An MIT student was arrested today for carrying and displaying (what looks to me) a breadboard with some wires and a 9-volt battery. For those who are not technologists, a breadboard is a simple piece of plastic with wires underneath, neatly arranged in a grid. You can insert various electronic components into the grid of perforations on it and they will be connected by the hidden wires. It’s used for prototyping circuits before sending them for large-scale manufacturing (on printed circuit boards.)

Here’s a photo of the device she carried. Compare that to the photo of a breadboard on the Wikipedia page.

To me, what is scary isn’t that the enterprising and creative girl was arrested, but that law enforcement officials are so less technologically inclined. I wouldn’t expect everyone to know about these things, but I think a little basic technology familiarization would keep the country safer than surveillance or arrests like this.

News agencies all over have been reporting this as a ‘fake bomb’. Guys, come on. By that deduction, every cell phone contains the equivalent of a hundred fake bombs. That’s how little circuitry can physically fit onto a breadboard. Just because the contraption looks laboratory-like and it’s at an airport doesn’t mean it’s a bomb.

Two students in Nova Scotia got back at school bullies silently, yet strongly.

Two Nova Scotia students are being praised across North America for the way they turned the tide against the bullies who picked on a fellow student for wearing pink.
[...]
They went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day.
[...]
Not only were dozens of students outfitted with the discount tees, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes, some head-to-toe. And there’s been nary a peep from the bullies since, which Shepherd says just goes to show what a little activism will do.

And you thought Monty Python were just fooling around when they crafted this scene of the Killer Rabbit in the Holy Grail movie!

Apparently, there is (technically, was) a squirrel on a similar rampage in Berlin this week.

BERLIN (Reuters) – An aggressive squirrel attacked and injured three people in a German town before a 72-year-old pensioner dispatched the rampaging animal with his crutch.

The squirrel first ran into a house in the southern town of Passau, leapt from behind on a 70-year-old woman, and sank its teeth into her hand, a local police spokesman said Thursday. With the squirrel still hanging from her hand, the woman ran onto the street in panic, where she managed to shake it off. The animal then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker, injuring him on the hand and arm, before he managed to fight it off with a measuring pole.

“After that, the squirrel went into the 72-year-old man’s garden and massively attacked him on the arms, hand and thigh,” the spokesman said. “Then he killed it with his crutch.”

Everyone agrees meetings aren’t fun, but what if you’re discussing matters with your teammates while pedaling a 7-person bike furiously on the streets of Mountain View? Forget the discussing matters part, but the rest of it sure is a lot of fun.

Just don’t call it the party bike; it’s the “conference” bike. Google’s newest acquired toy is a 7-person bike, much like New York City’s Party Bike [link broken at the time of posting]. It can be scheduled as a conference room for holding meetings and as a team-building exercise (no pun intended).

Our team rode the bike to the nearby Shoreline Lake on a hot Friday afternoon. Just for kicks, we rode it up a hillock and let it go full speed downhill. Here’re some action shots!

I have posted photos from today’s candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech. Reporters, journalists and media-persons, please note: the license explicitly prohibits any commercial use of these photos. Others, please feel free to share/email/print these photos for friends, family, and everyone else who might have been impacted by this tragedy.