Just watched a heartening segment on the PBS program Now showing a community radio station in a Nairobi slum. What an inspiration these 20-somethings were, pushing back against the authorities and giving their neighborhood a voice. They called what they do ‘edutainment’, clearly not knowing the ironic subtext that term has in ed tech circles.
Coincidentally, yesterday one of my regular Google searches brought a surprise to my screen. My little town in Sierra Leone, Bonthe, now has a community radio station! Radio Bontico is a low power FM station, so the only way I’ll ever get to hear it is to go there. More and more often, I think about actually doing that. Such a difference from when I lived and taught there when there were no AM or FM or TV stations. In the morning and evening, the state-owned Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation would do the news, and the rest of the day we could only hear the BBC and the Voica of America Africa service. Nothing much local grown. Like podcasting, this is a great counterbalance against a world increasingly taken over by News Corp and Clear Channel. I wish I had the tech skills to help people do things like this.
There’s a mild Santa Ana condition, so some of the Southern California air crud has been blown out to sea and skies are dark and clear. Good time to go out and look up for this year’s celebrity, Comet 17P/Holmes. One of my Canadian twitterpals was talking about it weeks ago, but I knew the sight wouldn’t be as impressive here as in Saskatchewan.
So out I went before dinner, looking up towards Cassiopeia and then searching for Perseus. It’s a naked eye comet if you know where to look and after a few minutes with binoculars, there it was. Like the other comets I’ve seen, it was impressive and disappointing both at once. No tail, no color. Just a dim, round smudge in the sky as though God’s teacher had come by to inspect his work and poked a chalky finger on the firmament.
But impressive, still, when you think about how far away it is, and how big, and what a gift it is to be able to see this unpredictable brightening that changed overnight by a factor of a million. It’s the size of the moon’s orbit around earth and there’s no tail because we’re looking straight down through the comet’s nucleus.
It will be moving slowly through Perseus through the next few months. There’s no way to know when it will dim again, or if will flare up a second time. Go out, look up, and take it in while you can.
