An Anthropological Intro to You Tube

This presentation at an hour long is profoundly touching.

Also check out:
Information Revolution
Larry Lessig Remix TED 2007

Star Wars Ewok Gospel

I didn’t even know there were haters of inhabitants of the moons of Endor!

Handlebars?

I heard this the other day while circling the Olympics on the 101. Broadcasting from a Canadian radio station I figured it was respectively a canadian band. The song no doubt sounds a lot like Cake, which I went through a phase of listening throughout high school. The flowing rap has a a modern feel to it. When I came home the next day the song was still in my head and I looked it up on the reliable you-tube. Since then I’ve listened to it once a day. At work to I started singing the open lyrics, and immediately got a response of disgust. “I hate that song!” and “My boy friend always sings that, I can’t stand it!”
I don’t care, the more I listed to it the more I like it, despite its overwhelming 90s stench, which my wife will attribute to it’s appeal for me. As I write this I hit play for a third time. It’s anti war lyrics, though sophomoric appeal to me, which remind me of this song.

Homeschooling is even ineffective in lab rats.

Liesureguy has posted an article about a study on lab rats and the effects of separation from their families in their infancy and its effect on our personalities.

I’ve always been opposed to homeschooling.

I worked with a lot of home schooled and home schoolers in the military. While most of them were good people, I haven’t met one who wasn’t socially awkward and sometimes even debilitating. The last time I talked with one of them we had a long conversation about it where he asked me what I felt he was missing out on. I told him that it was all of the negative things in high school like bullies, test and teacher anxiety, and talking to girls.

According to this report, “found that across repeated sessions of competition, novelty-exposed rats decreased their release of stress hormones into the bloodstream, suggesting that they adapted faster to the stressful situation.” seems to fit right in.

Home schooling is no better a solution to raising our children than is mindlessly dropping them off at school and relying on other people to take of them. The solution lies somewhere in the harmony of active parenting in a community setting.

Place Spotting: Passive geocaching

During the long hours of night watch on open ocean transit we used to play a game with our navigation system. Zooming into some obscure part of the world at a range of two nautical miles the player would try to guess the location as we zoomed further and further out. Lame as it was it passed the time. Sadly the game got old after about once. Luckily there’s now the Google Earth Geo Map Quiz. A Google Earth puzzle where you try to find and match obscure areal photos using a few almost passive geocaching like clues.

Place Spotting

Hackzine