Busy week and I’m coming down with something but here’s an interesting tidbit (via Wired: Science). We’ve manged to really make ourselves at home here during the last 300 years. Go to the full Wired: Science article to read up on how different this planet is now from three hundred years ago.
I love Moby Dick. My copy is beaten up and written in from front to back. There’s so wisdom on every page. Here’s my favourite passage and one that seems to come up most often in conversation: I should have underline the next line too. It’s true that if you’ve been comfortable for a long [...]
These two videos have made me realize that both American conservatives and liberals are defending the American Way. The only thing is that the conservative American Way involves guns, jesus and high-fructose corn syrup and the liberal American Way is what the founding fathers of the U.S. actually said. It’s not really that cut and [...]
From Stephen Budiansky’s article in the New York Times: But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are [...]
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with award-winning Toronto poet Matthew Tierney where he’s asked about the special relativity of poetry, kind of. His answer dips and dives but it’s worth a look (from Maisonneuve): Linda Besner: If we think of Einstein’s theory of relativity, the idea is that time goes by more slowly for [...]
From a post I wrote in June: Free-market economics are really good at making sure that each laptop I buy is cheaper than the last but, at the same time, it’s really terrible at addressing issues like stimulating new research into treatments for tuberculosis and malaria because there’s a lot more money to be made [...]
This is a guest post from Madeline who is volunteering for three weeks in Accra, Ghana. If you’ve had an experience abroad (or at home) that you’d like to share, shoot me an email. I’m in Africa, in Ghana, and I haven’t completely reconciled myself with that fact. Probably because I’m in the capital (Accra) [...]
I wish I was a brain ninja (via Aux.tv):
It’s Friday! Get outside! Unless you’re at work. Then get back to work. But put your earphones on and listen to Gimmee Gimmee from Bonjay’s 2009 EP of the same name. Some love for this Toronto duo include making CBC’s top ten Canadian bands to break out in 2010 and two appearances on The Mirror’s [...]
It’s a bet I wouldn’t have taken ten years ago when I was at my most cynical: billionaires giving away most of their fortune to raise the quality of life for the world’s poorest and sickest. And now the trend is spreading like multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in a Russian prison. It started a couple years [...]
