Hey Anne,
You should run for the job of chief of the Glooscap First Nation northwest of Halifax.
Tax free, of course.
You’d be replacing this lady.
It’s hard work, though, as that band has 87 people.
… Maybe you’re better off to only run for councilor, a job paying between $210,000 and $260,000.
Isn’t Canada a great country?
I’ve almost never felt “lonely”.
It’s a condition I know nothing about.
Film critic Roger Ebert, a bit of an internet shut-in himself, has read 80,000 comments on his blog. Many, he tells, are from lonely people looking for connection with strangers.
… For days I’ve been reading waves of messages from the lonesome, the shy, the alone, the depressed. Some who live as virtual hermits. Some who have few or no friends. Some who rarely speak with their families. Some who have never dated, or ever had sex. Some who consider it a good day when they never speak to anyone. Some who are sad to be alone. Some who are relieved. Some who can’t do it any other way. …
He reflects on loneliness in that post, and an earlier one – All the lonely people.
… After all that, Roger’s not sure whether or not the internet actually helps the lonely.
One day we’ll wish we listened more closely to Cory Doctorow and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, two spokesmen who can explain today why your internet freedom is at risk. And why copyright law is the beginning of the end.
Thought provoking.
One entertaining example of the benefits of free internet: a TED talk –Re-examining the remix
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube (20min).
There’s a war happening right now and most people don’t realize it. Dinosaurs fighting change. … I really hope dinosaurs go extinct.
Governments have a big role to play in deciding internet freedom. Many of the American politicians who supported a free internet lost in the mid-term election. It looks bad in the USA.
In transit at the Beijing airport yesterday I had to swipe my passport to access the internet, same as in Rome earlier this summer. Is that the future of your internet?
I’m all for developing the Oil Sands. But it sounds like this is not the best way to sell it to China.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
… International League of Conservation photographers in the Great Bear Rainforest.
… now threatened by a proposal from Enbridge to bring an oil pipeline from the Tar Sands and supertankers to BC’s wild coast. …
related – The Adventure Blog – Update On Great Bear Rainforest Expedition
Imagine there’s no country, It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.
It’s depressing to see how much media attention Pastor Terry Jones has gotten. I condemn religious nitwits of all denominations and call for consumers to boycott media trying to cash in on this story.
Here’s a much more important story, a more important man:
… Last week, we celebrated the wedding of my daughter, Pallavi. A brilliant student, she had won scholarships to Oxford University and the London School of Economics. In London, she met Julio, a young man from Spain. The two decided to take up jobs in Beijing, China. Last week, they came over from Beijing to Delhi to get married. The wedding guests included 70 friends from North America, Europe and China.
That may sound totally global, but arguably my elder son Shekhar has gone further. He too won a scholarship to Oxford University, and then taught for a year at a school in Colombo. Next he went to Toronto, Canada, for higher studies. There he met a German girl, Franziska.
They both got jobs with the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, USA. This meant that they constantly travelled on IMF business to disparate countries. Shekhar advised and went on missions to Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Kyrgyzstan and Laos. Franziska went to Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Russia. They interrupted these perambulations to get married in late 2003.
My younger son, Rustam, is only 15. Presumably he will study in Australia, marry a Nigerian girl, and settle in Peru.
Readers might think that my family was born and bred in a jet plane. The truth is more prosaic. Our ancestral home is Kargudi, a humble, obscure village in Tanjore district, Tamil Nadu. My earliest memories of it are as a house with no toilets, running water, or pukka road. …
read more – Times of India – My family and other globalisers
… Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute with a special focus on India and Asia. His research interests include economic change in developing countries, human rights and civil strife, political economy, energy, trade and industry. He is a prolific columnist and TV commentator in India, well-known for a popular weekly column titled “Swaminomics” in the Times of India. …
On the one hand we have incredible globalization, a mixing of religions, cultures and ethnicities. On the other, a few backward isolationists: Mennonites in Canada who have religious objections to all photos (including driver’s licenses) due to the Second Commandment prohibition against Graven images, for example.
I truly hope Mr. Aiyar and his family are the future, not followers of Terry Jones.
Thanks Peter and Warren Long.
P.S.
… We should respect the Mennonites freedom of religion. But they shouldn’t get driver’s licenses.
Man has been studying the stars since the beginning.
Right?
No wonder we trust horoscopes:
… Researchers at the University of Wales interviewed 34,000 youngsters aged 13-15 last year and found that nearly as many of them believed in horoscopes as believe in God.
In America, over 125 million people say they believe in astrology and at least seven in ten check their horoscope regularly. …
My friend K checks hers every day and has even saves them for me when she found them particularly apt.
But horoscopes in newspapers began only in in August 1930 in the Sunday Express:
… just after the birth of Princess Margaret. Editor John Gordon wanted a story on her birth but with a new angle, so Cheiro (then the biggest name in astrology) was asked to do her horoscope. Cheiro was unavailable, so the job went to R H Naylor, one of his assistants. The result was “What the stars foretell for the new princess” (24 August 1930 page 11) …
It took off from there.
Idiots everywhere consult these things now. Yeesh, we deserve extinction.
It’s terrible.
Like Facebook with 5% of the feature set.
Yet every company, celebrity and website feels obliged to tweet. (Even me with my 3 blogs.)
Have you heard about the upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network, based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires?
If Hollywood can make an overly dramatic film about the early years of Facebook, why can’t we make an overly dramatic movie about Twitter? Or at least the trailer to that movie! …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The movie rights for Googled: The End of the World As We Know it (2009) have been acquired.
Microsoft was EVIL.
Now Facebook and Apple are EVIL.
But not Google. Never Google. Their informal corporate motto is Don’t Be Evil.
The leading audiocast is This Week in Google. Their Aug. 11th edition was titled Carrier-Humping Net Neutrality Surrender Monkeys (based on Ryan Singel’s post on Wired)
Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, feels betrayed. He fears Google is considering selling out users in order to profit along with phone carriers like Verizon.
Why should you care?
Your online life could soon be much, much worse and more expensive than today. Especially on mobile devices like smart phones.
Check Jeff’s post – Buzz Machine – Internet, schminternet
What can we do about this?
Well the Federal Communications Commission in the States could grow a pair, to start. They’re supposed to be protecting consumers. Unfortunately they seem to be gutless when it comes to confronting the lobbyists of Verizon and that ilk. Especially in an election year.
The world tends to follow whatever happens in the States.
Jeff feels that if the FCC is powerless, the users of the internet will have to rally round something like his proposed
Bill of Rights for Cyberspace:
I. We have a right to connect.
II. We have the right to speak.
III. We have the right to assemble.
IV. We have the right to act.
V. We have the right to control our data.
VI. We have the right to control our identity.
VII. What is public is a public good.
VIII. All bits are created equal.
IX. The internet shall be operated openly.
Google used to advocate for an open web. No more, it seems.
It may be time they fire Eric Schmidt, to start. And reaffirm the original mission of the company, the one that made people trust them in the first place.
related – Business Insider – One amusing difference between the new Evil Empire (Google) and the old one (Microsoft)
UPDATE: … As Google backpedals, the EFF weighed in with this much cited post – A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal – Legislative Analysis by Cindy Cohn
Statscan found that 18 per cent of adult Canadians, about 4.4 million people, were classified as obese in 2009, up from 15 per cent in 2003.
We’re still getting fatter.
With less leisure time to exercise.
* One in five Canadian adult feels “caught in a time crunch,” experiencing high levels of time pressure
* That number is on the rise: the proportion of those who said they were in a time crunch grew to 19.6 per cent in 2005 from 16.4 per cent in 1992
* The average proportion of our waking lives devoted to social and leisure activities dropped by 20 per cent between 1998 and 2005
* A much higher proportion of females than males reported time pressure in 2005 — 22.7 for women, 16 per cent for men
* More than one in four employed Canadians were responsible for the care of an elderly dependent, and one in five (16.8 per cent) had responsibility for both child care and elder care in 2009
* The proportion of Canadians worked non-standard hours (weekends, evenings, nights, rotating shifts jumped from 23 per cent in 1992 to 29 per cent in 2009 …
… for the first time in 2 centuries, Canadians can expect to die earlier (younger) than their parents. …
Update – This article, linked by Chopbox, seems to contradict the one above: Life expectancy in Canada nears 81
Rick McCharles 