Whhaaat?

1 in 20 british children think that Adolf Hitler was a german soccer coach. for more absurd and depressing statistics such as this one read this article.

Linkkkkkks For Fun

Photos from a contest in which people were asked to create pictures showing what the world would be like if the internet disappeared. This is a real gem.

Insane weird cool video

Amazing set of pictures covering the world drug trade: from the dealers to the growers to the users.

Really awesome and inspired idea for a gift. Makes me wish I was much more creative.

Article on how England's swine flu cases have doubled in the last week...

Article on research that has found junk food to be as detrimental to rat brains as heroin. Clearly shows that junk food is not food for thought.

Crazy map showing the impact that a 4 degree Celsius rise in world temperature would have on the world environment.

Quote of the day: [Newton] invented calculus. Most of us sweat through it for multiple years in school just to learn it. He invented it--practically on a dare. He discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of optics. Then he turned 26." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

We Need to Get Out of Afghanistan Now

"According to reports, the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way."

Until I read this statistic I was semi-dedicated to the idea staying in Afganistan until we had finished what we set out. Now, I could not be farther from that. Right now, we are spending $320,000,000 PER DAY on the Marine's gasoline. Just the Marine's. WHHHHHHHHAAAT!?? How is that even possible? Really. How can we sustain that? I am speechless. To say the least, you should read the article that I got this from. It is all about how the US now fits the definition of a failed state.

What More Can I Say?

(click on it for the full experience)

This is probably my favorite Phillies picture taken during their many triumphs of the past three seasons. The raw emotion. The elation. Freaking Carlos Ruiz, the clutchest little panamanian this game has ever seen. This is the best team that I will ever root for. I can say that without any doubt and without any regret that I will never again get to see a group of players so good, so united by a common goal, so easy to love, and so exciting to watch. That is because these guys are that good. Go Phils. Finish up business tomorrow night and then sit back and wait around for those other teams to fight for the chance to be your next victim. Let's go.

Some Profound Quotes on Human Existence

It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."

-Chaim Potok

the infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. the sheer number of experiences i could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handfull of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation of the last, every moment smoothly following the the gentle curves of societal norms. we act like if we just get through today, tomorow our dreams will come back to us.

and no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to joly myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. it doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.

This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. That. Shit."

--xkcd

“In the midst of winter, I finally found that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Albert Camus

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. ~Fr. Alfred D'Souza

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. - unknown

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." - Richard Dawkins

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert Anson Heinlein

The people we judge and hate in life are in fact reflections of our disowned selves. (Dr Hal Stone)

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

• Quellcrist Falconer

High Quality Links

• This is really incredible. It is a recounting of the entirely odd balloon boy saga set to the tempo and rhyme scheme of the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
• Some awesome pics of frozen fruits and veggies getting shot at close range.
• A wikipedia entry on the peculiar phenomenon of sailing rocks, which are rocks that just move around, seemingly randomly. Freaking cool.
• A collection of the best of the best microscope images taken in the last 35 years. Truly stunning.
• A kick ass pic showing how big Antarctica really is. (clue: it's huge)
• A really complicated but enlightening and neat flow chart/illustration thing of the differences between dems and repubs.

Massive Berlin Marionette Show (and that's the marionettes that are massive)

There was a truly incredible marionette show in Berlin a few weeks ago. It was both absolutely beautiful and an staggeringly logistically complicated. Check it out if you want to be amazed and touched.

Jon Stewart Destroys CNN and Other Links

CNN spends time fact checking SNL skits. CNN does not spend time fact checking their guests. Jon Stewart has a few words to say on this matter. Check it out here.

Here's an article that expands on these thoughts: Why was Bush able to ram his agenda through so easily? Because his agenda was the agenda of the Ruling Class. Why can't Obama get his agenda through? Because his agenda directly attacks the Ruling Class.

Great reply to Fox's arrogance and overt collusion.

Strikingly beautiful map of pre-WWI Europe. If you look at anything here let it be this.

Nobel Prize winner

Did Obama deserve the nobel prize for peace efforts? It really depends on how you look at it. Has he really done enough yet to garner it? I would say no but I do think that he will in the next three, hopefully seven, years. Some obviously disagreed with me though.

I would have to assume that by giving Obama the prize the prize givers, whoever they are, were saying that by not being Bush, by repealing many of the acts that he had passed, by changing the tenor of the White House's words, by being in support of an ask questions first, and not later, strategy, by simply stepping down off the unreasonably high high-horse upon which the Bush administration had placed the White House and the USA, was enough to earn the nobel peace prize.

That is a powerful statement. It reminds me of when Time magazine made their 'person of the year' the public and put a mirror type thing on their cover. It was a surprising decision and one that a lot of people disagreed with but I loved it. It actually looked at what had happened in the world in the previous year, saw that things had changed, and that the causes of those changes had not been one person but the entire public. In the same light, the nobel prize givers saw that the world has changed in the last year, that many of the changes have been for the better, and that it was the work of one man, because really it is all about the way he carries himself and approaches his work that makes the difference, that had caused that change.

Quite honestly, it was not until a few days ago when someone pointed out that Obama probably won it for simply not being Bush, that I realized how great an impact Obama has had on the world already. No, he has not yet done a lot of the things that he promised but he really is doing an incredible amount of work and almost all of it is going towards returning the USA and the world to the stable ground that it was on before Bush took office.

In the process of writing this piece I have come to realize how brilliant a decision it was to give Obama the prize. I think it's because him receiving the prize made us all step back and think about whether or not he has done enough to earn it. On first look, it seems as though he has not really earned it yet, hell I wrote that at the beginning of this piece, but on second look you see that he really has brought the most peace to the world of any one person in the last year. This is by no means to say that he has come close to fulfilling the promises he made during his campaign or to fulfilling our hopes for what he is capable of but it is to say that he appears to be on the right path towards those goals. Here's to hoping he does enough in the coming years to win it again.

Awesomest Graph

This graph shows the occupational breakdown of US citizens in the last 150 years. Really cool.

Epimetheus Lives

PETA has a new blog and guess what it's called: The PETA Files. Now, if you haven't gotten it yet, say it three times fast. Dang, they did not think about that one.

Links For Thought

new piece by the great noam chomsky on "the push to militarize latin america"

some good ol' krugman on glen beck and the US. this one is good if you have recently found yourself wondering, as i definitely have, how beck has gotten so powerful.

an interesting piece from mother jones on the potential problems that are going to arise as tasers become more and more widely used, specifically by school security guards.

and, for all you tolkien lovers, but really just for myself, a site with tons of sketches that tolkien made of his imagined realm of middle earth.

let's be human beings

in these times of trouble, we must all remember that the qualities, i.e. race, religion, and politics, which appear to separate us from one another are merely on the surface of our shared existences. it truly can be hard to see this. to see, that is, that we are all the same on the inside.

our internal logic tells us that we are set apart from one another by the things that we have each experienced, and by the unique understanding of, and perspective on, the world that each of our sets of experiences gives us, but this simply is not true. yes, we have all experienced different things and yes, this does mean that we each see things in a different light but the distance between each one of us is minute compared to the gulf that i think we each imagine ourselves to be surrounded by.

for me, the proof that we are actually much closer than we think is that, while we do experience different things, we each experience those different things using nearly the same brains and sensory systems. in other words, we are all using the same operating systems to compute the data that we take in. i think that this means that two people can experience like things in different circumstances and each come out of it with like understandings of their experiences. i might even go so far as to say that that is what happens. that we each draw the like conclusions, merely coated by specific cultural circumstances, when we experience like things.

from here, you can make a leap and begin to wonder whether or not there is a finite set of conclusions that the range of things a human is capable of experiencing can yield. what would that mean? hmm, that's a bit of a thinker, probably best not to make that leap in the middle of all this. back to the main course.

ahh, yes, we all draw like conclusions off of like experiences. it must be noted of that there are differences in intellect, specific brain chemistry, and culture, which do set us apart to a point. i just don't think that we are as far apart as it seems or, more importantly, as we often want to think.

i mean how much easier is it to not care about someone's well being if you can think that they are nothing like you and would not understand where you are coming from? the answer is much, much easier. that right there is where so many of today's problems stem from. we seem incapable of accepting, or maybe even understanding, that the opinions' of our rivals might have merit to them, i.e. that they might be worth listening to and coming to comprehend.

there are efforts in many of today's most contested battles to build stronger bridges towards mutual understandings but this current economic situation is augmenting many of the divides, which already define these battles, and making the great distances that these bridges must cross even greater. now, more than ever in recent history, we need to take a collective step back and assess the true nature of our problems. i say this because i think that many of our arguments right now are being driven more by fear and anxiety about the future than by any specific parts of the arguments, i.e. people are more afraid about growing government control in a time when the government seems like a bit of a lurching giant than they actually are about health care.

we are all scared for what is coming. therein lies the crux; we are all scared. we are all scared that the lives we have worked for are going to get pulled out from under us and that we are going to be left alone and helpless in this new cold reality. well, firstly, that is exactly what is going to happen if we all continue to act so selfishly but, secondly, it is exactly in this moment of terror that we find the opportunity to come together and build a stronger, more united, future.

now, i do know that these idealistic words of mine have been spoken many times before and will be spoken many times again in the future but i also know that i am right. i know that this country is reaching a boiling point and that something is going to happen. whether that something is the republican party splitting into two groups, one group based on religion and yellow journalism and one group based on sound but conservative economic and social ideals, or obama giving in to dropping the public option and passing another weak health care reform bill or obama asserting the democratic majority in each house and passing whatever bill he really wants to or something else entirely, i do not know but i know that the next three, hopefully seven, years are going to bring change to this country.

so, here we sit on a precipice, three years from now, maybe seven years from now, we are going to be a different country. what is that country going to look like? it could be much more united than it currently is or it could continue on this divisive path towards a future that i fear holds in it the airing of some of America's oldest and dirtiest laundry. chances are that we will find ourselves somewhere in the middle of these two options. all i hope for is that we come to recognize the magnitude of the opportunity that we find in front of us before it is too late and that smallest of windows for positive change, which we see open only once every few decades, has closed again.

considering the dire magnitude of some of the ideas i just put out there, i should probably end this piece with a few words of encouragement. so, here they are: let's not be the cold, heartless, passive aggressive robots, which we have become. let's just be the warm, understanding, forthright creatures that we are meant to be. let's be human beings.

that may not sound like much but, really, it is all that we need to bring us out of this darkness and towards a brighter future

The man who saved a billion lives has just died

Norman Borlaug, "father of the green revolution", just died. His obit is ridiculously interesting. He worked tirelessly to find ways to increase crop production, specifically wheat, at a time when there were serious concerns that the world's population would outstrip it's food supply. It can be said without equivocation that his work saved hundreds of millions of lives. Though, he was not one to ever acknowledge the importance of his impact. Check it out.

Also, if you've got 10 minutes to kill, here's a penn and teller vid about Norman. If you've never watched a 'serious' penn and teller vid, you should because they are pretty politically conservative and they are pretty smart, too. In other words, they are an important perspective to hear from every now and then.

One more, a piece that I haven't gotten to read yet but that looks pretty cool. It's on the racial divisions that this recession is creating/bringing back into mainstream America. Read it.

real cool explanation of some old sayings

so, im not entirely sure that these are real but, if they're not, they're at least really creative. check them out