Electric Skeleton - a local artist

The maker of this film, is also a local artist from Copper Art Designs. His vid about his friend:

An Artists Tale: Episode 1 - Electric Skeleton from Douglas on Vimeo.

Party favor magnet loses $127M partying

He actually lost the money gambling while apparently partying. He is suing the casino about the partying.

From the WSJ:

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million. The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.

So when you are feeling like a loser...

Google's project using Google Earth to help adapt to climate change

From the project's main wiki page:

Climate change poses a significant risk to the sustenance of future generations in many places and a challenge for sustainable development planning everywhere. Adaptation is a socio-institutional process, which when supported by data, tools and examples can provide a flexible avenue for exploring robust responses to these risks.

Case Study page for California.

From sfist.com:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced the new application. Three years ago at the very same spot, Schwarzenegger signed California's landmark global warming law requiring the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Treasure Island, along with SFO and Google's Mountain View headquarters, could all be fully underwater by 2100.

Check out Google Earth to download.

Bernanke sezs financial system likely to emerge healthier

From Bernanke's speech entitled The Recent Financial Turmoil and its Economic and Policy Consequences:

Rather than becoming more crisis-prone, the financial system is likely to emerge from this episode healthier and more stable than before.

Speech was presented on October 15,2007.

So the question is, within a year of that statement, under his watch, after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, coming within hours of having the global financial system completely stop, and after trillions of dollars opaquely thrown at big banks - should he get to keep his job?

Hat tip to the article at The Daily Beast for the link to this particular speech.

LaLa.com bought by Apple

Back in October I mentioned Apple was looking into LaLa.com's app.

NYTimes.com announced Apple bought Lala apparently for the talent:

This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.

Lala’s engineers have built a service that music enthusiasts say is very easy to use. Lala scans the hard drives of its users and creates an online music library that matches the user’s collection, making it painless (and free) for people to get their music in the cloud.

From Bloomberg:

An acquisition of Lala may signal that Apple is more interested in creating a subscription service, Kenswil said.

Wasting 1/2 second while Googling apparently sucks

They tested it. From kottke.org:

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

Fox News sez The Daily Show scooped MSM on climate change conspiracy

From Fox, ahem, News.com:

The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they've even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central.

Bernanke getting more Senators against his confirmation

From nakedcapitalism.com:

Senator Bunting also placing a hold on Bernanke's confirmation in the Senate Banking Committee.

Check out FireDogLake.com.

Sprint automatically shares GPS data 20,000 times a day

From Precentral.com:

A Sprint spokesperson noted that law enforcement and other government agencies only request information such as in missing persons cases, genuine emergencies, criminal investigations, or instances when a customer consents to sharing information. Sprint spokesperson Matt Sullivan said, "In all cases we require a valid legal request appropriate for the circumstances, meaning the request must be accompanied by either a subpoena, court order or customer consent."

Bold emphasis added.

So people doing things legally have no problem allowing themselves to be followed every where they go and, if you follow the link, allow every thing they do online be watched? Or... they don't know they're allowing that access?

Accept credit card payments with your cell phone

From SquareUp.com:

Read payment cards from any device with an audio input jack, including your mobile phone. Accepting payments has never been faster or more convenient.

From Fast Company's article:

By providing a basic, easy-to-use and secure system (no credit card data is stored on the iPhone in use) Square could turn almost anyone into a credit-card accepting merchant. It also costs way less than the typical wireless keypad/printer card machines you see in stores, even factoring in the price of the iPhone--partly due to its "no contracts...no hidden costs" promise.

How to stop the Fed Chairman's confirmation > Contact your Senator

From nakedcapitalism.com:

When CEOs preside over disasters, they are fired. Captains go down with their ships.

And Bernanke needs to be replaced.

He was a major architect of the policies that created the crisis.

He ignored signs of the severity of the developing crisis and failed to prepare for obvious dangers, like the collapse of an investment bank.

nakedcapitalism.com is one of the best and most well respected macro econ & finance blogs.

An email service to help build artists' fan base

Received an email from an artist I follow who used FanBridge:

So Many Networks, So Little Time

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, oh my! Like you, your fans are spread out across many social networks, but that doesn't mean you need to maintain every social network separately. With FanBridge, you can communicate with fans from a single location. We then track the effectiveness of each network so you know where best to spend your time.

Looks like a terrific integrated service. Have you tried this?

Who did the Fed lend $2T too?

If you aren't pissed off about this, you aren't alive.
Go here to support Sanders and his blocking of Bernanke's renomination.

How Wall Street is going to make Enron's implosion look like an after school special

From the author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, her recent article at The Daily Beast:

Again, it’s “just” a couple billion of discrepancies, but with books this massive at banks this big and risky, accuracy matters. Plus, such nuances make it extremely difficult to understand its books for regulators or the public.

And:

With taxpayers now on the hook, we need an objective, consistent evaluation of bank balance sheets complete with probing questions about trading and speculative revenues, allowing for comparisons across the banking industry. This lack of transparency leaves room to misrepresent risk and trading revenue.

The short version of her article:

She read over 1,000 pages of SEC filings of several large banks and found their publicly released balance sheets are incomprehensible and we as tax payers are now also liable since we continue to bail them out with any real accountability and the odds are, we are all screwed unless something big happens on the regulatory front.

LandScope America by National Geographic & NatureServe

An online tool to help save previous places:

LandScope America—a collaborative project of NatureServe and the National Geographic Society—is a new online resource for the land-protection community and the public. By bringing together maps, data, photos, and stories about America’s natural places and open spaces, our goal is to inform and inspire conservation of our lands and waters.

Audubon provides some interesting info including it's Important Bird Areas series:

The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program is the focal point for Audubon’s bird conservation work. As a global effort to identify the most important places for bird populations and to focus conservation efforts on those sites, IBAs represent Audubon’s lead conservation initiative because the most severe threats to bird populations are habitat-based.

This should be identified as an Important Bird Area:



LandScope also has some excellent informative sections like Open Space 101:

One of the most auspicious aspects of open space planning is that for the most part it happens locally.Communities with the will and the grassroots involvement to protect land and other resources can do tremendous things. As author Samuel Brody has noted, “Some of the most effective policy tools that can either threaten or protect ecosystems are in the hands of county officials, city councils, town boards, local planning staff, and general public rather than federal or regional agencies.”

If local officials won't provide the leadership - the people need to step up, throw them out, and exercise their rights as citizens to protect their neighborhoods for future generations.

The most profound item in the SIFMA email today

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
German poet, playwright, novelist and statesman

On a related note, Vanity Fair's latest article on GS entitled The Bank Job.
SIFMA's website.

Walk to California to get the excess weight off from T-Day

Check out her work. It's great.

Back to the Land from Maira Kalman at the NY Times.



Her site.

Lego Matrix

You know the scene. This took a crazy amount of time to make and is awesome!
Enjoy:

A terrific essay about how small book stores can thrive

From Cory at bOingbOing.net:

On the bottom-end of the market, there's the Espresso book printer, as currently in operation in the wonderful Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. This thing will print any public domain book that Google has scanned, in about 4 minutes, for $8.

...At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself.

And:

At the other end of the scale, the high-end, there's the book-as-object phenomenon. Taschen and a few other art-book publishers have figured out how to make a market out of this[.]

BTW, you can spend about 40 hours a day at bOingbOing.net.

Fed testing simple three-way reverse repurchase transactions

The Fed has pumped well over $1T into the economy it eventually has to pull out in such a way inflation doesn't get too bad. Ha ha ha.

They've come up with a simple transaction they are going to test on a limited basis according to Bloomberg:

The transactions will be conducted at current market rates, and the aggregate amount outstanding “will be very small relative to the level of excess reserves,” today’s announcement said. The results will be posted on the New York Fed’s Web site and will be listed as liabilities on the Fed’s consolidated balance sheet statements.

The New York Fed said on Oct. 19 that it was working with market participants on how it would use reverse repurchase agreements to help drain cash. It also said the central bank was considering expanding the counterparties for reverse repo operations beyond the 18 primary dealers.

Sounds simple enough doesn't it? What's the worse that could happen? The economy is either the worst since 2008 or inflation explodes way more than it did in the 70s.

A how-to showing how to control what people see about you online

Even in Facebook.

From Wired's Wiki/article:

Different folks certainly have different tolerance levels for their online persona and how public they want it to be, but thankfully, there are tips to ensure that your boss, your ex, or your mildly interested former friends can keep tabs on you on your terms.

Wikileaks releases transcripts of 573.000 pager intercepts from 9/11 2001

From their 911.wikileaks.org page:

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

What wikileaks.org is about:

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights.

Hat tip to Virginia Coalition of Open Government for the link.

Order your personalized coffee table book about our President & his campaign

From Apple's Pro Profiles series:

“But with this book there are no copies in stores, no bookshelves, no review copies. Each copy is created as you order it, so it doesn’t exist until you bought it. Economically, environmentally, it’s just so much better.”

They picked 200 photos for the book:

“But with Aperture, it was incredibly easy to sort, rate, and export 40 thousand images."

At the book's website, The Obama Time Capsule:

STEP 1 Purchase THE OBAMA TIME CAPSULE on Amazon. One order per personalization. Within 3 hours of authorization an email will be sent to you so that you can begin personalizing your book.

Instructions for how to make the book personalized.



Why the author worked on the project:

“I don’t know the future of coffee table books,” he says. “Maybe they’re dinosaurs. But rather than killing them, technologies like just-in-time publishing might represent a coming of age for these books, and for books in general. I love the web — I live online all day — but there’s no ‘there’ there. So what I really like is that I can leave this book for my great grandchildren to pick up someday and see what my wife, my kids, and I were doing when President Obama was elected.”

Cool!

Please help preserve Ft Monroe

From CreateFortMonroeNationalPark.org:

SOLUTION: We propose a national park that would flourish without overly burdening taxpayers and that would benefit the Hampton Roads economy in many ways. There’s a proven precedent and inspiration: San Francisco’s similar former Army post, the Presidio.

Please! Donate to the Fort Monroe National Park Foundation:

The Fort Monroe National Park Foundation, Inc. was formed in June 2007 by leaders of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park as a separate nonprofit, educational foundation dedicated to educating the public and promoting better understanding nationally, regionally and locally of the importance and potential of the 570 acres constituting Fort Monroe.

WTF! Patent Office grants official exclusive rights for podcasting to Volomedia

That would be like giving the exclusive patent rights for thinking to one company!

HELP EFF.org DEFEAT THIS.

EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent And we Need Your Help! Patenting podcasting? You've got to be kidding. Yet a company called Volomedia just got the Patent Office to grant them such exclusive rights. EFF and the law firm of Howrey, LLP aren't willing to just sit by and watch. This patent could threaten the vibrant community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. We want to put a stop to it, but we need your help.

The Volomedia patent covers "a method for providing episodic media."
It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks
have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new
layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.

Please head to EFF.org's link to find out how to help.

NYTimes.com > Education> Med Grow Cannabis College

At This School, It’s Marijuana in Every Class

“This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars,” said Nick Tennant[.]

Med Grow Cannabis College website. Go ahead, click, I'm sure your privacy is secure.

Owl grabbing a kitten in slow motion

Owl Attacks Camera in Slow Motion - Watch more Funny Videos

Thanks for the link Mark!

After turkey dinner, here's something to do your mother wouldn't

This isn't your mother's JavaScript.

We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Indeed, when we talk about them, we say they are the cat's meow – which is an American expression meaning AWESOME.

Go play with Chrome Experiments.
One of my fav's, Ball Droppings.

Tweet not sent to thousands of teenage girls gets VP arrested

From coverage at CNET:

What is somewhat peculiar is that a tweet was sent from Justin Bieber's account around the time of the arrest, reading: "they are not allowing me to come into the mall. if you don't leave, I and my fans will be arrested, as the police just told us."

Follow Justin Bieber on Twitter.

You don't know him! Are you kidding me?!
Check him out on YouTube.com.

Please help the SEC regulate dark pool trading

Or if you're over say, 35, do not "invest" in any stocks or mutual funds that own stocks. Instead, save your money for Las Vegas, Atlantic City or the nearest Indian Reservation.

From Financial Times:
[free subscription probably required to read entire article]

“The number of active dark pools...has tripled since 2002,” said an early SEC release on the proposed rules.

“Given this growth of dark pools, a lack of transparency could create a two-tiered market that deprives the public of information about stock prices and liquidity.”

A previous article at Financial Times urging the regulation of dark pool trading had a comment:

He said the SEC was “exploring ways” to gather information about the transactions of high-frequency traders. “The commission recognises concerns have been raised that high-frequency traders have the ability to access markets more quickly,” he said. “This ability may allow them to submit or cancel their orders faster than long-term investors, which may result in less favourable trading conditions for these investors.”

Exploring ways! This is another area of our financial system that needs simple, clear, enforceable regulation.

Contact the SEC to move from exploring ways to taking action.

2012 Trailer from SNL

It's not neutrinos from a massive solar flare that destroys earth.

new deal 2.o website

Looks like this might be a good resource for in depth info about our financial system:

We go behind the headlines to explore the questions at the heart of the economic debate, offering both short, digestible explanations of the issues as well as more in-depth discussions around the finer points of the public conversation.

Some of their reporting, opinon and analysis should help determine:

What Caused the Crisis?

Like you, we want to know how our financial system imploded and determine how we can avoid future chaos. To that end, we have assembled thought leaders, former government officials, historians and intellectuals to write an open letter to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – a group of people recently appointed by Congress to "examine all causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis." The letter requests the adoption of guidelines critical to the success of the investigation.

1 million wild spiders make tapestry on display at AMNH

On display at the American Museum of Natural History in NY.

A dozen more people were needed to draw the silk from the spiders with hand-powered machines, with each spider producing about 80 feet of silk filament.

Hat tip kottke.org.
At NPR.org.

Andre Agassi with Tavis Smiley was very open

A clip.



Head over to Smiley's website to watch the entire 23 minute interview. Agassi explains how he overcame his crushing depression he suffered from while winning 8 Grand Slams.

The Andre Agassi Foundation for Education.

Exercising power v. doing better work

This will be a classic quote:

An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.

From Paul Graham writing about the mistake Apple is making with their App Store re: relationship with developers.

Microsoft sponsors event for people to bring their Macs

Opps!
Link has photo of Microsoft sponsored conference where every one is using a Mac Book Pro.

Nor'Ida a week ago on Friday the 13th

2 highest tides were Thursday night, and this one Friday morning. Photo taken about 837am Friday the 13th. There was about a foot of water in our yard at the 2 highest tides. These highest tides on our street were hours after the "official" high tide. 3rd high tide of Nor'Ida, Friday afternoon, still had a couple feet of water on our sidewalk & street encircling our property.

Watch Yankees win World Series in 3 minutes & 24 seconds

Starts with fans leaving buses before game. Highlights include grounds crew, hot dog grill, popcorn machine, home runs, & dancing pitchers. Ends with fans leaving.

Watch at NYTimes.com in full screen with speakers blasting.

The game is played to Chopin’s Waltz No. 5, a score Mr. Caplin chose to complement the antique sensibility of the piece.

Be a master rock setter instead of a professional cloud manager

It's never too late to change your education or career.
Check out this master rock setter's work at FastCompany.com.

Copyright Watch, which collects & monitors copyright law worldwide, launches

Since we:

...we are all authors, publishers, and sharers of copyrighted works.

About Copyright Watch:

Our dream was to build a user-friendly resource of national copyright laws to help citizens of the world undertake comparative research.
-
Finally, we hope that Copyright Watch will help document the importance of copyright to all aspects of cultural life and human freedom.

Jon Stewart v. Lou Dobbs tomorrow night

The gay illegal alien homophobic death panel crowd get's their cage match Wednesday night. Watch it live on Comedy Central. Tivoing this will be like Tivoing the Super Bowl.

Bird lover trades a view of a pelican for $1.25M 2006 Bugatti Veyron

From AP News.

Buy your own Bugatti here.

Here's some pelicans for free.

Kayak at our front door during Nor'Ida

Some one named the storm Nor'Ida. I like the name. Hated the storm and it's affects.

Here's a friend at our front door. This is not at the highest of the 3 high tides.

Note: water did not come over the Chesapeake Bay beach to our front door. It did not come over the shore at Crab Creek, nor over the banks of Pleasure House Creek. This was from our storm drains that feed into one pipe. Logical huh? You may be asking, why doesn't the City have "plugs" or some kind of engineering in the appropriate place for big storms like this? Follow this blog, and we'll explore why.

Andrew Zuckerman's film and photography work about birds is phenomenal

Andrew Zuckerman: Bird project. Spend some time here if you like/love birds. Under Photographs, be sure to check out the Andean Condor, Greater Bird-of-Paradise, Jackass Penguin, Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise, Wattled Currasow - really, check them all out. Under Films, check out Behind The Scenes, and Promo - Secretary. Audio is great too.

This is his official site - has audio when opened. I recommend viewing this on the largest screen possible, like your big screen TV. Under Photographs, be sure to see the Egg, Water - again, all of them.

Under Film, watch at least Wisdom - "It's about being decent." "You can't get to wonderful without getting through all right." "I think it's love." "If you're ever going to create a peaceful world, ..." Just watch this. Gain wisdom. The website for Wisdom has even more about this project. Check out Making Of > How It Was Made. "I had no experience interviewing any one before."

His movie, High Falls.

Friday the 13th Nor'Easter

Damage. Bunch of damage. A lot damage in our neighborhood could have easily been prevented. My guess is, it will be fixed.

Link between falling minimum wage, cheap food & obesity

From the National Bureau of Economic Resesarch:

Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially “fast food”, has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over 1968-2007 and because minimum wage labor is a major contributor to the cost of food away from home we hypothesized that changes in the minimum wage would be associated with changes in bodyweight over this period. To examine this, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1984-2006 to test whether variation in the real minimum wage was associated with changes in body mass index (BMI).

From Grist.org article & the study:

[E]ven though lower income persons are more likely than higher income persons to be obese, obesity has increased most among higher income persons in recent years, as might be expected if changes in the price of food away from home were driving increases in obesity.

You know, how fast food has gotten cheaper relative to making your own lunch/dinner with healthy food at home, eating out more often piles on the weight more easily.

Take the Single-Use Plastic Emergency Response (S.U.P.E.R.) Hero Pledge

Learn about PlasticPollutionCoalition.org:

Plastic Pollution 101: The basic concepts

Plastic is forever.

Plastic has become a plague.

Plastic affects human health.

Recycling is not a sustainable solution.

The Pacific Garbage Patch.

Take the pledge:

I will follow the “4 Rs” of sustainable living in the following order of preference:
Refuse:

Just say NO to single-use and disposable plastics like bags and bottles, straws, cups, plates, silverware and razors. Instead, bring your own shopping and produce bags to the market. Carry a reusable bottle with you for drinking on the go. Bring your travel mug to the coffee shop. Pack your own utensils. Skip the straw. (Plastic straws are for suckers!) Bring your own containers for take-out or ask for non-plastic disposable packaging.
Reduce:

Reduce waste: buy in bulk, choose products with the least packaging, look for products and packaging made from renewable resources, and avoid plastic packaging and containers. Choose products that have the least amount of disposable parts, like razors with replaceable blades and toothbrushes with replaceable brushes.
Reuse:

Reuse preferably nontoxic (glass, stainless steel) containers and goods to make less waste. Bad habits are disposable, containers are reusable.
Recycle:

Recycle what you can’t refuse, reduce or reuse. Recycling is a last option because it uses energy, and there may not be a market for the refabricated materials.

I will be a S.U.P.E.R. Hero!

Then go to Fake Plastic Fish and show your plastic:

Take the challenge. Collect your plastic waste (both recyclable and non) for one week or more. Then photograph, tally, and post it here. What can we learn about our habits and lifestyles by examining our waste? And what changes can each of us make to leave the planet a little less trashy?

Refuse plastic bags.

Beautiful photos of albatross chicks killed by being fed plastic

Watch this in HD full screen. The music is powerful too.



From Chris Jordan's YouTube page:

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

From the photographer's website, ChrisJordan.com:

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

The music for Midway. Message from the Gyre is "15 Aftermaths" from "Vol 1. : Battle Cry".

The long, complex journey that leads us home. This is the first song I ever wrote, when I was 15-years-old.

From MidwayJourney.com:

Midway Atoll, one of the remotest islands on earth, is a kaleidoscope of geography, culture, human history, and natural wonder. It also serves as a lens into one of the most profound and symbolic environmental tragedies of our time: the deaths by starvation of thousands of albatrosses who mistake floating plastic trash for food.

Do something!

Help fund the artists by donating or buying their work.
Ban the use of plastic bags near our waterways.
Forward this story to every one you know.
Never use helium balloons.
Never litter.

Originally saw this at MNN.com.

Wall Street Execs should donate 100% of their bonuses to help Vets get health care

From Bloomberg news, Wall Street bonuses are up 60% vs 2008:

The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates.

The big banks continue to get free money from us in the form of 0% Fed Funds Rate, Federal Guarantees in various forms and other programs amounting to trillions of dollars a year most you aren't aware of. They are continuing to make mad money, taking the same risks they took before they blew up the economy and got bailed out, and are paying larger bonuses on top of that.

Vets, who have proudly served their country, die every day due to a lack of health care.

From a research team at Harvard Medical School, their study found:

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001.

The solution?

The Bank Execs should donate 100% of their bonuses we helped them make to fund a Health Care System that would insure 100% of all Vets.

Vets deserve no less.

Yeah! Congress passes Health Care reform

Health Care Bill passes House.

New 18 button mouse simplifies computer use

From the geniuses at OpenOfficeMouse.com:



How does Apple have a chance with their Magic Mouse?

Hat tip about the 18 button thing goes to Daring Fireball.

Nosy about what Google knows about you?

Google Dashboard:

At Google, we are keenly aware of the trust you place in us and our responsibility to protect your privacy. As part of this responsibility, we let you know what information we collect when you use our products and services, why we collect it and how we use it to improve your experience.

10:10 Campaign's simplicity is brilliant

It doesn't get much simpler than this! From 10:10:

Aren’t individual efforts just a pointless drop in the ocean?
Not if they’re part of a mass movement. 10:10 makes the efforts of individuals meaningful by ensuring that lots of people will be pledging to make the same cuts, and shows politicians that we as a people are taking the threat of climate change seriously.

What’s the point of just getting people in the UK to sign up when the country accounts for only 2% of world emissions?
10:10 is being launched as a UK campaign but scientists say it is the right target for the whole developed world. The hope is that the campaign will spread to other countries, and we’ll be making it as easy as possible for that to happen.

Breathing technique to help folks with asthma

The NYTimes.com most emailed story for the last couple days is about a Russian doctor's breathing technique to help folks with asthma reduce medications and breathe easier:

Then, last spring, someone told him about the Buteyko method, a shallow-breathing technique developed in 1952 by a Russian doctor, Konstantin Buteyko. Mr. Wiebe watched a video demonstration on YouTube and mimicked the instructions shown.

“I could actually feel my airways relax and open,” he recalled. “This was impressive. Two of the participants on the video were basically incapacitated by their asthma and on disability leave from their jobs. They each admitted that keeping up with the exercises was difficult but said they had been able to cut back on their medications by about 75 percent and their quality of life was gradually returning.”

About the Buteyko Method:

In 1952, Konstantin Buteyko found out that people often consume five to ten times more air than their bodies require. An extensive amount of air creates an insufficiency of carbon dioxide in the lungs and bloodstream, which badly impacts metabolism and the immune system gradually rendering them dysfunctional. Carbon dioxide deficit also affects respiratory gas exchange and diminishes the amount of oxygen carried by the blood to the brain, heart and kidneys. This situation can cause asthma, allergies, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, cardiological problems, growth of tumors, etc. - after a life-long research, Dr. Buteyko came to the conclusion that about 150 out of all known diseases are the result of hyperventilation. Ironically, those 150 diseases are the most widespread.

A BCC story about it.



TheBreathingMan.com is a resource for The Buteyko Method.

Growing up with childhood asthma, I remember teaching myself to relax and use shallow breathing to "catch my breath". I guess I was using this technique and yes, it worked for me then.

Make Congress READ THE BILL by signing the petition

Read The Bill from Sunlight Foundation on Vimeo.

ReadTheBill.org sez:

ReadTheBill.org is an effort to gather individuals and groups, luminaries and everyday folks, conservatives, liberals and independents behind the simple concept that all non-emergency legislation should be available online for 72 hours before debate begins.

Please hold your Government accountable - sign the petition!

A take on using a CDS Clearing House

From nakedcapitalism.com:

And I must confess, they sound deceptively appealing (I was a proponent early on) until you dig further into how they would work for CDS. They need to be regulated intrusively, with the intent of shrinking the market considerably over time, and like insurance, with tough capital requirements and frequent examinations of the capital adequacy and claims-paying ability of the sponsor.

Essentially, that CDS should be viewed as insurance and not as an "investment vehicle". Makes sense as CDS allegedly is used to hedge, ie. insure, and us tax payers own AIG since they did not have any where near the collateral to pay off the obligations they received premiums for, ie. insurance companies must have plenty of capital behind their products. Therefore, a Clearing House is not to solution to reign in the CDS market. And to think, this market has been and still is unregulated.

Read all or parts of H.R.2454 - American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009

Thanks to Open Congress, you can read all or parts of any Bill working their way through Congress.

About Open Congress:

OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, and more to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of two 501c(3) non-profit organizations, the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

Put broadly, the main problem we seek to address with OpenCongress is that the Congressional legislative process is largely closed-off from timely and meaningful public input. For most people, finding out what's really happening in our democratically-elected Congress is a difficult and discouraging task. The rules by which bills become laws are notoriously arcane. What's more, Congress offers few channels for people to make their voices heard on consequential publicy policy matters before, during, and after the legislative process. This disconnect results in deep-seated public disapproval of Congress -- and worse, malignant apathy about politics as a whole.

As with any Bill, there are rumors circulating about what one can and can not do once a Bill is passed.

One example is that H.R. 2454 will:

In effect, this bill prevents you from selling your home without the permission of the EPA administrator.

You can easily read sections or the entire Bill at Open Congress to read what it really says.

SEC. 202 Building Retrofit Program.

SEC. 204. BUILDING ENERGY PERFORMANCE LABELING PROGRAM.

(f) Creation of Building Energy Performance Labeling Program-
(1) MODEL LABEL- Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Administrator shall propose a model building energy label that provides a format
(A) to display achieved performance and designed performance data;
(B) that may be tailored for residential and commercial buildings, and for single-occupancy and multitenanted buildings; and
(C) to display other appropriate elements identified during the development of measurement protocols under subsections (d) and (e).

(2) INCLUSIONS- Nothing in this section shall require the inclusion on such a label of designed performance data where impracticable or not cost effective, or to preclude the display of both achieved performance and designed performance data for a particular building where both such measures are available, practicable, and cost effective.

Goldman Sachs made money on housing crash

Of course they did. That is how capitalism works. There are winners & losers. Goldman has weathered the Great Recession far, far better than almost anyone.

Yet, from McClatchy's article:

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

Let's assume they're innocent just out to make a buck.

Here's the fun part. On their "public books" is it that far fetched they sell crap while simultaneously "hedging" in their opaque off balance sheet unregulated dark pools?

What motivation would they have not to drive the economy off a cliff if they saw everybody speeding to it?

Madison, Adams & Jefferson documents offered online for first time

University of Virginia Press' Rotunda:

Rotunda today releases Founders Early Access, our first open-access publication. Founders Early Access makes available for the first time thousands of unpublished documents from our nation’s founders in a free online resource. Collected over many years by the Founders documentary editions, these letters and other papers penned by important figures such as James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson offer Americans of all ages and interests a wider view of the early Republic.

The Founders Early Access portal.
Hat tip to Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

Ikea Heights, a melodrama

Not up on the latest happenings in Burbank's Ikea, catch up at Ikea Heights.

Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing.

Bill heading to Congress that could change the web & your privacy

According to studies, most of you do not block 3rd parties from viewing your online surfing habits. Do you care about your privacy? Do you know everything you do online can be tracked? Do you care who has that info?

Great article at Poynter Online about an upcoming Bill including links to get you thinking about your privacy while surfing:

The crux of Boucher's bill for the advertising industry is a plan to prevent Web sites from sharing information with "unrelated third parties.

And:

"Congress' position is that consumers are not appropriately aware of what is being done on their machines, and the use of cookies delivered by a third party is something consumers have not been appropriately informed of," Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan, who heads the Interactive Advertising Bureau's privacy committee, said in June after meeting with Congressional staffers.

He was on the opposite side of the debate from Wise at the conference, and he pointed out how much data is collected and shared -- everything from our bank account and credit card balances to the pharmaceuticals we've purchased -- without our knowledge.

Firefox, as an example, has features like blocking of 3rd party tracking and private browsing:

Customized Security Settings

Control the level of scrutiny you’d like Firefox to give a site and enter exceptions—sites that don’t need the third degree. Customize settings for passwords, cookies, loading images and installing add-ons for a fully empowered Web experience.

Takedown Hall of Shame at EFF.org

The Takedown Hall of Shame and why:

Bogus copyright and trademark complaints have threatened all kinds of creative expression on the Internet. EFF's Hall Of Shame collects the worst of the worst.

Walk on pavement to create electricity to safely light your way

One of their example uses is placing their pavement in the street so it would light up the crosswalk as you walk across it. How cool & safe would that be?

From an article at Inhabitat:

Every time a rubber Pavegen stone is stepped on it bends, producing kinetic energy that is either stored within lithium polymer batteries or distributed to nearby lights, information displays, and much more. Just five slabs spread over a lively sidewalk has the ability to generate enough energy to illuminate a bus stop throughout the night. But applications are not limited to the street.

Check out PaveGen Systems.

Funky reflection

Plastic that dissolves in water

Years ago I found corn starch "Styrofoam" packaging pellets that dissolved in any temperature water - as in - completely gone. Unfortunately I've had -0- luck finding it again.

This is a plastic bag that disappears in boiling water.

Check out the explanation about the dissolving plastic packaging at Creative Review.

The company behind the packaging and their blog.

So banning plastic bags near water like the Chesapeake Bay really isn't that much of a hassle with solutions like this eh?

AG Cuomo forces insurance companies into more transparency

From NYTimes:

The announcement is part of a settlement reached over the last year with more than a dozen insurance companies concerning one of the industry’s most controversial practices: the payment of out-of-network claims.

Using a database run by the UnitedHealth Group, the insurance giant, the industry was accused of systematically understating the doctors’ fees for more than a decade and shortchanging consumers by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why I never answer quizzes in Facebook

They can't guarantee your private info is safe.

From NPR.org's 2nd part of their 4 part series:

What people often don't realize, Conley says, is that these quizzes are applications. Just like games and other entertainment, they're programs that run in a user's Web browser.

"You think that all you're doing is answering a few innocent questions," Conley says. "But in fact, you're opening up your entire profile and almost all your personal information to whoever wrote the quiz."

Free music at Amazon made easy by downloading their, well, downloader

Check out the Philip Glass Sampler album for free.
Amazon has a bunch of other albums for free too. Over 100.

Soros funds Institute for New Economic Thinking with $50M donation

The hope is it'll be matched up to about $200M.

In case you aren't aware, "traditional" economics and it's models as it's taught in virtually all renowned universities completely failed in the last several years culminating in the economy blowing up in Fall of 2008.

Many believe, including me, that the entire global banking system needs completely overhauled asap. But:

... it's all happening very slowly. And with no rules of the road, we have entered a Mad Max world of economics in which even the most eminent of our top regulators and central bankers can't seem to agree on the fundamental nature of financial markets.

Soros with his resources is looking to speed up the massive shift that must take place to bring reality to economics, it's philosophies, models, etc.

Watch an interview explaining the Institute for New Economic Thinking at FT.com.

"The dogma has lost touch with reality."

Grants will be available from the new Institute.
More about Mr. Soros.

National Geographic Traveler Magazine ranks the Chesapeake Bay a 42

From National Geographic Traveler:

One of America's iconic landscapes, but the bay is dying, both as a natural ecosystem and as a cultural landscape. Almost all indicators of the Bay's health are negative. Is it any wonder, given the rampant sprawl, agricultural runoff, and booming population growth in the watershed?

Sad. Very sad. When will people decide to stop wasting time and start working on protecting this treasure for their great-great-grandchildren?

What did you do for 350 day?

According to 350.org:

What does the number 350 mean?

350 is the most important number in the world--it's what scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Amendment to exempt used car lots from proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency

This is funny. As in, how could this Congressman not know all of the info is public.


Go to Change-Congress.org.

Yippie - I'm invited to test Google Wave

Google Wave is:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document.
A wave is shared.
A wave is live.

Whitehouse.gov goes open source !

Congrats to Drupal, an open source content management system [CMS]!

From Personal Democracy Forum:

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government.

Publishing social security numbers online is a 1st Amendment right

I love how this woman has used the rule of law, the Constitution & FOIA, on what you would think would be common sense - that is - government protecting their citizens from publishing social security numbers online.

From ComputerWorld.com:

A fight by the Virginia government to stop a privacy advocate from republishing Social Security numbers obtained legally from public records on government sites on her Web site is attracting the attention of some privacy heavyweights.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to uphold privacy advocate Betty Ostergren's First Amendment right to publish the numbers.

- - -

Largely in response to her campaign, Virginia lawmakers passed legislation in 2008 that prohibits the dissemination of any records that contain Social Security numbers, no matter how the records were obtained.

Lala la - Where music plays for a dime

Sing it Muddy!

(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man...

Lala.com for more.

There's an app for that - by the end of the year. Check it at Wired.com story.

How several local judges are holding Wall Street's securitaztions accountable using the rule of law

Hopefully this will get a lot of press as it certainly appears that using the rule of law - the little guy will get to protect themselves from banks who take short cuts and who want their cake, have you pay for it, and get to eat it too.

Background:

Your mortgage is "packaged" with other mortgages into a financial instrument. This process is called securitization. It seems the investors who own these new securities - called mortgage backed securities [MBS] do not file the appropriate paper work for deed transfers.

From counter punch:

Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the “straw man” aspect of securitization. The judges’ decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who are more and more frequently the Wall Street banks themselves.

Can you name the 12-million-digit prime number?

You read that right. It's a new prime number just found and the finder won $100k.

More from EFF.org.

Google pink fingers

Ya know how Google is scanning every book ever made and is posting them online?

The person at Google doing it has pink fingers.
Hat tip kottke.org.

Green chile cheese burgers from the land of enchantment

Note: I am a vegitarian 100% of the time between meals.

OMG, do not watch this hungeree.

Link to vid about New Mexico's chile cheese burgers.
New Mexico's Green Chile Cheese Burger Trail.

The warning about your life savings

New Frontline doc The Warning from PBS.

A quote from The Warning:

That's how the business has grown from nothing in 1980 to $600 trillion of contracts today. ~ Mark Brickell Chair, International Swaps and Derivatives Association (1988-1992)

From a Slate article to put $600T in perspective:

By contrast, the value of the world's financial assets—including all stock, bonds, and bank deposits—was pegged at $167 trillion last year by McKinsey.

This market is not only hidden off company's balance sheets to a great extent. This market is almost 100% hidden - that is, not transparent. And most importantly - this market is still completely unregulated.

There is maximum pressure from companies, that we bailed out with trillions by the way, not to regulate this market. These companies, who we gave our money to, are paying lobbyists hundreds of millions to lobby against "us".

If you believe "everything will come back" with your IRA's, 401(k)s etc without regulation, you are as foolish as someone who jumps out of an airplane without a parachute and expects the outcome to be ok.

If you choose to do nothing to fix this, like contacting your elected officials demanding regulations, you are as liable for the outcome as someone who doesn't help their next door neighbor whose house is on fire and is threatening your own.

What are you working on changing?

About Change.org:

Today as citizens of the world, we face a daunting array of social and environmental problems ranging from health care and education to global warming and economic inequality. For each of these issues, whether local or global in scope, there are millions of people who care passionately about working for change but lack the information and opportunities necessary to translate their interest into effective action.

Learn more about Changemakers like Andy Abrahams Wilson and the Changemakers Network:

The Changemakers initiative aims to identify and engage the leading activists, elected officials, authors, bloggers, actors, musicians and thought leaders who have the greatest capacity to spark change on issues of importance.

From Mr. Wilson:



Learn more about the movie Under My Skin.

How health care could get done

I am so freakin jealous I didn't think of being a stand up economist!

Apparently THE Stand up Economist.



And no, I wasn't smart enough to find him from his letter to the editor of The Economist:

SIR – Having used my PhD in economics as a stepping stone to the more reputable field of stand-up comedy, it would be easy for me to spend all my time mocking macroeconomists. Consider, for example, that the current head of the Congressional Budget Office co-wrote a paper a few years back titled “Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?”.

Yoram Bauman
Seattle

I found him from his challenge to Obama's famous economist Austan Goolsbee.

Damn it! I wonder if the world is big enough for two stand up economists?

Comedian who is Prez of Chamber of Commerce chats with Ratigan

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is the same org who is fighting against health care reform and who are losing members due to their stance on climate change denial.

Wonder what will happen first - millions more losing health care, global catastrophe due to climate change or the Chamber of Commerce becoming irrelevant if they stay the course.

Would you rather live in a creative or distributive society?

From nakedcapitalism.com, some excerpts:

Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function.
-
Successful societies maximise the creative and minimise the distributive. Societies where everyone can only achieve gains at the expense of others are by definition impoverished. They are also usually intensely violent.
-
Even what the great investors do belongs at the distributive end of the spectrum. The genius of the great speculative investors is to see what others do not, or to see it earlier. That’s all. This is a skill…I am not convinced, though, of the social worth of such a skill, still less of the wisdom of encouraging society’s brightest and the best to try to perfect it.

This distinction between creative and distributive goes some way to explaining why the financial sector has become so large in relation to GDP – and why those working in it get paid so much. Even when a certain sort of financial activity is purely distributive, the returns to the winning parties are so enormous that the activity is immensely seductive – and the professionals who appear to be responsible for securing these gains are highly sought after and highly rewarded….

An insightful comment at the link:

There is something CRUCIAL missing from this analysis. The importance of LEVERAGE and LIMITED LIABILITY being combined, particularly in hedge funds. That is the real rort, and it is hidden away from view. Hedge funds enable huge gambles to be made, with a limited downside. And of course all those bets become self-fulfilling as credit expands.

Why people will be homeless before they are bailed out by people we bailed out

From the Wall Street Journal:

The $1.7 trillion mortgage securitization market is still a mess, despite (or in part because of) the Federal Reserve's $700 billion splurge into the market. But another reason may be Treasury's decision to undermine private mortgage-backed securities (MBS) contracts.

BlackRock Inc. Chairman Laurence Fink went so far recently as to call this "one of the biggest issues facing American capitalism." He's worried that to protect banks from billions of dollars more in writedowns on bad second liens (a.k.a., home-equity loans), Treasury is trashing private contracts. "There is modification going on protecting our banks, protecting their balance sheets" and "I'm just very worried about it."

Ah, yes. The law. Contract law in this case. Who knew there'd be a downside to transferring risk to someone's balance sheet [by securitization]? How could you possibly have thought there would be clear contract law in place to allow for worst case scenarios?

So the circle we're trapped in is, we had to bail out the banks so they wouldn't bring down the economy. But - they can't use our money that bailed them out to help bail you out since current contract law won't let them.

Facebook tracks millions of users to find out the Gross National Happiness

From their link at Facebook:

The graph contains several metrics. The first, GNH represents our measure of Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are interesting to view on their own.

From NYTimes article:

The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood.

Banks argue for keeping stuff off their balance sheets

Ever wonder why your credit report shows every little slight detail about you, but banks and corporations don't have to account for various items on their balance sheet - even when they are publicly traded companies?

From Reuters:

"If you get off-balance sheet treatment, that provides a more efficient use of your balance sheet and has been the foundation of the structured finance market. Bringing it back on balance sheet would have an impact on all your various financial ratios," said Mike Kagawa, portfolio manager at Payden & Rygel.

Duh, really?! And that transparency is bad?

The article continues:

Industry experts said the accounting changes threaten to setback the huge strides made by the Fed's emergency loan program, the Term Asset-Backed Securites Loan Facility, known as TALF, launched earlier this year.

Through the program, the Fed was able to bolster consumer lending and reopen the securitization market for consumer ABS, nearly shutdown by a deep credit crisis in 2008. The program also drove the high costs of funding dramatically lower.

In case you forgot, TALF is the $1T, note the T, program the Federal Reserve is using to bail out the dealers of the program... I'm sorry, I mean the companies who securitize loans to keep it functioning.

In other words, the market imploded, without the Federal Reserve's $1T it would not be working and "the banks" want to keep the accounting the same.

Susie Buffett's only TV interview

The woman behind Warren Buffett until her death in 2004. Warren said of her, "he couldn't have done it without her".




Hat tip Signal vs. Noise.

Ian Shive, conservation photographer

From Current TV's blog [emphasis mine]:

The place where the two diverge is that nature photography takes no action – the image is for yourself or for a magazine. Conservation photography takes the process a step further by taking that same image and using it for advocacy, education and to bring awareness or aid to the subject or ecosystem depicted in the image. It’s sort of like giving back to the landscape that you’ve borrowed from as a photographer.

Be sure to check out his inspiring portfolio at his website.

Follow their Hunch

Go ahead, follow their Hunch:

Hunch is a decision-making tool that gets smarter the more you use it. After asking you 10 questions or less, Hunch will provide a concrete result for decisions of every kind.

Hi tide

Essay why investing in equities is parasitic in nature

It can certainly be agreed that:

Investors’ objectives

Five primary reasons for obtaining stock are for control of a company; to receive current income from its operations; for price gains; to store future purchasing power; and to create money.

In lieu of arguing in support of the value of the essay re: your investment choices, think of this as you read it. From today forward, there will be potentially life changing opportunities for you to invest your hard earned money in ways that will create the kind of lifestyle and community that will not only enhance your world, but others as well. Based on recent history, political and cultural reality, fixing our broken economy will take years. That reality increases the risk of a Fall 2008 meltdown or worse. If you are planning your investments based on markets returning to the status quo, you invest at your own peril.

About the author & his new book:

Thornton Parker is the author of “What If Boomers Can’t Retire? How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom Wealth”[.]

He defines phantom wealth as “the returns from corporate stocks that are based on market prices” as opposed to real wealth that is based on “work, earnings, and solid accomplishments, instead of just hopes.”

Read the essay.

Private property = trees most likely cut down...

Public property = trees most likely live.



Birds that live on PHP*, like the Belted Kingfisher, appreciate trees too.



PHP = Pleasure House Point.
Want to help protect it for future generations? Start here.

Moving Windmills - read his story, watch his story, share his story, donate, buy his book

Thanks to Jon Stewart who had William Kamkwamba on tonight.



Mr. Kamkwamba's website.

A post on his site for viewers from The Daily Show that includes a couple dozen links of how you can learn more and help.

His book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, is also available from links on his site. If you purchase thru his website, the affiliate fees also go to him & his 501(c)3.

By donating [Emphasis mine.]:

Payments appear as Moving Windmills Project, a US 501(c)3. Contributions are tax deductible in U.S. Click "Support My Work" tab for more info. Amounts over $250 will be doubled by a challenge grant.

Some info about the Documentary, YouTube version above:

“Moving Windmills” was submitted to the Pangea Day Film Festival, where it received the “Best North American Filmmaker” award from Participant Media. It placed third in the Cinema Properite Film Festival.

Since the film’s release, “Moving Windmills” has been screened at the World Economic Forum, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Columbia University’s African Economic Forum. It has also been accepted to the Ashland Independent Film Festival, The Without Borders Film Festival in Rome, and the Darfur Film Festival. It won 3rd place at the Seven Fund

Watch & learn about the movie at the Director's site, m ss n g p eces.

Watch Moving Windmills at Pangea Day's site.

About Pangea Day [Emphasis mine.]:

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film.

Follow Kamkwamba on Twitter.

Some photos from Flickr:



He is also a TEDGlobal 2007 Fellow.
About TED Fellow program.

Rewriting the Bible at Conservapedia is like Mastercard?

Stephen Colbert's "news" on Conservapedia apparently crashed their site.

From a cached version at Google:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible[.]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Benefits include:

• mastery of the Bible, which is priceless

Other benefits also include, according to Conservapedia, getting close minded liberals to read the Bible:

liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds

It would be nice if this wasn't bulldozed wouldn't it?