FreeRice.com donates money for food to the United Nations World Food Program. They’ve instituted an interesting program to collect the money for donation. They’ve setup a leveled vocabulary database and present a word and 4 possible single world definitions. For each correct answer they donate 10 grains of rice to the WFP. You can play as long as you’d like. Advertisers display either a logo or an ad at the bottom of the screen and in doing so are paying for the donations. According to the website, as of yesterday 137,769,030 grains of rice have been donated.
Certainly an interesting idea and hopefully one that catches on.
Alan Watts was an author, philosopher, and one of the foremost experts on comparative religion. This is a video created for a speech he did. I don’t know that the visuals or the background music really add anything, but its a pretty awesome speech.
Clubbo Records is a fake record label created in 2004 by two San Francisco musicians, Elise Malmberg and Joe Gore. They manufactured an entire back story spanning 40 years and created the music associated with each time period, from the early bubblegum rock of Clipper Cowbridge’s “Soda Pop Shop” to Lazarus Project’s “Cyber Magnolia” supposedly the work of a computer whiz which “… is instantly recognizable as the work of a certain chubby, bearded guitarist from a psychedelic San Francisco band known for its protracted jams and devoted, itinerant fans.”
The website is a pretty interesting look into the history of pop music genres over the past 40 years. They have played close attention to detail with the recording styles of the music and have adhered pretty closely to their respective periods. As a hoax, it is pretty involved and enjoyable.
Thanks go out to Bryan and Steph for turning me onto this website.
Here is a video of John Maeda, the Associate Director of Research for MIT’s Media Lab, at the last TED conference in March 2007 discussing simplicity:
Last year I read and thoroughly enjoyed Maeda’s extremely short (~120 pages) book The Laws of Simplicity. I’d recommend it to anyone who does any kind of design. While designing with simplicity in mind may seem like common sense, I think sometimes we need a reminder and Maeda’s self-referential approach to discussing simplicity is a good one.
Jonah Lehrer, editor at large of Seed Magazine, announced today that his book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” is now shipping. I’m excited about the book and pre-ordered it quite a while ago. I’m a big fan of Proust and have always loved reading interpretations of his dense, hyper-natural understanding of the sensory world. Both Clifford Pickover and Robert Anton Wilson have speculated in the past about his connection to the sciences and consciousness. On top of the book being about an exceptionally interesting subject, Seed Magazine has been such a joy to read since I subscribed last year and there is no doubt in my mind that Jonah is one of the reasons why this is true.
A comment about the book made almost 6 months ago by the man himself:
… my title is quite literal. I argue that Proust (and Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, etc.) anticipated the facts of modern neuroscience. Their art expresses truths about the human mind - real, tangible, truths - that science is only now rediscovering. As you can probably guess, Proust was very prescient when it came to the neuroscience of memory.
I’ll post a review after I receive and read my copy, but you should all go out and buy the book today:
Jonah Lehrer, editor at large of 