A Slice of San Francisco Sadness

http://chadfox.blogspot.com/2008/08/scratched-dented-but-unbreakable.html

Quote of the Day

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. – PJ O’Rourke

Man, I love the game lemmings. How awesome would it to use the term “lemming migration” in a sentence sometime today. Maybe you’ll see a group of mid-level executives go to a meeting and you can IM to your officemate “There’s goes a migration of lemmings”. If that’s not possible, then tell someone today: “Don’t be such a lemming!”

What I Learned Today — Watch This Video

This video is not new, but Hans Rosling’s data and graphs simply blew my mind.  The graphical representation of all this public data is simply astounding and makes complex data more easily understood by the average person.   Everyone says that health is much more important than wealth, but Prof. Rosling shows–with actual data–that a poor but developing and  healthy (in terms of the general population) country can increase life expectancy for children faster than a suddenly wealthy country.  Also, you can literally see China lifting so many of its people out of poverty and you can see why the US is so nervous right now.  China is literally nipping at its heels…

Right now, I’m watching the rest of his videos on www.gapminder.org.  It also blows my mind that all this information including these type of videos are readily available on the Internet for viewing by anyone with a broadband connection.   The cascading effects of the Internet will be seen sometime in the future, maybe 50-100 years from now.  We truly live in interesting times…

What are 3 Things That are Right in Your Life?

I’m watching self-improvement videos again. I need the positivity after watching Top Chef last night. Ugh…I can’t believe such an untalented chef made it into the Top 3. Its not even that she’s untalented. She’s probably talented, to some degree. She’s just so negative and I believe part of that energy probably goes into her food. You probably eat her food and then want to punch someone. I know, I know…there’s a good possibility that the Top Chef editors cut and splice footage together to make her this season’s villain, but dude, it seemed like they had a lot of footage to work with. I’m just saying…

Anyhow, it makes me laugh, yet deeply disturbs me that this video has ~1200 views after a month, but a possible video of someone lighting their fart on fire and burning their butt off would probably get 3+ million views in under a day. Sigh…

Here’s Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project:

He states that you should end your day with a note of three things that are right in your life. Here’s my list:

1. My dad once told me that I should be grateful to be a woman in America at this time in history. He was right. There’s a high likelihood that it sucked to be a woman historically in any nation prior to recent times. Nothing brought this realization home to me as strongly as the movie Raise the Red Lantern. Furthermore, it frankly sucks to be a woman in a lot of countries today. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, most of Africa and parts of Asia, Latin American and Eastern Europe.
2. Living in a city rocks. Yes, it’s noisy. Yes, it’s crowded. Yes, it’s expensive. However, human beings are social creatures. We shouldn’t live in isolation. We needn’t live in track homes in an anonymous suburb somewhere, using a car to get everywhere. We need to walk and take public transportation and interact with all types of people, even the crazies.
3. I can afford therapy. Its worth every single penny. Seriously.

I Dare Husbands to Rate Their Wives According To This Scale

Check out this timeless gem of a rating scale:

* I’m pretty sure I’m a HORRIBLE wife, especially since I get a lot of demetrics for #9. Puts her cold feet on husband at night to warm them.

Why I Read The Economist

The Economist has a very informative article on the myth of the noble savage and how human society did not fall out of an ecological Eden with the invention of agriculture.

Hunter-gatherers
Noble or Savage?

This article ties into discussion around how governments could solve the current global food crisis by implementing new agricultural technologies, but how non-profits like to support small local farming initiatives. The tension arises from the displacement of small farmers and possibly creating agricultural conglomerates vs. getting the biggest possible food crop from the land, so as to feed the most people.

To add to the discussion points, here’s an awesome TED Talk, in which Juan Enriquez brings up Norman Brolaug and his contribution to both science and agriculture, in terms of wheat technology:

Quote of the Day (courtesy of Margaret Thatcher!)

How true is this? Have you ever seen VH1’s Charm School?

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.“
- Margaret Thatcher

I Love Pigs

And I just discovered the art of Edward Monkton. The combination:

My Favorite Indexed Post Ever…

This is pretty self-explanatory. Courtesy of the very, very funny Jessica Hagy.

How to Disappear in America?

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace

Forget how to disappear in America…
How would you disappear on the Internet?
10 years from now, how do you make all the Facebook/MySpace pictures of you getting sh*t-faced drunk or smoking a bong disappear without a trace?