What Your Favorite Comic Says About You

These are the 4 i read regularly. Plus "The Phantom"

Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson
Adventure is your number one priority.

Tintin, Hergé
You like travel better than sex. You also like crotchety sea captains and deaf scientists better than sex.

Doonesbury, Garry B. Trudeau
You’re somebody’s dad.

Asterix, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
As a kid, your parents took you on trips to Europe.

For more, see: http://www.flavorwire.com/346720/what-your-favorite-comic-says-about-you?all=1

A new documentary reveals the beauty and horror of plastic waste

"The opposite of beauty is indifference" which is an awesome quote from this video: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/plastic-repurposed/

Coolest Bookshelves EVER: Part Uno

Coolest Bookshelves EVER: Part Uno

I want the one that spells our READ!

Whole Earth Mental Health

Journalist Katherine Rowland's article about the evolving field of ecopsychology, which aims to cure what ails us by bridging the human-nature rift. Quotes below, but article can be read in full at:
http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/katherine-rowland-whole-earth-mental-health/

An evolving field known as “ecopsychology” proposes that the pervasive but fictive gulf between man and nature not only drives ecological decline, but also contributes to modern afflictions such as depression, anxiety, obesity and heart disease. From tenuous roots in Hippie-era urgings that we all be one with mother earth, ecopsychology has in recent years emerged as a legitimate approach to mental health, elaborating on research showing that people benefit from contact with nature—and suffer from its absence.

Ecopsychology endeavors to explode the nature-culture, mind-body binaries that for centuries have informed how we measure sanity and health. This bifurcating tendency is at the murky core of modern pathologies.
...... In other words, it is only because we are at such a remove from nature that we can behave the way we do: using resources with no regard for consequence, consuming goods with no thought as to their production. Doherty asks “what if we were to reinvent psychology so that at its heart it was an ecological discipline?” Could changing our relationship to nature hold the key to mental health?

How does depression correspond to a ruined landscape, or anxiety link to global warming or visions of future generations walking round a world eternally diminished?
Rather than consider anxiety or depression as outcomes of strictly personal history and circumstance, ecopsychology admits the possibility that outside events and circumstance bear on mental health. “Sometimes,” says Davis, “suffering really is about the planet.”
“It’s a form of insanity that we’re in the process of destroying our own life support systems.” 

For Davis, as well as a significant number of ecopsychologists and ecotherapists, the solution is not to take stock of silver linings, but rather to more actively engage with feelings of pain and loss. He describes contemporary attitudes toward the environment as akin to a passerby blithely strolling as a woman is murdered in the street. “There’s a learned helplessness,” he says. “We grow numb rather than face what’s really going on. We need to learn how to be active participants rather than bystanders to a tragedy.” 

Your childhood house is now dust buried beneath a strip mall; the apple tree that once gave you shade has been cut, burned, turned to splinter; the rivers where you once fished now run thick with toxic silt. Youth inherit this depletion and everywhere is starving, poisoned, desiccated, stripped and out of balance. 

“This environmental destruction can cause a profound sense of loss,” says clinical therapist Linda Buzell, founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy. “And it’s important to reckon with what that means, and really experience that pain in order to move through it." 

We suffer because we’re removed from nature; nature suffers because we are removed from it.

On writing and good advice

Awesome rules for writing: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/

1. Write
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Geek Love

Letters of Note: The Vision of Sin 
Charles Babbage gently takes to task Alfred Tennyson's poem "The Vision of Sin": for a verse "which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." and suggests changing it for accuracy to "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

While in the Guardian, Simon Singh corrects Katie Melua's song "Nine Million Bicycles" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/sep/30/highereducation.uk). He finds the "little ditty is deeply annoying, because [Katie] demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method." Read the rest of the article at the link above - bloody awesome plus it has a poem!!!

Dr Bonners and why it is good for you and the planet!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201204/tom-foster/the-undiluted-genius-of-dr-bronners.html

There's a common narrative that unfolds the first time you buy Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap. It starts in the store, where the bottles, with their brightly colored, text-heavy labels, line up like cure-alls from some deranged medicine man. You pick one up. Later, in the shower, there comes a curious tingling sensation after you've lathered up your nether regions. That's when you reach for the bottle again to give it a closer read.
There are quotes from Mao, Jesus, Hillel, Einstein, and George Washington, among others. There's something called the Moral ABC, which appears to be a philosophy for uniting all humans on Spaceship Earth. There's a lot of religious ranting, a liberal dose of exclamation points, and instructions for cleansing your "mind-body-soul-spirit instantly."
Now you're more curious than ever. And if you read enough of the label and happen to Google Dr. Bronner after you've toweled off, you'll discover the story of the late Emanuel Bronner, which reads like bizarro fiction. (We'll get to it shortly.) That story is just the beginning......In 2005, David decided he couldn't in good conscience buy raw materials from operations that didn't take labor practices as seriously as he did, so he set a two-year goal of switching all the company's major ingredients to certified fair trade. Only one problem: Nobody could find any certified organic and fair-trade farms that produced some of those ingredients.
The solution: Get into the farming business. By 2008, Dr. Bronner's owned a 200-employee fair-trade coconut-oil operation in Sri Lanka and a 150-employee palm-oil plant in Ghana, and had partnered on a peppermint-oil operation in India. Maybe the most audacious fair-trade project so far has been a partnership that combines olive oils from farmers in the West Bank and Israel, and has become a symbol of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Emanuel Bronner would be proud.

The Last Place You Ever Live By John Fischer

On a bench outside, I open the plastic containers one-by-one and hand them to my father. We watch the residents filter in and out of the main building, supported by four-footed canes and wheeled walkers.
“This must not be easy for you,” he says to me.
“I guess,” I say. “Is it easy for you?”
“All I have to do is get dragged around for a few days.”
I mumble something resembling an agreement and discover that I’m having trouble meeting his eyes.
“I remember when this happened to my dad,” he continues. “He was diagnosed with mesothelioma from his years at DuPont—this was before you were born. I remember those first real changes in him, when he wasn’t quite my father anymore. The hardest part wasn’t seeing him change. It was knowing he knew I saw it. That really broke my heart.”
I excuse myself from the bench, explaining that I need a bathroom.
Locked in a handicapped stall with an emergency pull by the toilet paper, I sit on my heels and cry. The bathroom is empty and so I really go for it: wailing, shaking, snot streaming from my nose. The minutes wash out in long blurry streaks. Pressure fills my chest like sinking to the bottom of a pool. The light goes flickering and dim.
When I return, my mother and father are debating whether the Toyota will break two hundred thousand miles on our way back. Neither of them mentions the redness ringing my eyes, but my father squeezes my shoulder as I help him into the car. 

The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end.
Part of what makes the truth of aging so unnerving is its scale. It’s the elephant to all of our blind men. .......
But after a while I start to think that scale alone isn’t the problem. It’s that the scale robs us of our individual agency. The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end. Everyone on the planet will experience it in one form or another, as one of the few rituals we share across our species. Except as tiny people with worries and chores, obligations and hopes, we are painfully ill-equipped to reconcile the distance between the personal and the universal. We perceive our own outline in the facts and empirical evidence, and imagine that we can make things different for our parents or ourselves.
Mostly we are wrong. Incontrovertibly and terrifyingly wrong. So we scramble to control whatever we can, in whatever infinitesimally small measure is possible.
The last place you ever live is not really a place. It’s a compromise. It’s a wheelchair or a cane, an argument, a difficult decision, a humiliation to be ignored. It’s a cleaving to the parts that were, and a progressive resignation to the parts that are no longer. It’s the temporary safety of particulars—will the new house be big enough, the food fresh enough, the other residents friendly enough? It’s a father seeing himself through his son’s eyes, or a wife trading hope for common sense. I’m sure it’s millions of other things too, depending on whom you ask. We are sons and daughters, after all, and susceptible by default to the terms of cliché.
If I only get to pick one, I guess it would be something resembling a simple question, probably the same one my parents are asking themselves right now.
How can I possibly make this my own?

You may also like...

Ann Marie Awad: My Egypt
 In the wake of revolution in Egypt, a first-generation Egyptian-American questions what her heritage means now.

Self Walking Backward
When my mother had her second cancer operation, I was in Africa. Gita was angry, because I hadn’t come back from my trip.
Two Doctors
Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.

The Bastard of Salinas
“Better to believe that you come from two happy parents.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/05/emily-dickinson-new-photograph

Emily Dickinson gets a new look in recovered photograph. A daguerreotype appearing to show the famously reclusive poet is only the second photo we have of her.

She looks like Scarlett Johanssen. Also, reading the article, was just like A.S. Byatt's Possession, how the photo was discovered

Two interesting articles from the BBC

Could babies' faces reduce crime?

• The experiment, named Babies of the Borough, follows other attempts to try and use the environment to moderate behaviour.
• One that has had plenty of publicity is the controversial Mosquito Anti-Loitering Security Device. The gadget emits an unbearable buzzing sound and can be set to a pitch that is audible only to those under the age of 25. It was initially used to prevent teenagers gathering outside shops, but opponents tried to get it banned as a breach of human rights.
• Music has also been used. London Underground copied a successful scheme from Tyne and Wear's Metro system to use classical music to reduce crime.
• Police cells in Switzerland were painted a colour described as "cool-down pink", which is said to keep prisoners calm.
• In the town of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, pink lighting has been installed in areas where teenagers hang out. It's supposed to highlight their acne, so they're too embarrassed to be seen there. Cardiff too, has been experimenting with the same idea.

The forbidden public toilets of Beijing

The journalists' rule of thumb in China is that you cannot report the so-called three Ts - Tiananmen, Taiwan or Tibet. But it turns out there is also another T that upsets Chinese censors.

Life without Lights Project

http://www.lifewithoutlights.com/
Peter DiCampo's website link above to his long-term “Life Without Lights” project on global energy access.

....it is easy to forget that 1.4 billion people – nearly a quarter of humanity – live without access to electricity (according to the International Energy Agency’s 2010 findings). And it is difficult to fully grasp the social and economic impact of so-called “energy poverty.”

While living and working as a volunteer in remote northern Ghana, I realized how deeply the lack of electricity affected the lives of my neighbors. It impeded their progress in the sectors of health, education, gender equality, agriculture, and virtually every aspect of development. And, of course, there’s the lack of light.

...Put simply, energy poverty keeps people poor. It is a critical piece in the mosaic of issues contributing to poverty, and often the one that is least addressed. 

...As I continue to research and photograph global energy poverty, I offer these stories as a contribution to the dialogue on energy’s future. While people living without electricity may seem exempt from the energy debate, their plight carries a warning for any region whose economy or energy supply lies on the brink. By examining the causes and effects of energy poverty, as well as workable solutions, this project will ask (and attempt to answer) the questions: What solutions will be made available for the energy poor? Will they be sustainable? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

H/T to Guernica Mag

Two cool new services (Food and sharing)

http://www.ohsowe.com/ - Share More. Waste Less. Help Neighbors.


OhSoWe.com is a website that helps neighbors share resources (items and skills). We make it easier for friends, colleagues, neighbors, parent groups, teams, classmates, churches, Google Group, clubs, hobbyists, Meetups and other groups to asily share items like garden tools, camping gear, small kitchen appliances, party supplies, handbags, ...

http://cookitfor.us/

See a recipe you want made? Then "Crave It!". We'll notify you when local Makers "Make It!" - which could be as soon as now! The more Cravers "Crave It!", the more Makers will "Make It!", so be sure to "Share It!" with your family and friends! Crave. Make. Share.

Two analysis of Bill Clinton's Speech at the DNC - Great Takeaways

Why Bill Clinton's Speeches Succeed - The Atlantic

Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.

That is the significance of "They want us to think" and "The strongest argument is" and "The arithmetic says one of three things must happen" and even "Now listen to me here, this is important." He is showing that he understands the many layers of logic and evidence and positioning and emotion that go into political discussion -- and, more important, he takes for granted that listeners can too.

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. ("I understand the concern about Strasburg's arm. But ... ") You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political "authorities" addressing the unwashed.

It's the difference between clarifying, and over-simplifying. 

Bill Clinton Shows How It's Done - The Atlantic 

Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. .....
He began with an appeal to bipartisanship -- a clever and unexpected turn in a partisan speech, one pitched directly to independent voters in their living rooms. "Nobody's right all the time, and a broken clock is right twice a day," he said. "And every one of us and every one of them, we're compelled to spend our fleeting lives between those two extremes, knowing we're never going to be right all the time and hoping we're right more than twice a day." Then he pivoted to attack: "Unfortunately, the faction that now dominates the Republican Party doesn't see it that way. They think government is always the enemy, they're always right, and compromise is weakness."....
"My fellow Americans, all of us in this grand hall and everybody watching at home, when we vote in this election, we'll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in," he said. "If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we're-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."
.......
A few minutes after Clinton was finished, a spokesman for the Romney campaign delivered its response: ""President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight." He did nothing of the sort, of course. But the point was, the GOP knew it wouldn't get far taking on Clinton. Instead, the Republicans could only hope he was so good at pumping up Obama that Obama might pale in comparison. In its way, that was the greatest tribute of all.

Arunachalam Muruganantham: The first man to wear a sanitary napkin #INKt...

In under 12 minutes, listen to the fascinating journey of a workshop helper - from being rejected by the same women whose lives he wanted to change - to now gearing up to create jobs for a million women.

ABOUT ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM :http://www.inktalks.com/people/arunachalam-muruganantham

H/T to my dad

Australians world's worst for illegal music downloads
The link has the coolest interactive graphic - where you can click on the country to find out the most popular download. As for Aus:

According to a survey of downloads from bit torrent sites conducted by Musicmetric, a self-described data and analytics company, Australia, with just over 19 million downloads, placed sixth in the top 10 for music downloads in the past year. The top downloading nation was the US which, according to Musicmetric, downloaded music 96,681,133 times, more than double the next nearest nation, Britain, which had a little over 43 million downloads.

However, by size, Australia with a population of 23 million for those 19 million downloads was comfortably the most frequent user of unofficial or illegal sites. And the most popular artist downloaded in Australia was Adelaide hip-hop group the Hilltop Hoods.

Low cost health intervention to save women's lives

Botswana Doctors Stop Cervical Cancer With A Vinegar Swab

Ramogola-Masire simply swabs a woman's cervix with vinegar and then looks for any potentially cancerous lesions, which appear as white tissue. If pre-cancerous lesions are present, she freezes them with nitrous oxide.
"She's lying on the couch," Ramogola-Masire says. "You look at [the cervix], you wash it with vinegar. You take a picture. You can immediately review the picture because you've got a screen. So you can say to them, this is the white change. I think this is where the abnormality is. We are going to freeze it. What happens is the freezing actually takes care of the top layer. You just sluff that off. And hopefully you've taken care of the problem."
Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus. There appears to be higher rates of HPV and cervical cancer among women with HIV, Ramogola-Masire says. Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, with nearly a quarter of all adults believed to be HIV positive.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Ramogola-Masire says, cervical cancer wasn't much of a concern because women with HIV weren't living long enough for the cancer to develop. Once cervical cancer has spread, it's difficult to treat, particularly in poor countries with limited health resources.
If caught early, cervical cancer is easily treatable. If not, Ramogola-Masire says, it's a terrible death. "It invades you nerves at the spine at the back, so you are in a lot of pain," she says.
"The other thing is that because there's a lot of dead tissue, you smell. There's a lot of bleeding. You're incontinent. You're in pain, you're bleeding ... I think it's just a horrible disease to die from."
Ramogola-Masire hopes that the widespread adoption of cervical cancer screening with vinegar in the developing world can help prevent those horrible deaths.

Cynicism in Publishing - Newsweeks' #MuslimRage on Twitter

#MuslimRage: How a Cynical Social-Media Play Became an Awesome Meme - The Atlantic

"MUSLIM RAGE," screams Newsweek's new cover story about last week's violent anti-American protests. This is a well thought out response to how the media's cynicism can be subverted. Go read and check out the links!

Why I heart Calvin and Hobbes

Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said Better Than Anyone Else

Click on the link above to see all of the list, incl 16 more funny stuff. My faves are below:

On life’s constant little limitations

Calvin: You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don’t help.

On expectations

Calvin: Everybody seeks happiness! Not me, though! That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world. Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!

.......

On the tragedy of hipsters

Calvin: The world bores you when you’re cool.

.....

On the falling of sparrows (or providence’s lack of a timetable)

Calvin: Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.

....

On realising God is more Woody Allen than Michael Bay

Calvin: They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.

Hobbes: Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.

Calvin: We need more special effects and dance numbers.

On why ET is real

Calvin: Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

.......

On the truth

Calvin: It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring!