Bring about Utopia, by Bertrand Russell

“Our dealings with those whom we love may be safely left to instinct; it is our dealings with those whom we hate that ought to be brought under the dominion of reason. In the modern world, those whom we effevtively hate are distant groups, especially foreign nations. We conceive them abstractly, and deceive ourselves into ...

How to sound more important

When you talk, there are times when you might raise the pitch of your voice to give the word emphasis. Instead, you can sound like an important person in a suit by simply lowering it on the same word. Try it: “I don’t *really* think that’s a good idea” vs “I don’t _really_ think that’s ...

Links for today

http://thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com/ http://kluster.com/ http://podiobooks.com/

Life is better shared

Life is better shared. Rather, my life is so good it’s worth sharing. I’m not sure I want to share anyone else’s unless it’s at least as good.

We are the drones

An interesting Matrix-style thought experiment is presented in (yet another) great TED talk: what if we serve the plants? How does the world look then? The second part of the 17m speech talks about the virtues of Polyface farming. There are some incredible yields possible.

Sand beasts

Where art and engineering meet.

Love

Do you find conversations and thoughts about love are difficult? It’s often hard to work out exactly what we think about someone, and even harder to tell them. Much of this is down to the very limited vocabulary we use when talking about love. Any word that can apply to “chocolate mousse” and “the person ...

US Elections

Just in case you were wondering, the 2008 US Elections aren’t until 4th November 2008, so we’ve got a whole year of this shit left. Go Obama!

Great video and song – Dan le Sac

Media-crat-y

Ok so we have bureaucracy, democracy, aristocracy… but what do you call the upper echelons of the media? A mediacracy. Personally, I find that funny.

Forgotten a tune?

Just sing it to your computer and it will match it. http://www.midomi.com

Innovation at its very best

Every cell phone user has done it: forgot to lock their phone’s keypad and accidentally called the first person in the contact list. Usually some unlucky person by the name of Aaron or Abigail. Belgian ad agency Duval Guillaume came up with a clever campaign that turns accidental calls into accidental donations to the Belgian ...

My teddy bear is called Jesus

Sigh. More stupidity as the world keeps turning. I don’t mean to be intolerant, but I am, so given that there are too many people anyway can we just take a leaf out of the Sudanese book and get genocidal on these people and save waiting for (the cultural r)evolution to kick in? Actually let’s ...

Symbols

It had never occurred to me before how mathematical symbols are more iconographic than symbolic. Take for example the symbol for ‘more or less’. When representing this by hand, you waggle your outstretched fingers from side to side. Expressed over time, this is exactly the same as the symbol ‘ ~ ‘. The divide symbol ...

Planks and specks

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 600 employees and has the following statistics? 29 have been accused of spouse abuse 7 have been arrested for fraud 19 have been accused of writing bad cheques 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses 3 have done time ...

You cant win if you do / dont play by the rules

http://cectic.com/comics/069.png

Ask 500 people

Nice idea. I might have to borrow this one day..  www.ask500people.com

How to get things done

Get a wife Get a house Until you have these two things sorted, your focus will be on these and no other major goals. Probably something to do with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

New iPod video / Fiest

It’s by Fiest, and it’s brilliant http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1156010133/bclid756025629/bctid751384420