On the 8 Spot

This website is awesome. Data wonks WOOT!!!

Worldometers – world statistics updated in real time

via Worldometers – real time world statistics.

pointer from here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2010/02/25/what-you-see-is-what-they-buy/

this is nice , hope we advance enough to be able to do this!! Manny Villar (Vista Land) ,  Noynoy Aquino (ABS-CBN, Ayala Group of Companies), Gilbert Teodoro  (Government???), Eddie Villanueva ( His followers?) , Jamby (Meron ba?)

Meanwhile, rumors swirl that Apple is planning something involving a black turtleneck and “one more thing” on Jan. 26 [13]. Then again, maybe the company is finally bringing the Beatles to iTunes. Or maybe Steve Jobs will announce he’s had the rest of his internal organs replaced with cybernetic equivalents [14]. Still, a lot of Apple fanboys are hoping their dreams of an Apple Tablet will finally bear fruit.

The most interesting part of all of this — again if those persistent Web rumors are to be believed [15] — is that Google plans to offer an unlocked, unsubsidized version of the Nexus One (or whatever it’s called) to consumers. In other words, Google may be entering the consumer hardware biz, thus competing directly with Apple.

In other words, forget Microsoft, Yahoo, or MicroHoo [16]. The battle for world domination will boil down to Apple vs. Google — with a few minor players like Amazon in there to raise the ante.

Oh they won’t be alone. Like a wildebeest at a watering hole, Microsoft will eventually stick its nose in the air, catch a whiff of what Apple and Google are doing, and strong-arm its hardware partners into producing their own Windows Live Tablets — two years late and burdened by a slow, complex-yet-condescending interface. Sony will quietly release a product that does almost everything people want, price it too high, market it poorly, and totally fail. A few minor players will jump in, and eventually tablets will become a commodity like everything else eventually does.

The real innovation, though, will come from a no-holds-barred catfight between the Googlers of Mountain View and the Appletons of Cupertino. That ought to be fun to watch.

Will all this really come to pass? We'll know in just a few weeks. Probably.

via Google takes on Apple.

The blog’s going to get noisy, I’ve had it with delicious not letting me save as much as I want!!!

I’ve never thought of Don Quixote as a geek. This framing of Nick Perlas as the geek suitor help me make the connection. This was a nice article, read the whole thing, tis really short. The funny thing is if we use his way of thinking what would Manny Villar be? the rich suitor? Eddie Villanueva would then be the suitor that speaks of spirituality and purity? Gibo would be the intelligent talented guy who doesn’t have much charm? Erap would be the Bad Boy?

What scares me with this is that my jaded ecxperience tells me that the nice guys finish last and ; It’s either the Bad Boy or The Rich Guys who get the girl.

I’m rambling. Once you get blogging into your system, you sometimes just have too. Okay vacation mode again!!!!!!!!

Think about Nick Perlas as the quintessential geek, neither flashy nor fancy.

The geek is plain. He is ordinary. He isn’t in it for the money or the honor or whatnut. He wants to solve problems that he is presented with. He is geek and like all geeks, a woman throws him into a recursive loop.

The geek is like that reliable knight who does Maria Clara’s will, and the perfect confidant. The geek is the guy who shields her as best he could and picks her up when she falls. He stands by her when no one does. But seduction is not in the geek’s repertoire.

And Nick Perlas the candidate is as exciting as the wrapping of bond paper.

Noynoy Aquino is the Trojan horse, the least expected and unlikely suitor/hero of the story who comes riding to save the day. He isn’t evil. He comes from a good background. He is not a genius and knows he cannot surpass his own parents’ success. In fact, of the list seeking her sweet approval he is the one best-shot Maria Clara has at happiness.

(And yes, how ironic since Mr. Aquino is a bachelor).

via Nick Perlas and the Missing Manual of Maria Clara.

Salman Khan, math master of the Internet

James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, December 14, 2009

During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.

Salman Khan, the creator of Kahn Academy.Salman Khan, the creator of Kahn Academy, records “A Form…Salman Khan in his home studio in Mountain View is surrou… View More Images

Instead, he started one almost by accident.

It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo’s interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.

Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.

They did – and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident’s 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he’s helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can’t afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.

“With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time,” Khan, 33, said. “I can't imagine a better use of my time.”

via Salman Khan, math master of the Internet.

Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for. Kafka’s Hunger Artist – the man in the story of that name, who does performance-fasting for a living – is asked why he devoted his life to starving himself in public; he couldn’t help doing it, he says, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else”.

via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.

loved this article! I’m reposting my favorite line. Hope you can read the whole thing, don’t agree with a lot, but it made me introspect!

Rich communities achieve more when divorce and abortion limit the harm of volatile families, while poor communities can’t afford such breakups. Poor competing communities can’t afford arbitrary cultural barriers to getting cash or tech, but such arbitrary restrictions hurt a family less if its neighbors are similarly restricted.

via Overcoming Bias : Key Disputed Values.

I see this as the reason why there was a trend when a lot of rich Filipino couples opted to get married in other countries where divorce is legal.

Cloud of Atlases

Maps without legends may not be immediately informative, but determining what they represent is extremely fun. If you’re into that kind of thing, THE EDITORS have a game for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack are the founding editors of The Morning News.

If you’ve ever picked up an old globe in a thrift store, you already know the sport of trying to determine its age based on where certain borders are demarcated and how territories are designated. And if testing your combined knowledge of history, culture, and cartography sounds like your kind of fun (it’s our kind of fun), you may enjoy what we’ve got in store.

We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the color-coding, names, landmarks, and whatever else you can detect. Here’s one clue to get you started: None of the maps represent gross national anything.

via Cloud of Atlases by The Editors – The Morning News.

This has been a huge time sink for today. Link surfing wikipedia has always been a weak point.

Hope we can all support the Charter for Compassion! Visit the website, watch the vid to learn more!

I saw a TED talk video of an african woman writer who  sad it amazed her how her roommate only seemed to view Africa with such narrow lenses. Let us not fall to a similar conundrum. Let us see the world in all its beauty with all its parts, blemishes and everything in between!

http://www.africanfilmlibrary.com/

link here