big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
I saw this brave site rating, ranking and recommending local home services for Toronto – plumbers, cleaners, roofers — and I wondered what local American neighborhoods would be like in twenty years. Will we flush out the hustlers? Will a new ability to choose top quality and fair prices emerge? If the Yellow Pages could rate a peach…
dead site: www.homestars.ca
Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.
They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.
On Dec. 22, they’re asking the world to contribute to the Global Orgasm for Peace. Sheehan said not to worry if you don’t have a partner.
Busy multitaskers shouldn’t despair about trying to cram this global activism into their busy schedules, either, she said. Take any time during the 24-hour period at the beginning of the winter solstice to join the demonstration. Just make sure to think of peace before or after participating.
Once you’ve committed, there’s even a secret sign to show others that you plan to take part: Flash the universal “OK” sign and wink. Or, as it has been redubbed, “The O” sign.
“to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy.” [link to more]
And don’t forget to wink.
via the eclectic drmenlo
Silver in clothing keeps odors away – Associated Press – a silver bullet for keeping the stink out of your socks. Not to mention your underwear, workout clothes, travel outfits, and hiking and hunting gear.
Scranton-based Noble Biomaterials, embeds silver in clothing worn by U.S. soldiers, elite athletes and weekend warriors alike – thus capitalizing on the precious metal’s increasing popularity as a way to keep clothes smelling fresh, even after multiple wears without a wash.
Noble is among a handful of companies that produce silver-coated textiles for use in the burgeoning market for high-tech performance clothing. The 10-year-old, privately held company’s sales have grown an average of 50 percent per year, and doubled in the last 18 months.
Silver kills odor-causing bacteria; it also redistributes body heat, keeping the wearer warm in cold weather and cool in hot weather.
Samsung Electronics Ltd. has launched a line of washing machines and refrigerators that use silver to kill germs. Sharper Image Corp. offers food-storage containers lined with tiny silver particles. Curad sells silver bandages. And Motorola Inc.’s i870 phone includes an anti-bacterial silver coating.
Noble: http://www.noblefiber.com/
Silver Institute: http://www.silverinstitute.org/
Brian Hayes’ weblog, which I’ve entered at left as the one stop thought shop, epitomizes the kind of find that keeps me abuzz. Leafy green aside, this is a meaty endeavor of web-enriching marinated filet d’idee in a delicious gravy of brainwaves.
http://www.drmenlo.com/abuddha/june02.html
The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever.
But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.
The 5% sickest people in our country make up HALF of our costs.
The HALF of us that are the healthiest make up 3.4% of our costs.
And the sickest people aren’t generally people that you see and think “Wow, they look ill.” They’re 10 times sicker. They’re people that spend months—MONTHS—in an ICU. They get admitted for something serious, and then they get a hospital infection. Or they have something else bad happen to them. They’re incredibly, incredibly sick. They’re on 20+ medications. They’re probably at least 50, if not 60, 70, 80, or 90. They probably have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol.
So see? When all the Talking Heads talk about “Health Savings Accounts” and being in control of your health care dollars, they’re focusing on a leaking faucet when there’s a Niagara Falls right next door.
Forty-seven percent of your most productive, most creative, most valuable workers are mailing out resumes, going on job interviews, even contemplating other offers.
Even worse, many managers are actually accelerating those departures by how they treat those employees, said Mark Murphy, chief executive of Leadership IQ and co-author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention: Cutting Edge Strategies for Keeping Your Best People.
“Frankly, we treat our high performers worse than any other employee,” he said.
more from Hugh MacLeod
Designed to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, The Honeywell – Nobel Initiative establishes a forum for students worldwide to learn directly from Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and Physics through a combination of live on-campus events, interactive content and broadcast programs that expand upon Nobelprize.org’s educational outreach efforts.
A patient with depression, writes a heart-felt analysis of society’s attitudes toward cancer patients compared to society’s attitude to patients with depression.
Depression’s not sexy. It’s common as dirt and every bit as dull. Depression’s boring, both for the patient and for everyone else in the vicinity. For one thing, there aren’t visible battle lines. Depression isn’t an invasion by foreign or mutated cells. If anybody’s come up with a sexy metaphor for neurotransmitter imbalances, I haven’t heard it yet.
via doctoranonymous
Look at the top dogs: Google was co-founded by Russian-born Sergey Mikhailovich Brin; Yahoo’s Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang was born in Taiwan; eBay’s co-founder Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris to Iranian parents; and Intel’s Andy Grove came to the U.S. from Hungary.
The public policy study, entitled American Made, reported that over the past 15 years immigrants have started one-quarter of venture-backed U.S. public companies, equaling a market capitalization of $500 billion US. In the high-tech sector, the amount of immigrant-led U.S. companies rises to 40 per cent.
The study seems to be a promo to Congress to expand the H1-B visa program. This comment says a lot to counterbalance the hype:
The study counts the number of companies that had at least one founder who was an immigrant. If you have 100 companies, each with 5 founders – one of whom is an immigratn, this study claims all of those firms are “founded by immigrants”. If you take that one immigrant out of the equation, would these companies still have been founded?
Probably most.
In any event, this method of creating a bias sample is found in Chapter 1 of “How to Lie With Statistics”.
Note that none of the people metioned above came here on a guestworker visa. This propaganda piece says we have a lot of companies that had at least one founder who was an immigrant — therefore we need more guestworkers.
That is the classic “Does not follow’ logical fallacy – Non sequitur.
If Mr. Anderson had come up with a list of prominant companies founded by guestworkers, then he might have had a point. His lack of guestworkers founders is more telling.
How do thoughts and emotions interact in everyday life and in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioural therapy? Do we really have any control over our emotions or are they things that just happen to us?
“A thought comes when it will, not when I will.” – Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s quote raises an important question about both thoughts and, implicitly, about emotions. Many people would say their emotions only come when they will and not when they want.
Robert Solomon has long been a proponent of the idea that emotions are not just things that happen to us. As existentialist philosophers like Sartre point out, we have a responsibility to take ownership of our emotions. They do not own us, we own them. To say otherwise is to cede control of a fundamental part of ourselves to…well to who?
As if John Lennon would also say,
“Imagine if the people…”
My sister Isabelle sent this pic
from her friend’s home in Banff, Alberta.
Totally wonderful.
To convert language into new content is a challenging art. The words tossed about in science, politics and business to promote ideas or the sale of products are usually copy/paste words or hastily rearranged words. Only a handful of words are constructed entirely for the reader and fewer words are built for the author. Most words lay on space, perhaps only to squeeze them into a website or advertisement. The convenience of engineering the internet is only one chapter. There is much more required.
Ask a storyteller how they create and polish their work. The draft material arrives in many different forms. Some drafts will fail in the first sentence or two. Others will flow like water but make no sense or have no impact. But in the end, a body of work begins. The work of writing original material will start to produce assets that companies around the world will want to copy/paste. Thus, the SEO professional builds commercial assets.
Can internet managers and entrepreneurs understand the complex elements in langauge assets? Will most engineers only see the organization’s structure or its transaction rates or whether they can exercise their power and influence? Will content be impatiently hurried along merely to fill the blank spaces of a screen?
If there are 10,000 vendors of a health supplement, it doesn’t take too long to see that there are only a few sources of the language used in descriptions and promotional material. Perhaps this explains why only a few dozen supplement vendors are truly profitable on the internet.
Words are the assets that fill the screen. Is there something other than words used by the search engines? Is there something other than words displayed for the reader?
Stories are the assets that fill the mind. Shrinking a company’s business plan into mere site engineering, rather than encouraging the art of the writer and designer, is similar to filling a bucket with dirt while leaving the gold on the ground.
I see what I know. I am what I hope.
Just wait until this comes to YOUR neighborhood!
knover.com
The Ultimate Place to Learn About People
Covering 16347 of the Web’s Most Mentioned
Knowledge Rover
relationships between noted personalities and organizations – a patent!
In response to growing alarm at the increase in dental fluorosis, the ADA issued interim guidance on 9th Nov 2006, advising parents to reduce fluoride intake from infant formula.
The American Dental Association, in a recently published position statement, says that mothers should be careful not to prepare baby foods with fluoridated water from the tap, as the fluoride contained in it could be bad for developing babies’ teeth:
“Recent studies cited in the report of the National Research Council (NRC), Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA’s Standards, have raised the possibility that infants could receive a greater than optimal amount of fluoride through liquid concentrate or powdered baby formula that has been mixed with water containing fluoride during a time that their developing teeth may be susceptible to enamel fluorosis.”
62% of Americans are exposed to fluoridated drinking water, Europe is almost wholly fluoridation-free. via Sepp
Chicken without the egg.
Meat Can be Grown in a Lab
Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells.
…two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production.
One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.
The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.
via gizmag
And wood without the trees…
A number of scientists in the UK have started a program called “Walking with Robots” that is intended to engage people from all ages and walks of life to learn about and ask questions about robots and robotics.
The public must prepare for a technological “revolution” which could soon see robots occupying every area of human life, from space explorers to gardeners and lovers, scientists said today.
via Alice’s RealTechNews
Elton John says his solution [to hatred] would be to “ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it”.
He added: “I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book.
“But the reality is that organised religion doesn’t seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it’s not really compassionate.”
And he called on the leaders of major religions to hold a “conclave” to discuss the fate of the world – which he said was “near escalating to World War Three”.
“I said this after 9/11 and people thought I was nuts,” he said. “It’s all got to be dialogue – that’s the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say ‘Listen, this can’t go on. Why do we have all this hatred?’
“We are all God’s people; we have to get along and the [religious leaders] have to lead the way. If they don’t do it, who else is going to do it? They’re not going to do it and it’s left to musicians or to someone else to deal with it.”
He also said he would continue to campaign for gay rights.
“I’m going to fight for them, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or so vocally that I get locked up.”
A recent Gallup poll concluded that nearly 50% of the American public believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Nearly half the population, in other words, believes that the entire universe, the sun and solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies, all began after the domestication of the dog. Richard Dawkins
Dehumanising the lowest of the low. Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17, 847-853.
… the brains of ten Princeton university students while they viewed pictures of people from different social groups.
Hitler could persuade you, he could do anything.
Churchill would persuade you, you could do anything.
Remembering, and Flander’s Fields.
And Celia Sandys, Churchill’s grand daughter, who reminds us that Churchill would spend hours rehearsing impromptu speeches in front of a mirror such as rehearsing his famous mistake when he cited the “infernal combustion engine”.
CNN maps the troops.
Not a decent mashup.
The real measure of your wealth is
how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.
Anonymous
US semiconductor giant Intel said Friday it would invest a billion dollars in Vietnam and employ 4,000 people in what will be its largest assembly and test facility in the world.
Hang-on, not Han-oi. Can’t you spell?
Ho-Chi-Mintel City?
Sydney Morning Herald
Deborah Lines, Windsor Downs, Australia, writes to ask, “Can we put a stop to this right now?”
Today on my apple there were two stickers. One was the apple label…. I’ve learned to live with those annoying little things. The second one was an ad for a new release on DVD. Imagine? All that potential advertising space wasted until now.