Hippo Roller 

Imagination

This blog is surely a vanity project, and blogging has been more gratifying to me than I imagined. It's great to hear from you all, both here in the comments and via email.

Today I got this:

I've read your blog.it's
not very interesting for me, indeed, but the picture
is, you're wearing a wig, right?

Yes, I'm wearing a wig.

Why I should be happy about knowing the blog isn't very interesting is beyond me. Interest is sometimes inscrutable. And just how you're supposed to earn Bazungu Bucks seems something lots of you have been scratching your heads about. The main way is through sharing.

A friend mentioned to me yesterday that the way she was trying to earn Bazungu Bucks was by paying attention to African news. That's a great way to earn bucks! What came through in the conversation is how hard it is to get a handle on the news. Africa is a big continent and lot's going on. I learned quite a lot just by our brief conversation and I look forward to more conversations.

I've not been very good about adding links to the sidebar. There are many sources on the Web for African news and news about development in Africa. Someday soon I'll add some. Today I added two new links in the Blogroll. The first is Hactivate and that's where I found out about Hippo Roller. The second is Timbuktu Chronicles which I just discovered and am so excited about. Just from intellectual curiosity the technologies and social networks involved for development are fun to read about. Tumbuktu Chronicles rocks!

Water is essential for life. From a natural history stand point human dependence on water is an inescapable reality that will shape and has always shaped our history. Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond is a wonderfully entertaining read and places our being as human beings in natural history. Water technologies are so crucial and Hippo Rollers a very important new technology.

Going to the Hippo Roller Web site is worthwhile. A couple of pages seemed particularly interesting to me. The first is the Franchise page. The point is that shipping buckets of full of air is too expensive, so regional manufactoring of Hippo Rollers is required to make them economically viable. A Franchise costs $100,000. That's out of my price range, but I hope not out of the range of some. This method of water conveyance is a big deal. The second page answers the question what happens if a person rolls over a landmine with a Hippo Roller. The good news is the person pushing it would probably survive, the bad news is that landmines are such a factor they would need to address it.

Our imaginations are our under-exploited resource. Still, they're not so hard to spark. Keep the ideas coming and keep sharing your ideas. I'm sure we'll all be the winners when our imaginations are flowing.