Teleidoscope

Thu, Dec 27, 2007

OLPC

Posted at 1:42 pm MST to Technology

While rummaging in my ISP's spam filters, looking for an email that might have been delayed, I found a notice from the One Laptop Per Child project about my laptop: it should arrive before January 15. They apologized for it not arriving before Christmas Eve and provided a link to a special IOU gift card to use if the laptop had been intended as a gift.

The laptops donated through the G1G1 program will be going to Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia and Rwanda. I approve of all of those destinations.

Especially Mongolia. Somewhere I have some brochures that the Mongolian embassy to the UN sent me about 20 years ago when I was thinking of writing a Mongol character in a space story.

I'm not sure why I have this thing about central Asia, but I've had it for a long time, and it seems to have cropped up again recently: Tosun Bekdeli, in the Techlands, stories is Turkmen with some Mongol ancestry. And Rakkas the tri-mule is part khulan, a wild equid not yet extinct in Turkmenistan and Mongolia.

Just for fun, a picture of a khulan is after the cut.

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