I think the only way Australia could be more fun for me is if it actually did still contain 7 foot tall kangaroos and giant wombats (and there’d be something able to take down the roving giant spiders).
NatGeo has the lowdown on the giants of days gone by . Some nice photos too .
via BoingBoing .
By Implication’s Wildfire recently won at the Game Design Category of the 2010 Imagine Cup. Designing a game inspired by volunteerism, they focus on the MDG goals as the basis of what you’re trying to accomplish in your city (and apparently inspired by Filipino volunteerism after the 2009 Typhoon). Sadly, Windows only (boo!), but the video of gameplay mechanics is giving me idears.
Love the mechanics of play, if hard to tell I’d like the game itself. We talked at work once about a game to teach people organizing and campaigning (part of our job helping build a more progressive Australia) and would kinda love applying these mechanics ideas to that. Hmmm…
National Geographic has an amazing 50 year retrospective on the incredible life’s work of Jane Goodall that she’s done with chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve. So impressive and inspiring. Seriously, I saw her speak in Toronto once (one of 8 guys in a huge “wimmins issues” conference) and I want her as my adopted GrandNan. She kicks ass and does fantastic work.
And keep in mind, she started Gombe at a time when women seriously didn’t do this sort of thing. Here’s to passion, courage, progress and pushing forward the boundaries of what people believed was possible.
Euthanasia is a contentious issue in Australia and currently illegal under law. Opinion is divided on it, though even the current federal Labor government has let the statutes stand. A move, for example, by the Northern Territories government here to legalize euthanasia a few years back was overridden by the federal Howard government of the time.
More troubling, Exit International recently tried to air this ad on Free TV but had it yanked at the last minute in what, in my opinion, is a serious violation of free speech.
First off, I should probably tell you that I totally ♥ Heroku . I run a bunch of little apps off it and at work believe it’s production ready for our main platform. A while back someone posted a nice little snippet of how to get a static site working on it in two lines of code on heroku, however, with some change in heroku, gem packaging or the like (or fact I added in multiple custom domains for the site), these static served pages suddenly stopped working. Counterintuitive when looked at, and even @radar and I together looking at it couldn’t figure it out. Anyhow, I puzzled the following out. Probably a few of the gems can be removed but this definitely worked for me.
Love Amnesty using Allen Ginsburg’s “A Prophecy” for its latest ad campaign. Inspiring.
via Osocio Weblog .
We sometimes forget about those souls slowly pushing forward the edges of science and discovery. Love this time series animation of the discovery of asteroids in the last 30 years. It’s incredible to think how much more we’ve discovered in such a comparatively short amount of time.
Can’t wait till we see a model like this for extrasolar planets we know about or stars we’ve reached… ;-)
In 1963 on 28 August 2010, MLK gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to over 200,000 people at the Washington Monument. Still, one of the greatest speeches ever given and a beacon to the human rights movement everywhere. Watch it all the way through.
Good thing to watch this Sunday and reflect on what you can do to make this world a better place for everyone.
Great diatribe by Mitchell and Webb (of peepshow fame) on why the whole election platform claim of “eliminating government waste” is complete bollocks (I can use the word “bollocks” here because he’s English. Ahem…).
I hope Tony is listening. The Australian Liberals need a slightly better leg to stand on economically.
This Australian election has been awash in rhetoric about “turning back the boats.” Sadly, neither party is willing to honour its obligations under international asylum law and continue to use the refugee issue here as a political football (hockey puck to my Canuck brethren).
The Age’s Katz appeals to Oz’s future prime minister that we should just keep out the worst of the worst – the Canadians .
… something must be done to curb the influx of Canadastanis flowing across our borders like thick insidious maple syrup smothering a helpless little butterball atop a compassionate pancake short-stack.