Back when Iron Man came out, one of the memes surrounding it was Jeff Bridges’ line about making things IN A CAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. Yeah, that pretty much sums up the genius that is African teen prodigy Kelvin Doe.
Here’s what Kelvin has done before most of us get a driver’s license:
- Built a battery to power his family’s home out of scrap metal, baking soda, and acid.
- Hand-built an RF transmitter, which he uses to broadcast the news to his village in Sierra Leone and the surrounding area.
- And did all of this with broken crap he pulled from the garbage.
Oh, we forgot to mention, he has no formal training. The electronics, the chemistry, the physics — it’s all stuff he largely figured out on his own, and the stuff he built he reverse-engineered from stuff people threw in the trash that was largely broken or otherwise useless. This is a kid who built a generator because his self-engineered radio station could use one. And also built a radio station because his community needed one.
In other words, he doesn’t live in a cave, but he does built pretty much everything out of scraps. Here’s a brief documentary about this amazing kid…
So, yeah, pretty much once MIT lets this kid near the jet propulsion lab, expect to see a guy in armor flying around Boston. Although he probably won’t be blasting metal out of speakers built into it.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/569/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2012/04/Picture-42-150x150.png)
Yeah, but can he photoshop a mustache on a dog?
Is that how it’s done? I’ve just wasted four years of my life trying to get my dog to grow a mustache. Those pills haven’t been working.
I’ve just been rubbing hair tonic on my dogs upper lip.
He’s dead.
Don’t be threatened Burnsy, I’m sure his fantasy team is in last.
So basically he’s the alien from District 9? Wait, is that racist?
It’s only racist if you call him a stupid prawn.
lol
“Jeff Bridges’ line about making things IN A CAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. Yeah, that pretty much sums up the genius that is African teen prodigy Kelvin Doe.”
Don’t want to be that guy but as an African I find that bit a little offensive, a village hardly equals a cave. A lack of resources doesn’t equal primitiveness. Civilization begun in Africa, choose your words carefully.
I would have to assume he meant that having about the same resources as one would have in a cave. Not necessarily calling the young man a cave-dwelling so-and-so.
As to civilization beginning in Africa, regardless of that, they’re technologically inferior to, say, a scientist working on the Large Hadron Collider might be.
Yeah, it’s a reference to a line in the movie “Iron Man”, where Jeff Bridges’ character points out that Tony Stark is vastly more resourceful and intelligent than the scientist in question is. For context, here’s the full line:
Chester, I don’t think the writer was saying anything horrible about Africans. It was another comparison to Tony Stark in Iron Man. When he said that it’s no cave, it was because Tony Stark built the first Iron Man suit in a cave from scraps of metal taken from weapons while being held captive. Nothing about having the same resources one would have in a cave or anything (that wasn’t meant to rude Belly Billboard).