Learning and changing the world

This is the first post of the new year, wow. 

I hope this new years brings much changes and opportunities for the people of the world who sorely need it in their lives.

I was going to open the new year with a post on minimalism, but my current schedule just won't let me do a long, detailed post like I did before. So here's new year's first post version 2.

While twittering with a friend of mine working as a teacher in India, I came across this website. It's a list of 26 learning games with goals of social change, like the free rice project I mentioned a distant time ago (I'm still playing it time to time. It's doing wonders for my vocabulary!). It's topics range from vaccine/rice donation game through word recognition, to some more elaborate games with Darfur themes and etc.

Why don't you open the new year by donating some time to one of the games? Many of them offer incentives to give help to the conflict regions around the world depending on your progress. Even the games that doesn't offer such incentives might serve to educate your or your acquaintance's children with some spirit of giving. It's meaningful, good, and quite possibly enjoyable. I don't see any reason you should not pay a visit to few of those game sites. 

Of course, while I advocate such good spirited ventures, and wish there were more of them (a VC aimed at developing markets? That would be interesting), I do believe that they are not the answer to the fundamental problems of the world. What would be the answer to the human conditon you say? Empowerment. Empowerment not through tweaking of resolutions and codes of law but through finance and science. The change in law should accompany the change in knowledge and wealth as a natural outcome, and any attempt at artificial show of power not backed by educated and wealthy (enough) populace is doomed to failure.  

That is why I support all practices of DIY sciences, whether they be biology, nanotechnology, or robotics. Any practice of science that remains open enough for other people with interests to begin their own pursuit will inevitably affect the flow of the age's zeitgeist. From such free knowledge we might have ventures and technical innovations that might be able to accomplish the things a century of world resolutions had failed to achieve. 

People already talk of stagnation of the internet culture and deadlock of everyday technology. I argue to the contrary. We are on the cusp of a new age that is being conceived even as we speak. I'm not sure if our generation will be the one to reap the benefits of the coming era, but some sort of zeitgeist-catharsis is coming our way, in some form, in some time. It had been for last few decades. And what we need to do is to make sure that the number of our generation who believes in change can reach a critical mass.