This is one of the most interesting articles I've read this year:

Gin, Television and Social Surplus

Fascinating implications for just about, well, everything.

I have so many hours of dreaming logged in at my parents gas station in Chugiak, Alaska. Ring up a customer- dream, stock the shelves-dream, mop the floors- dream, plow the snow-dream... I had spent my whole life in this remote town asking the question "what am i gonna do with myself if i stay here?" so as soon as i had saved enough for a ticket and a guitar I moved to LA.

I needed to find out... my Dutch/Welsh father dropped out of 6th grade to survive the Great Depression by picking cotton for bowls of beans until he lied about his age to serve during the Korean War to support his parents... he was a self made man...he built our gas station with his own hands...he taught me to follow my bliss... my Filipino mother who left her parents to board in another town and walked miles in the rain with a banana leaf for an umbrella to go to school, having sewed her own uniform and cooked her meals on a little fire as a child, beleived in the american dream and made a new life in alaska with greater possibilities for her children...she taught me that wit, intuition, resolve and improvisation can go a long way...the rest is left to fate or luck or the combustion of our individual spark.

with common sense, hard work and manual labor my upbringing at the gas station, pursuing music was a luxury, it was not hard for me to save a lump of change and go to the city...did the Hollywood thing hittin the streets with the demo i made at my friends house...at the time those were the only songs i had written...I mean I had played piano and sang in church since I was yay high but I was going by the seat of my pants, figuring out my sound as I wrote...since Fate Is The Hunter I have been developing my sound under the guidance of Tommy Mottola...I'm in good hands, after all he is " the architect of dreams ".

 

http://www.myspace.com/kateearl

If this doesn't give you goosebumps...

Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.

Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.

Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto?

Americans today use nearly a billion additional gallons of gasoline each year, compared with 1960, solely because they weigh more.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4333

Wow.

not pretty to look at but important.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/jun/13/ethiopia.internationalaidanddevelopment?picture=334992148

i think there are four major (and inter-connected) problems in this world:

education, energy, food and health care

looking forward to devoting as much of my life as possible to helping provide solutions to them.

bad ass.



we're capable of so much more than we realize.

Pretty darn awesome.

Been doing a lot of reading today on DHA and the impact it has on so many things.  Strongly (strongly strongly strongly) recommend you do some research yourself on the impact that DHA (or lack thereof as is so often the case with SAD) can have on the human body.  Decided to calculate the cost of various forms of DHA tonight.  Pretty interesting.  Here's what I found:

$13.59/43.2 G of DHA Nature Made Fish OIl (Costco.com) = $0.31/G

$11.25/12 G of DHA NOW Omega Supreme (NutritionGeeks.com) = $0.94/G

$40/40 G of DHA Vital Choice Sockeye Salmon Oil = $1.00/G

$20/12 G of DHA Omega Zen-3 (Sunfood.com) = $1.67/G

$25.19/6 G of DHA Neuromins (SmartBomb.com) = $4.20/G

$89/9.63 G of DHA Vital Choice Wild Alaskan Salmon = $9.24/G

These were calculated by taking the recommended dosages or serving sizes and multiplied by the amount of DHA per dose/serving.  On a per cost/gram basis Fish Oil from Costco is less than a third as expensive as the next leading contender.  However, I'm a little dubious as to how that's sourced and if you're looking for a vegan form of DHA it looks like NOW's Omega Supreme oil might be the way to go.  I've heard a lot about Omega Zen-3 but compared to Omega Supreme it's almost twice the cost per gram.  Neuromins is over four times the cost so unless I'm missing something here I'm not sure why you'd want to go that way.

And the worst choice (at least on a cost/gram basis)?  Salmon itself.  Almost 30 times more expensive than Costco fish oil and about 10 times more expensive than NOW Omega Supreme.  Seems like a pretty inefficient way to get your DHA...

Now I'm not sure all of the other things that go into this analysis and I'd love to hear thoughts on this form of analysis.  At the end of the day it seems like we all should get more DHA in our diet and given that this can get pretty expensive I hope this data helps some people make better choices!

You owe it yourself to watch this movie.  Hell, you owe it to the world to watch this movie.

Crazy that we let something like this happen...again (remember Rwanda?). 

Crazy that so much of the stuff we consider *important* simply pales in comparison with things like this.



At a minimum, please help to raise global consciousness about something like this by educating yourself.

What did the Church Lady use to say...isn't that conveeenient???

35 firms OK'd to bid on Iraq oil deals