So
Today is the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Bet you won't hear the Tea Tantrum people raving about how many trillions and trillions of dollars have been spent there. Well, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan they have free, universal health care paid for by US tax payer dollars. The irony is, there it is called 'Democracy' here the right condemns it as 'Socialism' (without understanding what either of those words mean).
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A fantastic TED presentation by Jamie Oliver discussing the effects of poor diet/food choices on children in most of the western world. His solution: teach every child about food. Some enlightening facts and figures about the issues as well as an overall engaging discussion.
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For all the right wing idiots who keep banging on about how the snow storms of late are 'proof' that Global Warming doesn't exist, here is a bit of science.
All this frenzied pointing to snowfall as proof that global warming is a hoax has only, if anything, demonstrated the slight, one-dimensional thinking being done by the parties who are desperate to discredit climate change and/or exploit for political gain its apparent nonexistence in the face of cold weather events.
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If you can't afford the Apple Tablet (iTablet?, iPad?) when it is anticipated to be announced on Wednesday, check out the certainly-less-functional-but-still-a-bit-of-fun Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet
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Finally! An Evernote client app (beta anyway) that I can use with my Nokia N97. Unfortunately, Evernote chose to develop the client as a widget rather than a native Symbian S60 application so performance suffers (as does the number of handsets that it can be deployed to).
It is a good start but has a ways to go with regard to the UI and general functionality (huge issue with the current beta is no local notes database). Hopefully we will see steady improvement in the coming releases.
As many bloggers have noted, the name Nexus One seems to be a reference to the cyborgs in the dystopian movie “Blade Runner,” which in turn was based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by the late Philip K. Dick. Both the film and the book feature a bounty hunter tracking down several rogue Nexus-6 cyborgs, the sixth generation in the line of Nexus robots.
This sort of reminds me of Carl Sagan finding out that the code name for what became the Apple Power Mac 7100 was 'Sagan' and threaten legal action even though Apple wasn't publicly using that name. When contacted about the legal threat, Apple made a somewhat public announcement that they were in fact using the code name 'butt-head astronomer' for the product.
Post created at 32,000 feet in route to LAX using in-flight wifi free trial.
So Interesting thoughts from Brian Eno on the impact art and culture diversity and availability is having on society. I share his hope that this will translate into advances in politics and other attitudes as well.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
A group of Australians is planning to helicopter out to an iceberg off the New Zealand coast, camp on it while they carve out an ice bar, and then stage a party – complete with a DJ who will produce a music track.