Ian On The Red Dot

This rocks. Although I think it is dumb. It is also definitely not an activity that can be done in mixed gender pairs because the guy is so going to get distracted, fall and die.

Your friends are secretly your enemies. Need proof? Look at the image below.

Image above created using the very cool tool Ambigram.Matic.

Learned of this message worth spreading from patlaw. Watch the video below and check out the site The Girl Effect.

Related stuff:

One of the ways to help women living in poverty is microfinance.

One of the biggest advocates of microfinance is Muhammad Yunus who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

The New Yorker has a pretty good article on microfinance here.

“There was a woman who started out with a mud hut,” McKinley recalled. “When we came back, she had a three-room house with a cement floor, and the pigs were in the hut she had stayed in before.” When the women first came for loans, “they sat hunched, looking down into their laps. They would take the money and fold it into a hairpin behind their ears, looking so frightened—because, they said, they were afraid they couldn’t pay it back. Two or three years later, these same women were running businesses, and were often involved in politics in their village.” She continued, “Does everyone succeed? No. But it is the same in the investment business. You don’t want to take a lot of risk? Buy some ducks. But the more risk-taking borrowers will pool their loans and buy a baby water buffalo and rent it to men for farming. And then there are those who blow right past livestock and build a brick factory.”

Omidyar was struck by Yunus’s statement that the poor are natural entrepreneurs, essentially because their business activities are a matter of survival. “By giving them the tools, you unleash the entrepreneurial instinct,” Omidyar told me. Janet McKinley said, “All these wealthy entrepreneurs loved it, because they say, ‘This woman is an entrepreneur—just smaller scale.’ ”

For a counter-view on microfinance, read this other article on the New Yorker.

This is the ultimate weapon against camwhores. Sure, the motivation for this device is more cheem than being used as weapon against camwhoring but still….

People’s great trust in their photographic reproductions of reality was what motivated me to develop the *Image Fulgurator*. A camera can be used as a personal memory tool, since people do not doubt the veracity of their own photographs. Hence, photos can reproduce the reality of an individual environment or public space. At sacred or popular locations, or those having a political connotation, an intervention with the Fulgurator can be particularly effective. Especially objects with a special aura or great symbolic power are good targets for this kind of manipulation. In other words, with the Fulgurator it is possible to have a lasting effect on those kinds of individual moments and events that become accessible to the masses only because they are preserved photographically.

The videos and related Digg links that introduced me to Frank Zappa, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins around the time when I started working.

Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa on Crossfire 1986

Frank Zappa Destroys Robert Novak on the Issue of Censorship (1986)

Richard Dawkins

First video of Dawkins at work (now removed):

Atheist Richard Dawkins Owns Evangelical Christian Ted Haggard

Atheist Richard Dawkins Destroys Students from Jerry Falwell’s University

Christopher Hitchens

DEBATE: Christopher Hitchens vs. Al Sharpton: God is Not Great

Awesome twitter message announcing the discovery of water in the form of ice on Mars. The Phoenix Mars Mission site is here and the the press release about the discovery is here.

It seems strange that our generation doesn’t seem as excited (I’m guilty too of the lack of interest, but no MORE) about what our fellow human beings are trying to discover and learn from Mars as compared to the generation that witnessed the space race and man going to the moon (yes, i do believe it happened).

Mars … here we come!!!!

The cynic in me says - Mars … here we come!!!! to rape you just like we did with Earth…. Hope the last inhabitants left us some goodies….

Via metafilter - there is an interesting study about how a homosexual’s brain represents that of the opposite sex.

Do check out the metafilter link for the comments and more links relevant to this discussion.

Do note also while reading this that there is a difference between causation and correlation.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for some time especially since I’m moving and faced with what seems like an insurmountable task to pack my stuff. Stuff. Why do I need so much of them?

This guy wants to whittle down his possessions to only 100 things. It is admirable. Moving gives me the chance to finally do something like that.

Related Time article here.

via:kottke

This is probably old news considering the blog has entries as earlier as February 2007, but this is the first time I’m coming across ex-Vice-President Al Gore’s blog. WTF. This is awesome on so many levels.

Spoilers ahead for the movie “The Happening” but if you have considered watching the movie, reading this review might save you from wasting money and time. Be warned - lots of spoilers.

via:kottke