I went to Berlin over the winter break with various and sundry Noisebridgers to experience my first Chaos Communication Congress. While there I discovered c-base, a combination hacker club, nightclub, and crashed alien spaceship. Closest thing I've seen to the set of a Doctor Who episode, ever.

c-base has a multitouch table they built (with a projector inside, mirror, infra-red illumination, and a diffusing surface), and they had a little hackfest to write things for it. With lots of help and inspiration from two graphics hackers I met there, Martin and Ulli, I wrote multitetris.

Dan Kaminsky calls it the "Minority Report of Tetris". Good times. Man, I miss programming for fun.

I spent the last couple of days working with other people at Google to build a person finder site for the Haiti earthquake. It's now available at Google's earthquake page and the U. S. State Department website. I had lots of help — many people across the company pitched in to help write code, do translations, test, report bugs, and get our launch approved.

As with every time this has happened in the past, many different sites have sprung up to collecting missing person information. The big challenge now is to aggregate and reconcile the records across all these databases. I am hoping that our decision to use PFIF will help solve this problem.

Peter Singer has blogged about my proposal. He points out that keeping my pledge pretty much guarantees that I will keep his pledge, so I should take his pledge as well. He's right, so I have.

Imagine you were confronted with a person in great suffering, and you were capable of helping to alleviate their suffering. If this person were right in front of you, it would probably feel unkind to ignore them.

Yet, rationally, there is no difference between the suffering of a person you can see in front of you, and the same suffering experienced by a person you've never met, thousands of miles away. Is it not equally as morally necessary to help any fellow human being in great need? Surely geographical location is an irrelevant factor.

This has been my way of thinking for some time. Peter Singer explains it more eloquently in his 1971 essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Yes, charities are less than 100% efficient, and choosing worthy ones can be complicated. And keeping ourselves in love with life is a necessary prerequisite for giving to others. But these are minor caveats in comparison to the main, inescapable point: most people give less than they should. I say this not to criticize any deficiency in their principles, but as an observation that their actions are logically inconsistent with the principles they choose for themselves.

Setting aside a fixed fraction of your income for charitable donations is a pretty common concept. Christians call it tithing, and Singer himself makes a similar suggestion, even proposing specific percentages for income brackets. The problem with the income-fraction approach is that not everyone can afford to give the same fraction of their income. Those barely able to make rent might only be able to afford a little, but billionaires can easily afford to give away most of their income. Singer wrote:

Given a society in which a wealthy man who gives 5 percent of his income to famine relief is regarded as most generous, it is not surprising that a proposal that we all ought to give away half our incomes will be thought to be absurdly unrealistic.

I've never set aside a fraction of my income to donate, even when I've had a regular income. I occasionally donate here and there, at random to a charity that strikes me as a good one, but certainly far less than 10% of my income, probably less than 2%. Having a real job has made me think about what I should do about this.

I have an idea for a different approach that I'm going to try as an experiment. It's pretty simple:

There are a few things I like about this scheme, both practical and psychological:

• By definition, this only affects non-essential expenses — so anyone can do this, regardless of income level.
• The statement of the pledge is simple and doesn't involve arbitrary percentages.
• It motivates me to donate more, while enhancing my enjoyment of the things I buy for myself.
• I'll become newly aware of how much I spend on non-essential things.

My plan is to use Mint to tag my expenses as non-essential. At the beginning of each month, I'll do a round of tagging and make a donation.

Thoughts, ideas, or suggestions?

Thanks to Mitch and Slim for reviewing this post.

2010-01-09 14:00 PST: Welcome, @PeterSinger followers! — PeterSinger tweets: Nice idea on giving here: http://wolog.net/254527.html Thanks Ka-Ping Yee. And you can pledge as well at www.thelifeyoucansave.com

Back at the beginning of the year, I made a list of resolutions. Now that 2009 is drawing to a close, I suppose I should evaluate how I did.

For 2009, I resolved:

• Not to learn anything: fail. At work, I learned a lot of technical stuff, and also learned about the green energy field and about working with utility companies. Thanks to the BSFC, I learned a bit about the process of getting a new organization off the ground. I learned some relationship lessons. And I learned a lot about Africa.
• Not to launch any products: fail. We launched Google PowerMeter this year with several utility partners (Yello, JEA, first:utility, and SDG&E) and device partners (TED and AlertMe).
• To become uglier and less happy: unfortunately, I made substantial progress on this one. This has been a tough year for me personally. I have been on an overall downward trajectory, and am ending this year much less excited about life than the last. As we put 2009 behind us, I hope I can turn the page and change this.
• To remain in the U. S. for the whole year: a big fat fail. I saw Africa for the first time, and it strengthened my resolve to do something good for those in the greatest suffering and need.
• Not to produce anything of noticeable benefit to others: fail. I contributed to the SMS for Life project, which is starting to show good results. In one of our pilot districts, stockouts were reduced by about 75%, which likely meant that lives were saved. I think it's reasonable to attribute some of this to the new information on stock levels that became available through our project. And I hope that the mapping piece I contributed made the project more effective, even though I have no direct evidence of that yet.
• To give up the guitar: wellll... I haven't given it up, but I've played it much less this year, and have barely played at all in the last few months.
• And absolutely not, under any circumstances, to build absurd contraptions: alas, I succeeded at this one.

What for 2010? I'm considering a few things. I guess the main thing I learned this year is what happens when I try to focus singlemindedly on saving-the-world goals to the exclusion of all else, including myself. It seems rational, but it's turned out to be pretty bad for me. I reached my limit and went beyond. I'm not sure exactly what to do next, but I'm thinking that I need more music in my life, and a commitment to enjoying life. Believe it or not, the latter is a very strange concept to me right now, and it's hard to accept.

IBM put out a press release about the project today: Saving Lives with SMS for Life. See more articles at mobihealthnews, FastCompany, and Google News.

After visits to clinics, hospitals and dispensaries across Tanzania, IBM, Novartis and Vodafone initiated a five-month pilot of the SMS for Life solution, covering 135 villages and over a million people in different geographic locations across Tanzania.

Vodafone, together with its technology partner MatsSoft, developed a system in which healthcare staff at each facility receives automated SMS messages, which prompt them to check the remaining stock of anti-malarial drugs each week. Using toll-free numbers, staff reply with an SMS to a central database system hosted in the United Kingdom, providing details of stock levels, and deliveries can be made before supplies run out at local health centres.

[...]

During the first few weeks of the pilot, the number of health facilities with stock-outs in one district alone, was reduced by over 75 percent. The early success of the SMS for Life pilot project has the Tanzanian authorities interested in implementing the solution across the rest of the country. Tanzania has around 5,000 clinics, hospitals and dispensaries, but at any one time, as many as half could potentially be out of stock of anti-malarial drugs.

I will be in Berlin from December 24 to January 7! If you're in the area or have ideas about what to check out, I'm all ears.

I had an awesome weekend. :)

This is what I'm working on
in my nonexistent spare time these days. Really exciting stuff!

Rusty corrugated metal is not scrap; it's what you use to make roofs and walls.

Lane markings (dotted or solid) are merely recommendations. On a two-lane road, it's normal to squeeze between the two opposing lanes of traffic to pass the car in front of you. So is honking at the bicycles to get out of your way so you can complete this manoeuvre.

Passing pedestrians, bicycles, and other cars at high speed with six inches of clearance is normal.

Almost all signs, even official government signs, are hand-painted. Spelling, grammar, and typographic consistency are all optional.

Roads are made of dirt, rocks, and potholes. To drive down a straight road is to navigate a labyrinth. African drivers have developed a keen ability to see through dust clouds, generate a mental topography of the oncoming terrain, and estimate the depth of each bump and depression. Using this data they plan a winding route along the road (and occasionally off the side of the road) and adjust their speed just enough to keep you from being tossed out of your seat.

Just about anyone can balance anything on their head. They all learned it as children. Grown men don't do it, though; they consider it embarassing.

The side of the road is a place for:

• Goats
• Sheep
• Chickens
• People towing wooden carts loaded with dozens of tires
• Broken-down vehicles
• People standing around who were riding in said vehicles, waiting to be picked up
• Overturned trucks
• 8-year old Maasai children directing herds of cattle
• Termite mounds taller than you are

A bicycle is more than a handy personal vehicle; it is also a cart and a revenue source. You can take your five 20-litre jugs of water, your bundle of firewood, or your sacks of produce for the market, tie them to your bike and walk the bike up the hill. Or, pile an extra person or two on the back of your bike, and you have just become a gainfully employed taxi driver.

Lots and lots of people really do live in little straw huts. To them it is neither charming nor pitiable; it's just how they live.

Walking 10 kilometres to get to primary school is normal.

Everywhere except the big cities, each car is followed by a dust cloud as long as a city block. Everything is covered in a layer of dust — the cars, the buildings, the people. On paved roads, cars are followed by great clouds of pungent black smoke. I have probably tripled my particulate intake for the year during this trip.

There's nothing weird about having a mobile phone but having neither running water nor electricity in your home.

Just honk and keep driving (slowly). The 20 baboons sitting in the road will get out of the way.

Swahili is straightforward to pronounce: it uses the five standard European vowel sounds, and the consonants work just like English, including "j", "ch", and "sh". The "r" is rolled. Otherwise, pronounce every letter individually, exactly as it's spelled. In short, you can pronounce Swahili as though it were Japanese written in the Roman alphabet.

jambo! hello!
— jambo!
habariyako? how are you? (what's the news?)
— mzuri [sana] [very] good!
ni me furahi kukutana na wewe I'm pleased to meet you
ni me furahi I'm happy

habari asabuhi? good morning! (what's the news of the morning?)
lala salama good night! (sleep well)
ume lala salama? did you sleep well?

mambo! what's up?
— poa [sana] it's cool

asante thank you
asante sana thank you very much
karibu welcome! / you're welcome
tena again
karibu tena come back again
tafadhali please
samahani sorry
asante kwa kunifundisha kiswahili thanks for teaching me Swahili!

barabara road
gari car
baiskeli bicycle
pikipiki motorbike
matatu a private minibus packed with far too many passengers travelling at dangerously high speeds, usually painted brightly with an exciting name like PIRATES or a Christian slogan

mimi me
wewe you
sisi us
sasa now
leo today
kesho tomorrow
chakula food
maji water
chooni bathroom

ngombe cow
kondoo sheep
mbosi goat
pondo donkey
pondo milia zebra
simba lion
masharubu beard (nickname for "male lion")
tembo elephant
swala pala impala
swala Tommy Thomson's gazelle (with the black stripe)
swala Grant Grant's gazelle (no black stripe)

jinalangu ni Ping my name is Ping
wewe je? and you...?
jinalako? what's your name?
hi ni nini? what is this? (great for learning new words)
hi ni ... this is ...

ndyo yes
hapana no
kushoto left
kulia right
mengi a lot
ndogo / kidogo a little

ni is
na and / with
kwa for
wa in
ya of
nini what
wapi where

chooni ni wapi [tafadhali]? where is the bathroom?
unatoka wapi? where are you from?
unaenda wapi? where are you going?
mimi naenda ... I'm going to ...

moja one
mbili two
tatu three
nne four
tano five
sita six
saba seven
nane eight
tisa nine
kumi ten

ishirini twenty
thelathini thirty
arubaini forty
hamsini fifty
sitini sixty
sabini seventy
themanini eighty
tisini ninety
mia hundred

ngombe tano five cows
mia nne na tisini na sita four hundred ninety-six

We rode through Lake Manyara National Park, where we saw lots of baboons and some adorable giraffes, along with a few vervet monkeys and a few elephants. I really enjoyed watching the baboons play. We stopped at a pond full of yawning hippos, and watched them get in and out of the water and chase each other around.

Then we continued past Ngorongoro into the Serengeti, where we saw thousands of zebras and wildebeests scattered across the plain in little groups, and a few dozen zebras, wildebeests, and gazelles up close. We also glimpsed a few spotted hyenas and, way off in the distance through binoculars, a couple of lions. The lions were enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon; one was even lounging around on its back with its legs flopping in the air. On our way to the lodge we stopped for a big herd of buffalo that were leisurely crossing the road in front of us.

I took probably a hundred or so pictures today, but can't upload them right now. Got to get to bed — we leave tomorrow morning at 5 am for a hot air balloon ride!

We left Lusaka and returned to Nairobi yesterday.



This place has quite a few interesting birds. I caught this stork landing on a billboard.



Here it is walking over to join its pal.



We got stuck in a long traffic jam on the way to the hotel. Whenever cars are stopped, there are lots of people walking around trying to sell you all kinds of stuff.

The work part of my trip is over. Tomorrow, I start a safari in Arusha, Tanzania! I expect to have Internet access less often or not at all, so you might not hear from me for a while.

We spent our third day in Zambia touring health facilities in the Mumbwa district. On the way there, we passed little settlements along the highway.



Unlike in Kenya, the extremely poor here built their structures out of plain sticks, or bricks (in the background). I didn't see much corrugated metal for walls. Perhaps bricks are easier to get here for some reason.



The square dirt huts were still common, though.



This is the administration building of the main district hospital for Mumbwa.



Here's the sign for the hospital, in front of the stores building.



Inside the stores, the stock levels of supplies were tracked by hand using the green bin cards you see here.

There was a large supply of antimalarial drugs in this particular store — but it was all about to expire in the next two months. (After manufacturing, the drugs last two years.) Most of it would go to waste, since it can't be returned to the central stores within six months of expiry.



These were in the parking lot outside. I'm told the hospital does have another working ambulance, though.

We also visited some rural health clinics, which were much smaller. In one of them, all the supplies were kept in the head nurse's office. In all of them, the supply of antimalarial drugs was incomplete — they were out of stock in at least one of the four doses, which meant that they would have to break pills in half or combine pills to produce the correct dose. Despite having incomplete stock, the stock in the other sizes was also within a month or two of expiry.

In this particular district, these situations were probably not life-threatening concerns, because the malaria burden was quite low here. But it was still worrisome how much medicine would be wasted, and how poorly the stocks were maintained.

I didn't get any photos in the rural clinics because my camera's battery ran out.

The craziest thing happened when I went to use an ATM at the strip mall on Tuesday evening.

The starting screen looked like this:



After I put in my card, it asked me for my PIN as usual:



But after I logged in, this was the screen that appeared!



I couldn't resist pressing the "ADJUST CASH" button to see what would happen. Here's what it offered to do:



I decided that going further might get me into trouble, and hit the CANCEL button.



This was entirely repeatable. I did it again to take these pictures. And then I tried an ATM at a different bank and it did exactly the same thing. I found a few other confused people wandering from ATM to ATM, wondering why they weren't working properly.

I wonder how long it took the banks to figure out that something was wrong.

On our first day we visited the National Malaria Control Center. We're trying to understand some of the problems they face in stocking and distributing malaria medicine.





This is a truck outside of Medical Stores Limited, which is the storage and distribution company that the government contracts to distribute all medical supplies. We were particularly interested in the antimalarial drugs and rapid diagnostic tests for malaria, but these were only a tiny part of what MSL stocks and ships.



We weren't allowed to take pictures inside MSL.

Although I heard that Zambia is a poorer country than Kenya, there was a surprisingly upscale strip mall attached to the hotel where we were staying in Lusaka. This is what the entrance to the movie theater looked like:



Nearby were several fast food places.

In Kenya I had seen a brand called "Chicken Inn", often next door to "Pizza Inn" and "Creamy Inn", which sells ice cream:



A close imitator in Kenya is the "Kenchic Inn":



Well, it turns out Zambia has "Zamchick":



Not to be outdone, some beef producers chose the brand "Zambeef". EXCELLENT MEAT.

At Jomo Kenyatta airport, we had to go through security twice (once for the airport and once for the airline), and the gate closed an hour and 5 minutes before the flight's departure time. We made it, though.



We landed in Lusaka Monday morning, and walked across the tarmac to the airport.



In Lusaka, we stayed at the Protea, which was a pretty fancy-looking place. It felt like the opposite of Kenya: casually dressed people in a spiffy building.



I had to fill out a form to check in, and thought this part of the form was pretty funny, not just for the bad English but the mention of horses and live animals. Sixty kwacha is about 1.1 cents.



The rooms were also very fancy — but the notable unique point was the provision of a can of bug spray. I later quickly understood why: mosquitoes were everywhere inside. I got bitten in the restaurants, I got bitten in my room, I got bitten while sleeping. I must have about a dozen bites, all from being indoors in the evening and none of them from being out in the field during the daytime. I despise mosquitoes.

The next morning, we were up bright and early for the long ride to Nairobi.



We rode past enormous fields of tea. In some of them we could see dozens of workers picking tea leaves.



We stopped for a break in Nakuru, where I was accosted by these two enthusiastic purveyors of souvenirs. Their prices seemed to drop about 10% every 20 seconds or so.



This was an interesting ad. It's recently become a popular practice here to use your mobile phone as a personal boom box. When you take someone out on a date, apparently the thing to do is to place your phone on the dinner table so you can attempt to drown out the restaurant music with your own. You'll be competing with the music coming from all the other patrons' phones as well, so having loud speakers on your phone is essential. Very romantic.



We saw baboons along the side of the road! There were a few of them hanging out, and they seemed pretty brave, watching for traffic and scampering across the highway when it was clear.

We couldn't resist stopping to have a closer look. This particular baboon was especially bold, and came near to check us out. I dug a banana out of our packed breakfast boxes to feed him, and sure enough as soon as I stepped out of the car I had his full attention. Much more attention than I had anticipated, in fact — while I was fumbling for my camera, he ran right up to me, grabbed my hand, and wrested the banana away!

At that point we started to fear that he would jump into the car and start going through our stuff, so we shooed him away.



We saw some more baboons a little further down the road. This one had a bad limb and was very shy, but was kind enough to pose on top of a signpost for us.



In Nairobi, we stayed at the Fairview, which was an absolutely beautiful hotel.



This was the courtyard on the inside of the Fairview.

Getting up at the Blue York was an adventure.



This was the switch outside the bathroom for the water heater.



This was the shower, with a built-in instant water heater.

I switched on the water heater before attempting to shower, optimistically assuming this would cause the hot and cold water taps to work like they would in a regular shower. But no. The hot water tap controlled nothing; only the cold water tap would cause water to come out. The water started off frigid; then the heater gradually warmed it until it was scalding. Since there was no in-between setting, taking a shower consisted of standing under the water until it was burning hot, then running out (naked and dripping) to turn off the heater, returning to continue washing until the water was cold, running out to turn on the heater, washing until the water was scalding, running out, etc.

Of course, I know I should be thankful that there was any hot water at all.

We headed back to the IPA office for more tours of water sources and chlorine dispensers.



They had this amusing Obama calendar on the wall (click for a bigger view). Jeff later explained to us that the entire country just went nuts when Obama was elected — and not just Kenya but other African countries as well. Uganda had a two-day national holiday.



This was a well we visited in a peri-urban setting.



And this was the dispenser next to it. We had a long conversation with the woman who was in charge of refilling the dispenser, with Bukeke helpfully translating our questions into Swahili. She told us that the dispenser was like a blessing to her family. Before they had the dispenser, nearly every week, someone in her family would be sick and would have to go to the hospital; now, that hardly ever happens.



This was a family compound we visited in a rural area near Busia. Jeff explained that this was a pretty well-to-do family, comparatively speaking — in addition to the mud huts, they had one building with a corrugated metal roof (which you can just see behind the hut on the left), and a metal roof was a sign of wealth.



To get to the water source, we took a five-minute walk through some fields of cassava.



The water source was a protected spring, built by a previous IPA project.



This was the chlorine dispenser next to the spring.



We took a break for lunch. That big blob of white stuff on the plate in front is ugali, which is made of flour and water and has the consistency of playdough. You eat it with your hands — first you take a little ball of it and squish it with your fingers until it becomes malleable, and then you use it to scoop up other food. We ate it with tilapia from the nearby Lake Victoria. Definitely my most adventurous meal so far.

Next we rode to Kisumu, where Obama has his African roots.



This is an urban water kiosk we visited. This kiosk charges 3 Kenyan shillings (about 4 cents) for 20 litres of unchlorinated water, or 4 Kenyan shillings for 20 litres of chlorinated water. The kiosk also sells drinkable water to bodaboda drivers at one shilling a cup — a shrewd business move. Despite the huge markup, it's worth it to a thirsty bicyclist; we saw a bunch of bodabodas hanging out here in front of the kiosk.



Here's the owner of the kiosk standing proudly next to his chlorine dispenser.



This sign was posted on the water kiosk by the water company.



This was the street by the water kiosk (click for more detail).



We stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Kisumu. All the hotels in western Kenya provided mosquito nets over the beds — even the Blue York. At the Imperial Hotel they even prepare the mosquito net for you.