co-written with Bryan Mealer), William wrote, “The book has since changed my life.”

Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his disposal, and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected things that most people would consider garbage—slime-clogged plastic pipes, a broken bicycle, a discarded tractor fan—and assembled them into a wind-powered dynamo. For a soldering iron, he used a stiff piece of wire heated in a fire. A bent bicycle spoke served as a size adapter for his wrenches.

Months later, in front of a crowd of disbelievers who had scoffed at him for behaving strangely, William lashed his machine to the top of a 16-foot tower made from blue gum tree branches. As the blades began turning in the breeze, a car light bulb in William’s hand started to glow. In the weeks that followed, William went on to wire his house with four light bulbs and two radios, installing switches made from rubber sandals, and scratch-building a circuit breaker to keep the thatch roof of his house from catching fire.

He begged his parents to send him to school—he had big dreams for modernizing his village and needed to learn more math, physics, and electricity to realize them—but they barely had enough money to feed him and his five sisters.

William and his windmill remained a local curiosity for a number of months, until the head of a national teacher’s organization saw the windmill and recognized the boy’s accomplishment as something extraordinary. A media firestorm ensued, with newspaper articles, blog posts, radio stories, and a presentation at TED Africa in Tanzania (TED stands for Technology Entertainment Design), where William, who didn’t  know about laptop computers and had never heard of Google, discovered airplanes, mattresses, hotels, air conditioning, and the mind-boggling concept of having as much food as you wanted whenever you wanted it. Befriended by Tom Rielly, TED’s irrepressible and well-connected partnership director, William was taken on a tour of the United States, where he met many high-tech millionaires who were charmed by the instantly likable underdog who never complained about the lousy cards he got dealt in the game of life. They happily contributed to William’s plans to electrify, irrigate, and educate his village, as well as pay his tuition at the prestigious African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg.

With so many tales of bloody hopelessness coming out of Africa, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind reads like a novel with a happy ending, even though it’s just the beginning for this remarkable young man, now 21 years old. I have no doubt that William—who is rapidly becoming a symbol of promise and possibility for the people of Africa—will be leading the way.

LEARN MORE

Watch a short documentary about William Kamkwamba here.

Find The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer on Amazon.

Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine and the founder of Boing Boing. He is currently writing a book on the do-it-yourself movement for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.

Photos by Tom Rielly

Want to see with your tongue? Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz looks at technology that blurs the boundaries between our five senses.

What if you could see with your skin? Or taste what you see? While those kinds of experiences might suggest a mental disorder, or an acid trip, the ability to substitute your senses by choice is on the horizon. A confluence of new technologies are leading to a kind of digital synesthesia.

Synesthesia, of course, is the fascinating neurological phenomenon whereby stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers another sensory pathway. A synesthete might taste sounds or hear colors. But the ability to reroute the senses could dramatically help blind individuals, for example, or restore the sense of touch to amputees wearing prosthetic limbs.

At Institute for the Future, where I’m a researcher, my colleagues and I have spent the last few months exploring the notion that “everything is programmable,” or will be soon. The idea is that emerging technologies—from pervasive computers to synthetic biology—are making it possible to program our bodies and our worlds to desired specifications. Increasingly, we are looking at the entire world through a computational lens. As part of that research, we’ve been collecting “signals”—events, developments, articles, scientific publications—that taken together, give indications of key trends. We’ve entered these in our public Signtific signals database and tagged them based on their subject matter. I’ve found many research efforts suggesting how we may reprogram our senses in the future.

For example, there are the “Flavor Tripping” parties fueled by Synsepalum dulcificum, aka “Miracle Fuit,” the West African berry that temporarily reprograms your taste buds to make anything sour or bitter taste perfectly sweet. And there’s the story of Daniel Kish, the blind psychologist who, by clicking his tongue, uses echolocation to “see.” In the realm of digital synesthesia, numerous projects are attempting to leverage tactile feedback in the form of clothing outfitted with tiny vibrators. Instead of picking up your phone to read a text message, you might feel the words spelled on your back.

The late Paul Bach-y-Rita could be considered the father of all technology used to reprogram the human senses. In 1963, Bach-y-Rita developed a “Tactile to Visual Sensory Substitution” device. It converted images from a camera to tactile sensations that a blind person could feel on his or her back. Bach-y-Rita’s research was all based on the notion of “sensory substitution.” The brain, he argued, was not hardwired and that a working sense, say touch, could be used to replace a failing one, e.g. vision. His ideas around the plasticity of the human brain were very controversial at the time but widely accepted today. He continued his research on sensory substitution technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his company Wicab, until his death in 2007.

“I can connect anything to anything,” Bach-y-Rita said in a profile in The Telegraph shortly before his death:

We see with our brains, not with our eyes. When a blind man uses a cane he sweeps it back and forth, and has only one point, the tip, feeding him information through the skin receptors in the hand. Yet this sweeping allows him to sort out where the doorjamb is, or the chair, or distinguish a foot when he hits it, because it will give a little. Then he uses this information to guide himself to the chair to sit down. Though his hand sensors are where he gets the information and where the cane “interfaces” with him, what he perceives is not the cane’s pressure on his hand but the layout of the room: chairs, walls, feet, the three-dimensional space. The receptor surface in the hand becomes merely a relay for information, a data port.

In the latest incarnation of Bach-y-Rita’s work, the data port is the tongue. The company he co-founded, Wicab, has developed a visual prosthetic for the blind that converts images from a video camera into tactile sensations on the tongue. The system, called BrainPort, pairs a head-mounted digital video camera with a postage stamp-size electrode array that sits on the tongue. A small computer translates the visual information into a pattern that is “displayed” on the tongue.

“The tactile image is created by presenting white pixels from the camera as strong stimulation, black pixels as no stimulation, and gray levels as medium levels of stimulation, with the ability to invert contrast when appropriate,” reads the company’s website. “Users often report the sensation as pictures that are painted on the tongue with champagne bubbles.”

The BrainPort is not yet FDA approved, but clinical studies have been quite exciting. During trials, blind test subjects had their brains scanned while using the device. Interestingly, even though the device provides tactile sensation, visual regions of the brain were activated.

Seeing with your tongue may seem unusual, but arguably not as weird as “skin vision.” A researcher at Tel Aviv University suggests that humans might be able to “see” with their skin. Engineering professor Leonid Yaroslavsky hopes that through biomimicry, new kinds of imaging technology might be developed that obviates traditional optics. Yaroslavsky presented his theories on the subject in a scientific book titled Advances in Information Optics and Photonics. From an American Friends of Tel Aviv University press release:

Skin vision is not uncommon in nature. Plants orient themselves to light, and some animals—such as pit vipers, who use infrared vision, and reptiles, who possess skin sensors—can “see” without the use of eyes. Skin vision in humans is likely a natural atavistic ability involving light-sensitive cells in our skin connected to neuro-machinery in the body and in the brain, explains Prof. Yaroslavsky.

While the first people to reprogram their senses are likely to be people with a sense that has failed them, the technology will likely trickle down. Eventually, the hard lines between our five senses may be blurred. And in a world where everything is programmable, five may be a choice, not a limit.

Do you see what I’m saying?

David Pescovitz is co-editor of Boing Boing, a research director at Institute for the Future, and editor-at-large of MAKE.

The Global Lives Project is creating a video cross-section of humanity.

Rumi Nagashima, 22, navigates Tokyo in her wheelchair on the way to a girl scout meeting where she’s the troop leader. In Ngawle Village, Malawi, Edith Kapuka, 13, is playing ball with her school friends before walking a trail to her small hut. Across the world in San Francisco, James Bullock, 57, steers his cable car up San Francisco’s steep hills. And you? You’re in the middle of it all. An array of video projectors immerses you in a day in the life of everyday people around the world. Look left, and there’s Israel Feliciano, 23, a hip-hop singer in a favela of São Paulo, Brazil. Behind you is Muttu Kumar, 18, a postcard vendor hawking his wares in Hampi, India. This is an installation of the Global Lives Project, a volunteer effort originally launched to “record 24 hours in the lives of ten people that roughly represent the diversity our planet’s population.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

In college, Harris spent 8 months in a study abroad program living in five very different places, from a bamboo house in the Philippines to a mansion in New Delhi to a squatter settlement in Mexico City. He studied economic development in those places, but found that just living with his local families taught him the most. It was the culture shock and eventual intimacy that led to Global Lives, he says. Shortly after his trip, Harris and a friend conducted the first shoot, with the San Francisco cable car driver who also happens to surf. After graduation, Harris moved to São Paulo, Brazil where he connected with the Museum of the Person, a key partner in the project. From there, the Global Lives story spread organically online, and volunteers—students, documentary filmmakers, journalists—stepped up to shoot in places like Japan, China, Lebanon, Serbia, and Indonesia.

Now, the organization is a full-fledged non-profit with a network of unpaid collaborators around the world. As such, there isn’t one person, Harris or anyone else, who picks the subjects of the shoots. Rather, there’s a carefully-constructed set of criteria designed to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. Local teams participate in a process-of-elimination procedure with the broader Global Lives network. The six selection criteria include world region, population density, gender, age, religion, and income.

“When Global Lives got started, our core objective was to record the daily lives of ten people who were ‘roughly representative of the world’s population,’” Harris says. “‘Roughly’ is probably the most important word to remember there. The Global Lives Project is not a scientific endeavor to classify and present the human species under a microscope, but rather an artistic and educational undertaking, seeking to transform people’s understanding of the world by doing a pretty good job of showing them what it’s like to live a day in a human body.”

Continuing the community-minded thread of the project, all of the footage is released under a Creative Commons license, permitting free downloads and redistribution. And while the original Global Lives story is nearing its completion—the tenth shoot is now being scheduled in south central Asia—the project has, well, taken on a life of its own.

The Museum of the Person produced a guide to taping one person for 24 hours, hoping that others around the world will pick up a camera. Indeed, Harris is currently working with the Internet Archive to develop a system for storing and managing the terabytes of raw footage streaming in from every shoot. And that’s no easy task when you consider the project’s revised, and lofty, goal of collecting, digitizing, and sharing the myriad human realities that the world has to offer.

“With the momentum we’ve established, we’re hoping that Global Lives will grow into an online library of human life experiences,” Harris says.

David Pescovitz is co-editor of Boing Boing, a research director at Institute for the Future, and editor-at-large of MAKE.

A host of shady online services is making it easy to lie and cheat.

Are you sick of lying, cheating, and stealing the old-fashioned way? Of course you are—it’s too hard. Who wants to spend all that time and effort cooking up excuses, ruses, and swindles to deceive unwitting victims, when you could be enjoying your ill-gotten gains?

Good news! There’s no need to abandon your commitment to indolence. A raft of new online services is making it easy for shirkers, layabouts, mountebanks, and freeloaders to deceive their employers, IRS agents, professors, spouses, children, and others. Here’s a brief tour through this online mall of deception.

Fake ATM Receipts
customreceipts.com

It’s a known fact: chicks dig rich guys. But how are you going to score when you’re almost broke? Carny rolls don’t work like they used to (and besides, if you flash one, you might be expected to use it). No, today’s smart grifters log on to Custom Receipts and order fake ATM slips that’ll trick the objects of their affection into believing they’ve got mountains of money in the bank. As the site recommends: “Hand out your number on the back of one of our fake ATM receipts. They’re a player’s dream come true.”

Only $16 for a stack of 52, one for every week of the year.

Alibi Network
alibinetwork.com

After you’ve hooked up with some honey whose fallen for your ATM receipt trick, you’ll probably want to start spending a little quality time with her at that $29.99 motel across town. But what about that nosy spouse of yours at home, the one who is always interfering with your personal life? Get yourself over to the Alibi Network and set yourself up with a bulletproof excuse that will fool even the shrewdest shrew. From their website:

The basic concept is rather simple: we invent, create and provide alibis and excuses for people wishing to justify absences. These alibis can take various forms: a telephone call simulating work emergency or car accident, an invitation to a classical music event, a letter documenting your participation in a sales seminar, a Dallas Cowboys football game or a Britney Spears concert ticket…

They’ll even “provide you with seminar handout and certificate of achievement or the program of an event to which you were invited.” Won’t wifey be proud of your accomplishment.

Fees for the alibi service start at $75. (Governor Sanford, give us a call.)

Fake Receipt Generator
theflashblog.com

This is the free gift that keeps on giving. Pad your expense account. Sweeten your Schedule C. Accidentally leave one of these in the gift box to make that $8 necklace look like it cost $295. Ka-ching—those receipts add up quick. The uses for this customizable receipt maker are limited only by your insatiable desire to avoid doing the right thing.

Corrupted Word Files
corrupted-files.com

What is it with professors and their rigid rules about turning in papers by a certain time and date? Do they really expect a free spirit such as you to adhere to their patched-sleeve, tweedy, uptight schedules? Deadlines are for squares and businesspigs only—down with the man! For $4.95, this site will sell you a “wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC.” That pointy-head geek will waste all weekend trying to open your “term paper” while you wait for the folks at PaperMasters.com to hurry the hell up and finish your real report so you can turn it in Monday morning with an “I swear I’m gonna go back to using a typewriter!” grin. Hey, Mr. Professor, put that in your carved Marx-head briar pipe and smoke it.

If the idea of using these kinds of services appeals to you, remember that getting caught can lead to fines, prison time, or moving into a dingy studio apartment and fighting a losing custody battle for your kids. A quick review of the IRS’s tax fraud penalty page could make you think twice about using bogus receipts to pad your expenses. Even the deception merchants are starting to feel the heat: in early July one of the more notorious fake-receipt generating services, falseexpenses.com, dropped off the face of the Web after a recent blitz of blog-fueled publicity. Why, things have gotten so bad it almost makes you want to give up and resort to a life of integrity.

Social media meets social unrest in Guatemala

Guatemala is in the throes of its most intense political convulsions since a bloody 36-year civil war ended in 1996. A president accused of assassination by the victim himself, from beyond the grave; government officials accused of corrupt dealings with one of the country’s largest banks; thousands marching in the street, week after week, demanding an end to impunity.

And in this crisis, online social networks such as Twitter and YouTube have become key, dynamic forces. Some are calling this “the Twitter Revolution.”

The current crisis was sparked by a viral video: one recorded by attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg four days before he was murdered. The 18-minute testimony begins with the words, “If you are watching this message it is because I have been murdered by President Álvaro Colom.” In the video, Rosenberg claimed he would be targeted because he planned to come forward with evidence that Colom’s government engaged in drug money laundering and misuse of public funds through a partly state-owned bank.

Rosenberg’s allegations have yet to be proven or disproven. Colom and his administration have blamed the murder on crime syndicates reacting to new measures to crack down on organized crime. Colom is Guatemala’s first left-leaning president since a U.S.-organized coup overthrew Jacobo Arbenz nearly 50 years ago, and his supporters claim he has been framed by right-wing political opponents.

Regardless of who killed Rosenberg, and why, his death wasn’t an unusual occurrence. Last year, more than than 6,000 people were murdered here. Political assassinations, death threats against human rights workers, “disappearances,” and seemingly random killings traced to leftover death squad operatives who’ve found postwar work in the drug trade—they’re all normal. Death defines Guatemala. You don’t have be involved in politics or social justice to be at risk. According to a United Nations study, some 97 percent of crimes here never go to trial. This is a country where one can easily and literally get away with murder.

Rosenberg’s video was handed out on DVDs at his funeral. The footage spread within days to YouTube and other video networks. Soon, it was the focal point of chatter among mostly young Guatemalans (who are more well-off than Guatemala’s extremely poor majority) on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Hi5. Users followed those conversations by searching for the hashtag #escandalogt—shorthand for “Guatemalan Scandal.”  Remixes of the video soon appeared online, along with subtitled versions and amateur op-ed responses to the claims therein.

Those same social networks also played a role in organizing massive demonstrations in the country’s capital, Guatemala City. Crowds one weekend were estimated to be between 30,000 and 50,000. Roughly that same number have signed petitions calling for Colom to be stripped of the immunity from prosecution that Guatemalan law grants elected officials. Newspapers in Guatemala credited social networks such as Facebook and Hi5 with “summoning” the petition signers.

Many protest participants wore white, to symbolize an end to violence, and they became known as the “tsunami blanco.” Web-savvy news organizations (namely Libertopolis.com and Prensa Libre) broadcast live video of the protests online, right there in the streets, using laptops, cellular data cards, and free streaming video services like Ustream.

Despite widespread fears the protests would turn violent, and even with government-organized pro-Colom demonstrations just blocks away (the administration is said to have spent millions of quetzales in public funds to organize the events, pay poor participants, and bus them in by the thousands from the country’s interior), street activity has been peaceful so far.

But backlash to online activity has been intense, notably from the sector of Guatemala’s government that controls the country’s financial system. One Twitter user was arrested, jailed, and faces up to 10 years in prison for having posted a single 96-character tweet about the bank at the center of the corruption scandal. Guatemala’s Supervisor of Banks, Édgar Barquín, has proposed sweeping controls on internet use, including a requirement that anyone who wants to log on in an internet café must first register their national ID card (cedula) at the front desk.

In keeping with the hall-of-mirrors, telenovela-like surreality that marks Guatemalan politics, Colom’s chief political rival—former Army general Otto Perez Molina—recently denounced a purported plot to assassinate him. Colom’s party dismissed those claims as having been fabricated “for show.” On Twitter, some countered that the lack of institutional ability to investigate any crime is the root of the current crisis, so all claims of threats should be treated with equal respect and due process.

“All we are saying is give the rule of law a chance,” one “tuitero” direct-messaged me.

“Who are we supposed to trust when all of the institutions of the state are compromised?,” tweeted another.

That overwhelming lack of faith in any state institutions is what many outside of Guatemala see as most concerning.

A recent article in The Economist suggests Guatemala is now well on its way to becoming a “failed state.” Some op-ed writers in Guatemalan papers responded defensively. But the longer Rosenberg’s symbolically important case goes unsolved, the longer corruption is perceived as unchecked, the longer the already horrific violent crime stats in Guatemala continue to climb, and the greater the risk of total collapse.

And as this wired generation of Guatemalan citizens demand transparency and change in new ways, our own newly minted government—which promised change—has just ruled that the CIA continue to maintain the secrecy of records related to America’s involvement in the Guatemalan civil war.

Guatemalan human rights organizations want access to these documents to help solve the cases of assassinations and disappearances from that era, and bring those responsible to justice. Many military figures from that era remain active political figures in Guatemala. There is good reason to believe that a lack of consequence for past killings has created the “killer’s paradise” that exists here.

Even the “tuiteros” exhilarated by their own newfound, potent public voice fear the darker aspect of that history will repeat.

“The problem is that sooner or later, they’re going to persecute us,” tweeted one. “Just like they did the so-called ‘communists’ of the ’60s  and ’70s.”

LEARN MORE
See more images of the protests via Flickr user Surizar.
Read more about the “Twitter Revolution” on Boing Boing (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Find background on the recent United States court ruling here and the ruling itself (pdf) here.

Xeni Jardin is a Boing Boing tv host and executive producer, and Boing Boing blog co-editor living in Los Angeles, CA.

Photos by flickr (cc) user Surizar.

Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin explains how fast people can still enjoy slow food.

When the economy took a nosedive, I did the same thing a lot of other Americans did: I looked at my household expenses and my lifestyle with newly frugal eyes, and began thinking about costs and personal priorities in new ways. That included food.

Rethinking what I cook and eat post-econopocalypse meant simpler, slower food; a more local and traditional diet which, in fact, makes good sense in any economic weather. But I live an urban life. I spend a lot of time online or working in short attention bursts. I don’t have a lot of time to cook or prepare food, and my city apartment doesn’t afford room to raise goats or grow tomatoes. Despite this, I’ve gradually eased into a number of new rituals and good habits that reduced my grocery bill and make me feel happier and healthier. One of them is making yogurt each week.

It takes maybe 20 minutes of actual work and attention, zero equipment beyond stuff I already had in my kitchen, and yields a yummier, healthier, and yes, “probiotic” product that costs five to 10 times less than the store-bought stuff.

Here are the basics of rolling your own yogurt the lazy Xeni way. First, choose your starter culture. You can order this online, get it from a fellow slow foodie obsessive, or just do it slacker-style, like me: Buy a small single-serving container of plain yogurt at the corner bodega. Any brand with live Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus cultures will work ($.99 worth of the ubiquitous Dannon does just fine). The instructions that follow are for homemade yogurt with other yogurt as a starter.

Next, pick your milk. I use organic 2 percent, but whole milk is even richer. I don’t like the more acidic taste or runny texture of yogurt made with lower-fat milks (though you can add dry milk powder to these to compensate). Full-fat soy milk will work if you’re vegan, but it forms a more gelatinous “set” than cow or goat milk.

Next, heat your fresh milk to 180–190 degrees Fahrenheit, which is right about when it starts to steam and form little bubbles. Heating to this point changes the structure of whey proteins within the milk, and helps ensure a nice consistency. I improvised a double boiler for heating milk like this: Half-fill a large, wide metal pot with water, and set a metal bowl filled with milk in the middle of that pot. Boil the water, and stir the milk in the bowl that floats in that water.

When you’ve scalded the milk, let it cool off to about 110–120 degrees. If you have a thermometer in your kitchen, use it. If you don’t (and I still don’t), do the “baby bottle” test: dribble a few drops on the inside of your wrist. If it feels really warm but doesn’t burn your skin there, it’s just right.

When you’ve cooled the milk to this temperature, whisk in (or stir with a spoon—whatever!) two tablespoons of yogurt. This can be the store-bought yogurt, or the last two spoons from your last batch of homemade stuff. I like to thin it down with a bit of the warm milk before I stir it in, to make sure it’s evenly distributed.

Now you need to incubate. After you’ve mixed your “innoculation” yogurt into the warm milk, pour the “innoculated” milk into a sterilized glass jar or other container, cover it, and keep it still and warm for about four to five hours until it sets. I just cover that same metal bowl I used to scald the milk, so I don’t have to bother sterilizing another dish to pour it into. Sometimes, I’ll instead use a bunch of small ceramic cups, sterilized by running them through my dishwasher. All your equipment should be sterile, because you don’t want to introduce any other bacterial contaminants that could prevent the yogurt from setting.

To keep it warm during that four to five hour setting period, I wrap my metal bowl in some kitchen towels, and leave the swaddled bowl in the oven with the pilot light on. And really now: leave it alone in there! It’s like rising bread dough. If you jiggle it or poke at it, you’ll mess up the setting process. Go play Warcraft while you wait, do some email, whatever, but don’t fuss with it.

As soon as your yogurt sets, stick it in the fridge to allow it to further firm, and halt acid production. If you leave it in “incubation” mode too long, it will become harsh tasting, and eventually, the whey will separate. You don’t want this.

Here are a few websites I bookmarked when I was making yogurt for the first time. Some of these offer suggestions on other cool stuff you can do with yogurt, like straining it through cheesecloth to make the thick “Greek style” kind, or using it to produce other products like yogurt cheese. It never lasts long enough in my home for any of this fancy stuff, though. A spoonful of local raw honey, maybe a handful of nuts or fresh seasonal fruit, a pinch of salt—nom nom nom.

Some of the websites listed below offer equally easy alternatives to my “oven pilot light” method for incubating the yogurt. You can set your milk on a heating pad overnight, or pour it into jars resting inside an insulated beach cooler filled with warm water. But isn’t this great? You don’t have to buy a yogurt-making machine, and there are a number of ways to reliably produce delicious creamy yogurt with stuff you have lying around the house already. Cheap, easy, lazy, yummy. Enjoy!

LEARN MORE

Fankhauser’s Yogurt Making Illustrated

University of Missouri Extension

National Center for Food Preservation

Harold McGee’s “Curious Cook” column in The New York Times

Wild Fermentation, which is a website and a terrific book.

Xeni Jardin is a Boing Boing tv host and executive producer, and Boing Boing blog co-editor living in Los Angeles, CA.

Photos by flickr user (cc) Biology Big Brother

Water levels are falling in America’s largest reservoir. If it dries up, so could power and water for much of the Southwest.

Imagine Nevada’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, as a great sand pit, and imagine the population of the western United States as a colossal ostrich burying its head in the pit. And now, imagine the sand level dropping so fast that the willfully ignorant bird is forced to confront the fact that Lake Mead may actually become as dry as a sand pit in a decade.

Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.

The combination of a changing climate and a strong demand for the lake’s remaining water has resulted in 100 foot drop since 2000. While that’s just 10 percent under the lake’s high water mark in 1983, Lake Mead is like a martini glass—wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. That 10 percent dip represents a loss of half Lake Mead’s water supply in nine years, from 96 percent capacity to 43 percent.

Anyone who’s gone on a diet knows this simple equation: if you burn fewer calories than you eat, you’ll gain weight. But like a cheating dieter in Superman’s Bizarro world, the Western United States has been sucking more water out of Lake Mead than the dwindling Colorado River can provide to replace it. When output is greater than input, the reservoir shrinks.

And it continues to shrink. Lake Mead’s water level fell 14 feet last year, and the Bureau of Reclamation has projected the level will drop 14 more feet this summer. That will bring it perilously close to 1,075 feet, the point at which the federal government can step in and declare a drought condition, forcing a reduction of 400,000 acre-feet drawn from Lake Mead per year. A typical Las Vegas home uses a half acre-foot of water per year, so such a reduction would be equal to
turning the tap off for 800,000 households.

In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.

“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”

Conservation efforts are helping (Southern Nevada has significantly reduced its draw from 325,000 acre-feet a year in 2000 to 265,000 acre-feet today) but the Colorado River remains “oversubscribed.” Millions of acre-feet are sent to California, Nevada, and Mexico annually, draining Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell faster than they can be replenished. Conservation solutions include “grass buyback” programs to encourage people to install drought-tolerant landscaping, tax incentives for pool-covers, and inevitable rate hikes.

Frustratingly, Las Vegas residents tried to pass a bill that would allow homeowners to install graywater systems but the Southern Nevada Water Authority blocked it, offering up a piece of fuzzy math as a defense. Las Vegas Valley is alloted 300,000 acre-feet of water per year from the reservoir. The water that goes down drainpipes in Las Vegas gets pumped 12 miles back to a reclamation plant near Lake Mead. This returned water counts as a credit toward getting more fresh water from the lake. The Water Authority says if people start using graywater to water their lawns and gardens rather than using drinking-quality water, their lowered water bills will dissuade them from conserving water. In other words, the Water Authority believes that legalizing graywater will cause people to use more fresh water and return less dirty water to the reclamation plant.

One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved the West Basin Municipal Water District’s plan to build a desalination system in Redondo Beach that can desalt 100,000 gallons of seawater per day.

The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?

Mark Frauenfelder is the editor-in-chief of Make magazine and the founder of Boing Boing. He is currently writing a book on the do-it-yourself movement for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.

Top photo by flickr user (cc) TimPearce. Bottom photo by flickr user (cc) jscatty.

Xeni Jardin is a co-editor of Boing Boing, and producer of the blog’s daily Boing Boing Video program. In March, 2009, she traveled to the West African nation of Benin. Following are excerpts from her travel journal. Longer form video and audio features are planned for future release through Boing Boing Video.

1.

A few days before we left, I looked into a camera and failed to impress a television talent director. “Where do you look to find the future,” he asked. Screen test for a tech show pilot. I knew what he meant: what blogs, which super secret hacker mailing lists, whose tweets.

“Africa,” I said.

Wrong answer for the casting call. But 30 hours of flights later, we’re finally in Cotonou, Benin, and it’s true. Every time I’m back in the barely-held-together whirling here, I am closest to the past, and through it, whatever is next.

Swarms of zémidjans, screaming moped taxis, clog the streets in the port capital tonight. Facemasked, daredevil drivers swoop up passengers in technicolor African robes, passengers clutching cassava or cellphones or jerrycans of smuggled Nigerian gasoline.

We’re a few miles away from the slave port which was once the single biggest freight point for America-bound human cargo. And just outside the hotel tonight, old ladies sell fermented corn mush and grilled sugarcane-rat by candlelight, under a baobab tree.

Breathing here is like sucking an exhaust pipe. It’s the hot hot steam month before rainy season. Mosquitos buzz through that haze, lugging malaria payloads. French-Hausa hiphop blares from the corner bar. Cheap palm wine inside. An amputee beggar boy dances on stumps in the gutter for spare francs.

Tomorrow, the long drive north, toward Burkina and Niger, to a dry village where our fixer’s father was once king.

2.

Driving is dodging, it’s a video game, Grand Theft Togo.

We’re in a beat-up 1980s Benz with more kilometers on it than the counter can display, on a sometimes-dirt, sometimes-asphalt highway hugging the Togolese border.

Cassava flour along the road.

Our driver swerves around dogs, chickens, goats, stray children. In each village, there are handpainted signs for everything. For cellphone “resurrection” shops that fix old handhelds. For translucent glass globe-jugs of moped fuel, which I believed were wine, my first time here. For salons—”coiffure et tresse”, or “ici bon coiffeur,” they read, with a grid of hairdo sample sketches.

We pass through burnt stump forests, slashed and burned, to be tilled soon into cassava mounds for tribal farmers. Vertical stacks of cassava flour bags, marked with the name of the farmer who processed it, for honor system roadside commerce.

Women walk along the road’s edge, bearing head-loads, baby swaddled in back. Hundred-pound firewood cords, or water jugs, or stacked brown yams. Everything the earth yields, a woman carries here.

A phone repair shop.

We pass freight trucks, hauling heavier goods from the port to the desert. Some are adorned in elaborate murals for good juju: crowned lions, or elephants, or American rap stars, or the floating head of Osama Bin Laden.

3.

Dankóli shrine.

Blink, driving by, and you’d miss it, but we were brought here by someone who knows. A great, asymmetrical black mound of rotting offerings, pierced with a white voudun flag on a tall staff, laced with strands of beads. An overwhelming, accumulated mass of remains: sacrificed doves, chickens, hooved creatures. Skulls, matted feathers, black earth. Prayed over, over and over again, by devotees on pilgrimage.

Dankóli shrine.

Here is how it works: you come here to ask for something. You ask with palm oil, palm wine, folded bills, muttered prayers echoed by attendant priests. You pound a sharp wooden stake into the mound with the priest’s mallet, you speak to the gods as you hammer. You promise to return if the wish is granted, and to return offering something bigger, maybe something breathing, something that really costs you next time.

A voudunu in a used UNICEF T-shirt and white head scarf kneels nearby, a petitioner waits next to him with folded hands. The priest has gutted a goat for him. He’s stringing warm intestines out on a big banana leaf, divining in tendons, reading flesh, seeing through blood.

4.

A Bariba settlement near Kouandé, in the far north near Nigeria.

Our car pulls as close to the center compound as the dirt path allows. We open car doors, step out into dust, through grass thatch gates. A crowd of women are dancing, drums and high trills. We landed mid-ceremony. We’re here to pay respects to a healer-queen. A few steps inside her hut, bags of blackeyed peas, flour, and hard candy are stacked like cash along mud walls—payment, tribute, from villagers. We’re seated on the ground, swatting clouds of flies, awaiting her audience.

A female healer.

This is the part I’ll remember forever: One by one, young girls file in, after the ceremony. White mud dots on their faces, scar lines carved in dark brown skin, constellations of scars and stars, ancestor ghost signs. They call out like birds as they step inside. The healer calls back, a long vowel.

“Ehhhh,”

“Ehhhhh,”

“Ehhhh,”

“Ehhhhh,”

Again and again, then quiet. The girls lie down before her, stretched out on their sides, heads bowed into the floor, awaiting a tap from her on the left shoulder. Eventually, she taps each shoulder. They rise, and leave.

Soft, resonant wood thud sounds outside now, a different rhythm. Not drums this time, but older women pounding cassava, singing, trading verses of vowels with one another, as they pound roots into mash.

5.

Midnight in Savalou.

Full moon climbs through blackout branches. I’m in malaria-med delirium, Lariam waking dream. Leaves on those branches are thin blades. The night birds cluster them together with twigs, craft them into messy nests up there. The night birds sing louder as moonlight opens wide. The night bird songs are a rain of blades, slippery sharp waves; descending, singing staccato knives that blot out all but sleep.

A nightvision image of priests at a shrine.

Photos and video stills © 2009, Xeni Jardin

As cyberspace becomes a “layer” on top of the physical world and we spend more of our lives online, a new-found appreciation emerges for authentic experiences, interactions, and goods. I think that’s part of why so many people are embracing the “maker mindset” of DIY culture, from Stitch and Bitch to Maker Faire.

In many ways, authenticity is the flipside of the mediated experience. For example, the United States has seen a trending down in the average age of farmers. A new documentary film, The Greenhorns, explores this growing culture of young farmers driven by eco-motivation and the quest for authenticity. They’re getting their hands dirty. For them, reality is still where the action is.

Last year, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future spent a day brainstorming with James Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of the famous business book Experience Economy. Their latest book, Authenticity, is about what the demand for truly “real” things means for business strategy. It was fascinating to think with them about the myriad contexts in which questions of authenticity arise. What does “authentic” mean on a Bourbon Chicken Grill’N Dip label that boasts of “authentic food court flavor”? Or in Las Vegas, where the fakeness itself is authentic? Or in death?

An article in the March issue of Smithsonian explores “The Surprising Satisfactions of a Home Funeral.” The author, Max Alexander, lost his father and father-in-law in the same month. One received a typical American funeral. The other was a more DIY affair. Alexander, his wife, and her sister washed the body with water and lavender oil. He and his 15-year-old son made the coffin with Home Depot hardware.

Alexander came up with the coffin design on his own, but he could have easily found existing plans. They’re available on the Internet or in books on the subject, with titles like Do-It-Yourself Coffins: For Pets and People and Fancy Coffins To Make Yourself. You can even build a coffin from Ikea parts and give it some weird Danish name. The point though is that going DIY, or DIO (do-it-ourselves), can give those in mourning something that is a natural part of many other cultures: a visceral, authentic connection to the physical reality of death.

Death is very personal, both emotionally and physically. Fortunately, there’s a spectrum of possibility when it comes to DIY funerals. Crossings is a Maryland-based information clearinghouse that advocates for “the integration of dying and after-death care back into our family and community life.” Visiting the organization’s site, I learned about green burials, the chemical nastiness of embalming, and the legalities of acting as your own funeral director.

And while green is good, what DIY funerals really offer is personalization, customization, and the embodiment of emotion through an authentic experience.

“I suppose people whose loved ones are missing in action or lost at sea might envy the rest of us, for whom death typically leaves a corpse, or in the polite language of funeral directors, ‘the remains,’” Alexander writes. “Yet for all our desire to possess this tangible evidence of a life once lived, we’ve become oddly squeamish about our dead… According to advocates, home after-death care is… more meaningful for the living.”

And meaning is where the quest for authenticity should ultimately lead, however you get there.

David Pescovitz is co-editor of Boing Boing, a research director at Institute for the Future, and editor-at-large of MAKE.

Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson on why Amazon’s Kindle 2 is the next step towards ubiquitous e-book readers

Today Jeff Bezos held up the Amazon Kindle 2 in front of a lecture hall filled with journalists and outlined his vision for the white slab e-book reader: “Every book ever printed in every language available for download in under sixty seconds.” It’s a good goal. Wouldn’t you want every book every printed just a click away from the device in your pocket?

You might not know that you already can, especially if you want one of the thousands of books that have fallen out of copyright and back into the public domain, indexed by the under-appreciated archivists at Project Gutenberg.

Every last text on Project Gutenberg is available as plain text, just your regular, run-of-the-mill file that can be understood by almost every computer on the planet—including the Kindle. You could copy any book you download from Project Gutenberg to your Kindle over USB. Or navigate to the website using the Kindle’s relatively awkward web browser and pull down the book directly to the device.

Even better, many of the Project Gutenberg books have been converted by Manybooks.net into the Kindle’s native .azw file format. That doesn’t make any substantive changes to the reading experience, but it does make it look nicer in the Kindle home screen’s list of books, as well as guarantee that all the paragraphs have lines that wrap properly.

It’s a shame, though, that Amazon doesn’t provide a direct interface to Project Gutenberg’s entire library through the Kindle itself. (Although they do offer some free downloads of classic texts through the Kindle store on Amazon.com.) Even as a promotional stunt, it would be a powerful symbol to hand someone a device that has several hundred of the major works of the Western Canon already inside.

Or maybe that’s just my own personal pipe dream. I’ve mentioned it to others before, most of whom were e-book and e-paper skeptics to begin with, and they always come back to the disposability of tree-and-glue books. “I just toss my trashy sci-fi novels on an airport bench,” one friend told me. “I don’t ever want to read them again.” That’s fine. Even Bezos made it clear today that Amazon wasn’t trying to obviate the need for the paper book—not yet, at least.

But in the 14 months since the first Kindle was launched, 10 percent of the sales of any book that was available in both paper and Kindle format was sold for the e-book device. That number will continue to tip towards e-books over the next few years, especially as the LCD screens in our computers and mobile phones become better for reading and e-paper displays, the same ink-based, high-contrast screens used in the Kindle, become less expensive. (Amazon even announced a plan to keep your place in various books across various devices, so that you could stop reading a book on your Kindle, only to pick up where you left off on your mobile phone. Nothing was announced today, but I’d expect an iPhone application that can also purchase and display Kindle e-books sooner than later.)

At $360, the Kindle isn’t cheap, but it’s not the complete waste of money that some sighing critics make it out to be, either. I travel a lot. When I broke my first Kindle—yeah, yeah, you can’t break a paper book—I really missed the ability to download a book I saw in the airport shops, usually for less than the cover price. (And it’s good that Kindle books are cheaper, since the DRM-encumbered titles downloaded directly from Amazon don’t allow normal bookish behavior, like giving a title away to a friend when you’re done.) More than anything, I missed being able to keep four or five books that I was reading with me all the time, something I can’t do with my all-carry-on luggage strategy.

Then again, $360 buys you at least 10 or 15 hardcover books—or a lot of library late fees.

The acceptance of a new technology isn’t always an either/or question. It depends on a matrix of advantages and disadvantages. Successful products obsolesce their predecessors only when those disadvantages begin to be heavily outweighed by the advantages. I think e-paper devices, whether Kindle-branded or simply generic, will eventually become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, especially as the color and resolution approaches that of paper. The Kindle lets you experience some of their advantages today: You can buy books over the air from nearly anywhere in the United States, enjoy the new experience of reading a book lying on your side while using just a single button to turn pages, and look up the definitions of words without reaching for, or carrying, a dictionary.

And from what I’ve seen of the new model, which ships on February 24th, it’s even better than the last, with a slightly faster screen with 16 shades of gray (instead of four), a wholly more intuitive interface that uses a joystick instead of the interesting but obtuse clicky scroll wheel, and a new text-to-speech function that turns any text into an audiobook that sounds, well, robotic, but really not half bad.

My only complaint: While the new model now has 2 gigabytes of memory onboard, seven times as much as the old Kindle in storage terms, it no longer has the SD flash memory card slot that made it possible to keep a library of tens of thousands of books on the device at once. While my library never really grew that big (having even a few hundred books began to make getting around in the menus somewhat awkward), knowing it could went a long way towards tickling my desire for the world’s entire written history to be in my pocket at all times.

It may even be that Amazon will reach their vision before Google, who surely include books in in their mission statement to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” Although, with the newly launched version of Google Book Search that puts 1.5 million public domain books close at hand on iPhones and Android-powered phones, I’m hoping they meet in the middle: a Kindle that downloads new books from Amazon, but also public domain books from Google. Until storage becomes inexpensive enough that every book in the world can be stashed on a flash memory chip—and that will happen!—a library in the sky would suit me just fine.

Joel Johnson writes about technology so much that he sometimes gets tired of it, but stays interested when gadgets and computers actually make life better. He is about to move to Eugene, Oregon with his dog and his favorite plants.