Just as I was wishing for such a thing, Appfrica came through with a list of ten Africa Tech blogs (complete with OPML file so you can subscribe to all ten at once.)
Thanks, Jonathan!
Graphic CC-BY Erik Hersman
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Category Archives: research
African Science Fiction
I am also trying to amass citations on African science fiction. Liz Ng’ang’a wrote this article for Business Daily Africa, in which she cites John Akomfrah’s observation that
…since science-fiction narratives are usually about alienation, abduction and transportation, they provide a powerful understanding of the displacing of African people.
That—plus the African imperatives toward entrepreneurship and improvisatory technology—strikes me as an extremely fertile mix.
Made in Africa
Here is Afrigadget founder Erik Hersman‘s talk from last weekend’s Pop!Tech conference. There is a frenzy of African technology and technology-for-Africans activity going on right now, and Afrigadget has been my information hub.
My blogroll-du-jour includes:
I would love to hear any additional citations you may have.
Marconi’s Ray Gun
Henry Luce’s (far-right, jingoist, unreliable) The March of Time radio show provided extensive coverage of Italy’s incursion into Ethiopia.
In a serendipitous voltpunk twist, the August 28, 1935 show tells the (fictional) account of a conversation between Mussolini and Marconi, regarding the wartime and peacetime uses of a ray gun Marconi has developed.
Hedy Lamarr, Voltpunk?
I had yesterday’s Times open at the breakfast table this morning, and saw this amazing story.
Evidently Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil hold the patent for frequency-hopping radio guidance. That’s basically the same technology that lets digital cellular avoid the type of easy eavesdropping that Scanner used to sample.
From Lamarr’s Wikipedia entry:
This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.
Got that? A piano roll, skipping among 88 frequencies! That’s the most awesome hack I’ve heard in ages! If your only tool is a piano, everything looks like a key, I guess. I often worry that computers impoverish our hackish imaginations.
The ‘punk’ part of ‘voltpunk’ is extremely problematic in this case, of course— since what Lamarr and Antheil were anti- in this case wasn’t -authority but -fascism. Punk or not, I’m always happy for hacks in the service of anti-fascism (particularly since our local brand of fascism has friends at the top).
Herb Spot
An unknown number of local teenagers likes to hide out in our yard and smoke dope. The smoke drifts in our windows, and eventually one of our daughters says, “What’s that smell?” Then I have to go out and stalk around sniffing the air and listening for giggling from the bushes. When I do this, I look EXACTLY like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace, right down to the weird mustache.
I spent a chunk of the day reading about sword making and sago processing, for use in the Srivijaya section of the Derby Ram story. I now know the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, I can tell you how to produce several types of crucible steel, and I know how to make pempek. Mmm, pempek.
Town Gas, Wood Gas and Homemade Gasoline
In the course of doing some research for the Pismo story, I came across the following items:
Town Gas: Evidently, natural gas was not in common use in the U.S. until after the Second World War. Each town manufactured its own gas– town gas– out of what was available: most commonly coal, but also rutabagas. (I would use rutabagas at any rate.)
Wood Gas: A cursory googling will yield a number of cars retrofitted to run on wood. Big tanks of wood.
Homemade Gasoline: This seems obvious in retrospect, but if you have a source of crude oil in your backyard and you rig up a makeshift still, you can make your own gasoline. It’s easier than making moonshine.