Go ahead, talk to me endlessly about how great “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is. Rave on, if you must, about “Sixteen Candles,” or “The Breakfast Club.” But for this geek, if you’re going to talk about the pinnacle of the tragi-comedic teen lust and angst (at least for this long-ago teenage boy) that the late, great John Hughes could tap into, let’s talk “Weird Science.” Full stop. Just check out those little half gloves that a very young Robert Downey, Jr. is wearing, folks. Check out Bill Paxton’s amazing performance as one of the worst of the bad-brother characters ever created, “Chet.” Best of all, check out what happened to the kid who wasn’t Anthony Michael Hall. Oh, and the soundtrack, which features Oingo Boingo. And so, Tech Podcast 253 begins with what I’ll call “a geek’s audio tribute” to John Hughes.
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But seriously folks, it’s a great podcast this week. We begin with an interview that the BBC’s Jonathan Fildes recorded recently at the TEDGlobal Conference in Oxford, England. He had the chance to speak with Swedish architect Magnus Larsson, who is trying to build, well, not buildings, but sand dunes. And not with bricks and mortar, but with, well, a strain of bacteria (Bacillus pasteurii), which binds with sand into a kind of calcite cement. It’s a project called DUNE: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture, and it envisions the creation of a sand dune wall that would extend some 6,000 kilometers across the Sahara Desert. You can read more about it here. And for my money, the story of the week relates to the picture you’re looking at here. This is the solar suitcase, and it was designed by Dr. Laura Stachel and her husband. They started an organiztion called WE CARE (Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity) Solar. Dr. Stachel got the idea after doing work on maternal health issues in Nigeria. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear her grim descriptions of what it’s like to work in a Nigerian hospital, without sufficient lighting or communication.
For those of you who are interested, the teen group Plugged In will be doing a benefit concert for WE CARE Solar this Saturday (August 8, 2009) here in Boston. Details here.
Remember, the podcast is available every Friday, weather permitting, via iTunes and RSS.
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