The latest copy of Wired Magazine arrived at home yesterday, and it got me thinking about the old television program “Popular Mechanics for Kids“, where the hosts were always going on fabulous adventures underwater, in the sky, and everywhere in between to learn about different things and how they work. I’ve been away from [...]

Ever think this?  Like, when you’re in elementary school and your new friend has a way better house than yours.   I still remember the first time I ever wanted a better house.

I love my home but compared to these gems….

Habitat 67 – go for cargo

Click on [...]

I just came across this hilarious and fascinating look into the not-so-distant past: a news report from 1981 about an experimental service to distribute newspapers over a telephone network which pre-dates the internet! It’s interesting to hear them make the prediction that print newspapers would be made obsolete within a “few years”. Clearly that hasn’t [...]

Like hockey and helping people?

If you hadn’t heard about this yet, it’s a great way to forget about those Canucks fans that rioted after the playoff win this week.

Remember my daily forrays into msn.com?

Well, typical of my internet habits, after I completed my ASIC final I logged on looking for some easy reading.  Somehow the superficial coverage of random news relaxes me.  Amid the softball-caused deaths, a lake with a name 45 letters long, credit-card sized PCs, there was a rather interesting article [...]

From the BBC (link):

A study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes.

From The British Medical Journal:

In 2005 males under the age of 20 exceeded females by more than 32 million in China, and more than 1.1 million excess births of boys occurred. China will see very high and steadily worsening sex ratios in the reproductive age group over the next two decades. Enforcing the existing ban on sex selective [...]

This is worth checking out. Dr. Wayne Maddison, Director of the Beaty Museum, spent part of this past summer in the jungles of Papua New Guinea with the support of Conservation International. He was searching for new species of jumping spiders, as part of a team surveying the rich biodiversity of the Papua New [...]

The Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth at UBC announces a new project:

TAG LIVING LAB — Walking the talk for educational equity

Be a part of:
-Improving educational equity at UBC
-Finding solutions to challenging classroom situations
-Creating awareness about real student experiences

Participants in the Living Lab Troupe will:
[...]

Dr. Atomic, the transfixing new opera by the composer John Adams in collaboration with the director and librettist Peter Sellars, calls to mind William Carlos Williams’ lines in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found [...]

Two things recently have got me thinking about our perception of beauty – particularly in music – and the extent to which this is a universal trait, or a product of culture.

The first is a study by Fritz T. et al., described over at Cognitive Daily. The study concerned the Mafa people, a [...]