I've known Prof. Tom Murphy for a few years now. Whenever we were at a conference or other event together and had dinner, he invariably would ask the wait staff if they had two corks he could have. If the place served wine, it wasn't too difficult to find two corks that were the same size or close.

Convergence of good ideas into a coalesced one is normative for this millennia. It has has happened with PDA, camera, phone, and portable game system becoming today's smartphone; which is now converging with touchscreen notepad and keyboard into a next ubiquitous device. This blog post highlights convergence of hardware, software and curricula into a lowcost parallel educational appliance, almost free, with a next generation coming out this summer, ready to be wheeled into an undergraduate CS classroom.