Here's a quote from Boris:
“I was never put on the ‘conveyor belt’ of life—I’ve always made my own path,” he says. “I do only what is absolutely required to be considered ‘normal.’”
And here's an interesting interview in which he discusses the state of family in the US and other countries, how to create a resilient child, and so forth.
So here's a question: Once the Chinese have finished raking out all of the algae bloom and jailing all the possible loose dissidents around, do you think that this Olympics will incent them to fix their air quality? Or will that take another fifteen years?
This article describes the situation to a T, although it was written in January.
Here are more current pictures from the Nasa earth observatory website. Note that Beijing residents haven't been allowed to use their cars since (and some factories closedon) July 20.
Although this is a horror show for the athletes participating, things look to be far better than they were in 2005, or in 2004, when an air show had to be cancelled because nobody could see the sky.
OK, so here's a little something that will make your toes curl. Replete with diagrams AND video, Justin Spring shows just what he does on that bar. One word: Yeeeeowch!
From the New World Notes blog on second life, here are some remarkable examples of what people have done in second life.
The BBC has a video segment where they juxtapose satellite images and data to create neat images
I sent this out to my friends and was greeted by some run images in response. These images are such fun for children - especially the images of unseen activity overlaid on the world. The telephone calls amazed my son.
large hadron collider
tour de france
tour de france conclusion
recent volcanic activity
views of jupiter
And of course there's this fun panoramic cam site
And the Earth from Space website.
Check out the Shelfari slamming in this post about Amazon's new acquisitions. In my humble experience, MANY acquisitions end up on the shelf permanentlly. Let's hope that AbeBooks stays well and that Shelfari gets its spamming nails trimmed!
I stumbled onto some pretty fun posts about how celebrities are photoshopped out of control. Always fun to look.
Here's Jezebel's "before and after comparison" of Faith Hill on the cover of some women's mag.
Here's their point-by-point rundown on what got changed.
And check out this guy's website. He's a retoucher. Seriously, the mouse rollovers are scary!
I liked this video by Girltalk. An intriguing story by Andrew Sullivan.
Here's a great posting from Tim Spalding, the author of Librarything, slamming Wikipedia by citing this great post by Karen Schneider, talking about what a homophobe Orson Scott Card is, and how it just doesn't get mentioned on Wikipedia.
Interesting stuff. And have I mentioned that I love librarian blogs?
I remember talking with a very young girlfriend who has a slacker boyfriend. "He's networking all the time," she said. "He's always getting into huge arguments on Wikipedia about stuff that he's written."
Oh dear.
I adore LibraryThing's social information model. Some of the coolest cross-networking I've ever seen. Can give Amazon a run for it's money. Should be interesting to see where it goes.
I have worked with geeks for years. It makes me happy. It's fun to work with a group of people who are genuinely invested in a problem and a project - as opposed to social interactions (for example.)
Here's a very cute article from the Eide Neurolearning blog about teaching geeks, talking about what works best and the benefits of teaching a geek (or more).
