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Portable and off the grid. Necessity Is the Mother of Invention. (NY Times, reg. req.) Amy Smith teaches MIT students about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering and helped start the IDEAS competition; she herself designed (among other things) a screenless hammer mill suited to third-world conditions and using "materials available to a blacksmith in Senegal."

Smith's entire life is like title="Mohammed Bah ABBA -- A True Human Scientist">Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher who came up with the pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing more than a big terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water, Abba created a refrigerator -- the rig uses evaporation rather than electricity to keep vegetables cool. Innovations that target the poorest of the poor don't have to be complicated to make a big difference. The best solution is sometimes the most obvious.

A rare optimistic story for these downbeat times. [MetaFilter]

Soylent Dean poster. Nice work from the Dean campaign: downloadable Soylent Dean posters. These are the next "When you download MP3s, you're downloading communism" posters, or possibly the next "When you download porn, God kills a kitten" posters -- mark my words! 520K PDF Link)
[Boing Boing Blog]