The sun was setting as we said goodbye, knowing that we had a good 2 hour journey in the dark ahead of us. I wasn’t too concerned. [...] I think I was smiling the whole way.

Though my frustrations about the project still stand, they’ve been tempered by my sense of hope. [...] The cooperatives can still meet their targets. There are people like Tangson and Kennedy who want to see it succeed. So this thing we’re trying to do…there’s a chance it just might work after all.

I worked very hard alongside my hosts, trying my best to keep up and realizing all along that not only have my muscles atrophied from under-use but so has my mind. The abundant world in which I was raised has actually limited my ability to conceive of what is possible, of what my body is capable of, of the elegance in simplicity.

There is so much we can do.

Whyson, my co-worker, says that when outsiders see images of village life or drive through in roaring white land-cruisers, they say, “Oh, these people are suffering.” Yes, one cannot deny that there is a fair bit of suffering in rural Zambia. But what visitors fail to see, Whyson says, “is that these people are living.”

We ran through the spray of the Falls in darkness, chasing moonbows as if they were pixies, trying to touch them with our fingers and toes... We screamed at the top of our lungs, giddy from enchantment (but also ridiculously cold from the Fall’s spray). We marveled at the beautiful circle in the sky as its light fractured into a spectrum of colour, made sparkles of the billowing mist, and all the while, lifted our spirits.

"This what becomes of reformed gangsters: they leave the life to become mathematicians. But Smiley was not one of those studious types who disappeared into hermitage or exile. He was an exhibitionist who slept naked and solved theorems while the glass from the overhead sky-light magnified his derivations and graphs".

If you are still asking yourself this question, or haven't even yet, then let Drew Endy break it down for you, white board style. Just don't give him your credit card number: synthetic biology is a means to an end, but it is also more than you can afford.

I have been silent for close to 340 days. This is not that I did not want to share, but I think it is because I felt that I had nothing worth sharing. When you live in a place for a number of years, the strange becomes normal, the amazing becomes ordinary, and the unusual becomes common place.

Meeting after meeting I met people who themselves were passionate for development and the benefit of people in their own countries and communities:

• a man in Northern Malawi who had operated a food security program in 5 districts for 8 years without any funding
  
  
• a husband and wife couple in Central Malawi who had given up civil servant jobs in the early 1980’s to start a community based farming project and have transformed their valley from a dry, infertile wasteland to a 20 hectare oasis;
  
  
• a group of gentlemen in central Zambia who were in the process of setting up a small corn grinding mill and vegetable garden to generate money to run several development projects in their community

And these stories represent only a small sample of people I came into contact with.

How could I not love this place?

How could I not have hope for the future?

"Engine and vehicle technologies have improved steadily in the past 20 years, and vehicles have become more efficient. But without either a push from CAFE standards or a pull from soaring fuel prices, the higher efficiencies are routinely offset by the increasing size, weight, speed, and performance of many vehicles.

"The unsettling result is that in the last 20 years the average fuel consumption in new vehicles has not changed.

"But there are ways to lower the cost and the burden of relying solely on regulation. Measures that could stimulate consumer desires for fuel economy would ease both the costs and uncertainty borne by manufacturers."

This is freaking scary. Apparently, things haven't gotten any better. By the way, May 1st marks the 29th anniversary of the first spam message ever. Mark your calendars.

• "If your rodents are larger than 5-6 inches in length (tail included) it’s likely that they are rats, not mice."
  
• Mice leave "dirty smudges and urine dribbles on floors along walls". Urine dribbles!?
  
• "Just one happy couple can create over 100 offspring each year". That is insane. Plus mouse sex is a disturbing idea to me.

• In presenting qualitative information, clutter is a failure of design; there is no correlation between clutter and the level of detail or content displayed.
  
• Find examples of good presentation, communication designs and copy them! Use templates, find conventions--don't reinvent the wheel: roll with it.
  
• Principles of design for presenting analytical information mirror principles of analytical thinking--presentation of data should aid in the thinking process, not hinder it.
  
• As a consmer of information: look for the storyline in a presentation, assess the credibility of the presenter, and decide the domain specification of the presentation.

• On Hugo Chavez's alleged claim that Chomsky had died: Chavez never said such a thing; the New York Times misquoted him (see bottom of the article for the correction).
  
• On the crisis in Darfur: The issues gets a lot of attention in the Western world because it is a conflict that can be blamed on Arabic instigators.
  
• On U.S. agricultural subsidies undermining domestic markets in developing countries: That it's a complex situation; removing subsidies in the U.S. will increase prices in countries that now import agricultural products from the States, while at the same time bolstering reliance on domestic suppliers.

Project Apollo surfaces repeatedly as a model for tackling the energy challenge. Given the urgency of the situation, achieving a secure energy future will, indeed, call for a similar commitment in funding, policies, and passion. The execution, though, will have to be different. More than a discrete undertaking with a single goal, the energy project will have to deliver a broad portfolio of solutions, playing out on timetables measured over a few years to several decades.

The tireless enthusiasm of students is one reason universities have the potential to play key roles in energy innovation. In addition, while integrating new technologies on a broad scale into an immense and mature sector of the economy will pose complex challenges, universities have expertise to share not only in technical fields, but also in economics, planning, architecture, political science, and management, among others.

• Introduction to Technology and Policy, taught by Professor Annalisa Weigel of Aerospace and Astronautics and the Engineering Systems Division.
  
• Engineering Systems Analysis for Design, taught by Richard de Neufville of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Engineering Systems Division.

"As the countries in the developing world rapidly motorize, the increasing global demand for fuel will pose one of the biggest challenges to controlling the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

• technology (at least in the engineering sense?) is well defined, constrained, isolated, and completely "knowable".
  
  
• policy is variable, relative, evolving, and there doesn't seem to be much that can be absolutely, justifiably "known".
  
  
• making decisions in technology (at least in the engineering sense) requires rationality and objectivity. Making policy decisions depends on point of view, bias, status, culture, history.
  
  
• in order to make the best decisions in some issues, it is necessary to understand how to apply technology (good, old reliable technology) within the policy realm (uncharted, makes-my-head-hurt murkiness).
  
  
• a technically perfect solution doesn't stand a chance with politically compelling motives working against it.
  
  
• leadership has something to do with making technology and policy work properly.