(the title is intended to be said as if you were scratching a record…Brother Andy…i know you’re doing the hand movement and saying it.)
A TA for one of my classes posted this article today. I guess a few people in the class had used Wikipedia to site a lot of their information. The topic was religion, and from what I’ve read most of the wikipedia entries on religion are reliable and have solid information. However - if the information is true, it won’t be hard to go and find it on an acedemic website of some sort. I think wikipedia is great, I go on it to read about all sorts of things. But I would *never* be stupid enough to site it in an acedemic essay. Some people are just… idiots.
This was on Colbert a couple nights ago. I was simply going to use it to test my ability to post videos (since I’m still getting used to this whole typepad thing I like to play with all the things, and a video post was one thing I had yet to attempt.) My plan was going to take it off once I saw that it indeed works, but… Colbert is just too funny to delete.
Greenpeace has pushed McDonalds to stop selling chickens that are fed by soya grown in the Amazon. McDonalds was contributing to the deforstation of the Amazon Rainforest. Treehugger did a post on it back in April, read it for a bit of background info on the issue. Greenpeace did a report called Eating Up The Rainforest, (click the title for a pdf of the report…which is very image heavy…btw.) which is really interesting. The report focuses on Cargill and McDonalds.
Three US-based agricultural commodities giants – Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge and Cargill – are responsible for about 60% of the total financing of soya production in Brazil. Together, these three companies also control more than three-quarters of the soya crushing capacity in Europe that supplies soya meal and oil to the animal feed market.
Spiralling demand for soya animal feed from European agribusiness is driving the expansion of the agricultural frontier into the Amazon rainforest. Europe buys half the soya exported from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, where 90% of rainforest soya is grown. Meat reared on rainforest soya finds its way onto supermarket shelves and fast food counters across Europe.
Well, Greenpeace had a McVictory, and McDonalds will no longer be participating in the amazon soy/deforstation activies!
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system,
where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single
individual. The particles’ properties - color, size, shape, opacity -
indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be
clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The
quote can then be clicked to go back to the blog entry where it
originally appeared.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.
I followed like 8 links, (I’m pretty bored.) a lot of the blogs end up to be pretty emo-ish, but it’s still really interesting, and yet another thing to add to my time consuming internet activities.
My last issue of Wired was pretty dissapointing. There was nothing overtly exciting in it…or worth talking about. BUT! This months, has a giant picture of Stephen Colbert on the front of it and he is sawing through an IPod. (See on the left, uploaded from the official Wired website.)
The magazine comes with a pull out titled "Wired: How To: A step-by-step guide to making the most of your digital life". (Follow the link to Wired to find the How To guide in a more complete form.)It has how to make the most of you work, play and life, and is jump started by an introduction called "Be an Expert on Anything" written by Stephen Colbert. Yeah, it’s funny.
(read on for Stephen’s advice on how to be an expert on anything…)
