Pick a number,(From the poem “Lottery”, by John Skoyles)
any number,
and it will bear
the teeth marks of time.
Mostly Yes
Heard the one about the deaf comedian?
(Guardian piece on John Smith, a deaf stand-up comic who performs in BSL (British Sign Language). His jokes are not all slapstick and miming, but also employ the signing equivalent of wordplay - the same sort of ambiguities and syntactical incongruities - only, with his hands. There’s a cool video of a performance, too.)
Big Questions
John Templeton Foundation’s “Big Questions” series of questions and answers by leading thinkers, scientists and economists. I love the design (big type = Win, for me) of the “answers” pages, and the writing is very meaty as well. These are the questions: Does the Universe Have a Purpose?, Will money solve Africa’s development problems?, Does science make belief in God obsolete? and Does the free market corrode moral character?.
(via)
XDRTB.org | Spread the story. Stop the Disease.
(Photojournalist James Nachtwey’s TED prize wish, a website and awareness program featuring a collection of gut-wrenching photographs informing about XDR-TB, Extensively (Extremely) Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis - a variant of the disease that doesn’t respond to any of the prevalent TB drugs.)
xkcd - Height
(This is an instant classic.)
Election 2008 | powered by Twitter
(Twitter’s new site, filtering updates related to the US presidential elections. I love the UI, this should be made available for random keywords - or for the public timeline.)
Guy Decoux, RIP
Guy Decoux was an enigmatic and ridiculously intelligent Ruby greybeard sensei, familiar to me solely through his zen-like emails on the ruby-talk mailing list, monumental insights concentrated into a few succinct lines of code. Somehow his presence - one of mystery, patience and intellect - seemed to me to embody the aura around Ruby then. He was a special part of the community, this news brought tears to my eyes. RIP, ts.
A tribute by _why. His drawing is heart-breaking.
Brilliant advertisement for Hovis bread, also showcasing some moments in British history. (via)
David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College
(Worth the time.)
BBC NEWS | The layman's finance crisis glossary
(My favourite is “FAKEAWAY”: A home-made, belt-tightening version of a takeaway - think, a curry made with a jar of sauce, bag of rice and a packet of poppadoms from the supermarket.)
Subprime works
(A primer on the mortgage death spiral, by stick figures speaking in Comic Sans)
! (via Andy Baio)
2008 Summer Paralympic Games - The Big Picture
(Wonderful pictures from the Paralympics Games. Somehow much more inspiring than the Olympics shots..)