On March 13, 2007, I handed over the keys to my house, put my possessions in storage and headed out to travel around the world with nothing but a backpack, my laptop and a camera. Three and a half years and 70 countries later, I’ve gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth.
So worth reading!
20 Things I’ve Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years [HuffingtonPost]
fuckyeahgiantpanda.tumblr.com/ – Best blog ever.
This stunning color photograph of Alim Khan (1880–1944), emir of Bukhara, was taken in 1911 by Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Large archive of Prokudin-Gorsky photographs can be found here.
Continuing the chain of imaginary offensiveness to stereotypes, I plan to open a Babies R Us next to the gay bar next to the mosque next to Ground Zero. Next to the Babies R Us I will open a pornographic bookstore, and next to that I will open a police station. Next to the police station I will open a hip-hop recording studio, and next to that I will open an Applebees. Next to the Applebees I will open a TGI Fridays (those guys HATE each other) and next to the TGI Fridays I will open a methadone clinic. Next to the methadone clinic I will open a crack house, and finally, next to that, I will open a Catholic church adjoining a daycare center for attractive boys, adjacent to which I will just blow up whatever’s there so I can erect a memorial, and next to that memorial I will open a community center dedicated to a locally inconvenient ethnicity that I hired to blow up the original structure on the memorial site. Next to that I’m just going to put up some condos.
Important Announcement [Chris Mohney, via Tumblr]
Photo credit: Mike Monteiro, via Flickr.
Man, just look at this incredible remodel of a standard 500-square-foot East Village studio, designed by Brooklyn-based Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture. Tiny but beautiful…
East Village Studio [JPDA, via VillageVoice]
Photo credit N/A.
Awesome comment left on my Facebook status, “Food for thought: If $100 can buy you a 1TB harddrive, then why is MP3 still the preferred format for digital music?” by my friend Michael:
Cuz us pioneers have been permanently scarred for life by having to defrag our 500mb harddrives after converting 1CD on our Roxio program. So we turned to the Napster cat for music, & promises of fitting a whole cd of music into 30mb of space. We didn’t even know we would own a 1200watts worth of JBL speakers plugged into a Harmon Kardon receiver (thanks to Haji-G), to make mp3 sound like music being played on a Coby tape deck player.
Spectacular.
[via TheFutureBuzz]
ThinkMogul.com – Nice street art by, well, who cares. Fans of Banksy need to check this out.
I wonder how many politicians and world leaders have balls to be openly atheist and run for public office, like the new Australian PM Julia Gillard:
New Prime Minister Julia Gillard assured Australia’s Christian majority on Thursday that her atheism would not affect government funding to church-run schools if she is re-elected. Gillard, who was sworn in last month and promptly called elections, was the first prime minister in the federation’s 109-year history to take an affirmation of office instead of swearing on a Bible.
I believe that in politics, religion shouldn’t matter at all because the work of public officials should never be influenced by personal beliefs or religious affiliations. Unfortunately, we live in an era when religious groups and leaders are openly saying that the idea of separating your personal life or beliefs from your professional conduct should not apply to government.
Australian PM says her atheism no threat to church schools, welfare [USAToday]
Yesterday Amazon unveiled the third generation of its Kindle e-book reader, which offers smaller body, better contrast, faster speeds and double the storage and battery life compared to the previous model. I must admit I have never used one before (somehow, I still prefer classic ‘paper’ books) but I will definitely get one now.
Pre-orders start now for both the WiFi-only model (USD $139) and WiFi+3G (USD $189). Both models will ship on August 27.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?
Disallow: /show_ads.php
Disallow: /affiliate/
Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php
Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php
Disallow: /affiliatelink.php
Disallow: /campaignlink.php
Disallow: /delivery.php
Disallow: /music/+noredirect/
Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self
Allow: /
Yup, that’s the content of Last.fm robots.txt file from July 28, 2010, 3:21am EST. Nice.
Designer Erik Askin recently published a project titled Designed to Annoy: A theoretical look at designing inefficient packaging, an interesting twist on the standard cigarette package design. The idea behind this project is to make the use of a harmful product much more difficult and to encourage a user to rethink their consumption of such product. In this case, what if to discourage smoking, cigarette cartons were designed to be less convenient? Food for thought.
We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This [WikiLeaks] is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards.
—WikiLeaks.org founder Julian Assange, 39, discusses why he started the WikiLeaks project.
WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the ‘War Logs’ [Spiegel]
