The motto of world’s-best soccer club is ‘més que un club’–more ‘than a club’ and starting this year, they’ve lived up to that title. Starting in September of this year, Barça has been sporting the UNICEF name and emblem on the front of their shirts, both home and away. In addition to wearing the name, the club also has agreed to 0.7% of their annual revenue and 1.5 million Euros over the next five years to the charity. Obviously their motivation is more than just generosity but I think this is a good step in making FC Barcelona the world’s club.
Find out if your website is banned in China
“The Great Firewall of China”:http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ is a website that tests to see if any given URL is banned under the censorship regime of the Chinese Communists Party. Neither this blog, nor my personal website “elliott-herder.com”:http://elliott-herder.com are banned but one of my favorite blogs “Architectures of Control”:http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/ by Dan Lockton somehow got on the Chinese black list. Or it a red list?
Newton Aduaka takes home the Golden Stallion of Yennega
I know you were sitting on the edge of your seats waiting to hear who had won the grand prize at FESPACO, the biennial African film festival. The winner was Nigerian film Ezra by director Newton Aduaka. The film’s plot focuses on the plight of a child soldier in Cote d’Ivoire and won for its artistic direction and relevant subject matter. Here is a picture of the winning director with his award, the Golden Stallion of Yennega.
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The starting gun goes off for another nuclear arms race
Despite being the single largest nuclear power in the world, the United States is building more missiles. Maybe it’s an echo of the saber-rattling going on in Iran or North Korea off the Oval Office door, but this is just disgusting. The goal is, according to this “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/washington/03nuke.html?ei=5088&en=ed161959958c796a&ex=1330578000&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1172936294-dgS7tY5dDxejG69oMkkkMQ , to replace the arsenal of aging warheads with a generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft. Nuclear weaponry has absolutely no place at all on the modern ‘battlefield’, if we can use such a term. Is the US actually considering using these weapons, and if not why would billions of tax dollars go to such a program? Does anyone remember what happened last time somebody used a nuclear weapon?
!http://www.westbynorthwest.org/summer02/vop/abomb.victim01.gif!
As if the US re-arming wasn’t enough to get the whole world back in the nuclear market, Col. Khadafi of Libya adds another disincentive. In a rare interview with the BBC, Khadafi complains that western countries never followed-through on their promises of development aid in exchange for his country’s nuclear disarming. For more on that story go “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6414387.stm
Linux phone line-up
Mobile phones sold by US providers are routinely handicapped and DRM-ed up to their retractable antennae. Whether it’s only playing Verizon songs on Verizon phones or the ridiculous per-MB data rates they charge, we in the States are way behind the technology curve. That’s all about to change. The world of cellular communication is about to be revolutionized by the increasing capacity of WiFi enabled phones and VOIP applications. At the forefront of this movement are “these phones”:http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/03/eight_great_lin.html reviewed by Wired Magazine. All of them are open source and therefore user-modifiable. I can hear the sirens’ song of ‘free calling’ already. I can’t wait to see how corporate America kills this golden-egg laying goose.
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The Gupp Phreedom
New York City seen hosting a new kind of migrant
The unending urban sprawl emanating from New York City has caused a different kind of migration. According to this “article”:http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006225.html from “Word Changing blog”:http://www.worldchanging.com/ wildlife has been leaving the ecological desert of suburbia for the next best thing. That turns out to be the parks and waterways of New York City. Recent urban jungle sightings include hawks, falcons, coyotes, and beavers. Yes, there are beavers in Brooklyn.
Free music: Harvey Danger
It’s not often that you’ll hear me endorse straight up rock and roll. Generally I take my rock with a twist of Swedish pop, folk, or political anger but this latest album by Harvey Danger is good. Not only is _Little by Little_ good, it’s also free. The band decided to release the album as a free “torrent”:http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/Harvey_Danger-Little_by_Little.MP3.zip.torrent , “direct download”:http://files.harveydanger.com/downloads/HarveyDanger_Little_by_Little.zip , and as a “traditional CD”:http://www.harveydanger.com/store/ . As to why a young rock group might *on purpose* expose themselves to the perils of pirating? Here’s their “explanation”:http://www.harveydanger.com/press/why.php .
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The new album is bouncy enough to dance to but not too pop-ish, with smooth male vocals and thoughtful but still-accessible lyrics. By no means pedestrian, _Little by Little_ is what rock has been waiting for. The sound is reminds me of Ben Folds, but without the pretension that makes him almost unlistenable. Luckily you don’t have to take my word for it, “try it yourself”:http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/ . Let me know what you think.
Conservative answer to Wikipedia
Conservapedia, the religious right’s answer to the “liberal” and uber-popular Wikipedia has been having server errors lately as a small amount of press has triggered more traffic than usual. When I heard about the site, self-described as “an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America,” I went there and tried a number of links (“liberal bias in Wikipedia”, “American History”, “the Commandments”) finding none that actually worked. I then searched for the one article that should have surely worked: The BBC recently ran an article on the Iraq war with a slightly different take than most. The piece, which can be found “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6401839.stm , related two stories of youth soccer games interrupted by bomb attacks. In both cases there were fatalities. The whole situation reminds me of this anti-landmine advertisement put out by the UN. It was never aired in the US for obvious reasons, but the message is an important one. They say good things come in threes. Well if that’s true then sometime in the near future there’s going to be a Sony Vaio sporting a bullet wound because Panasonic and Apple already have their scars. In one of the stranger coincidences to hit mobile computing, there have been two stories this month about computers stopping bullets for their owners, the first was this Panasonic Toughbook used by US soldiers in Iraq:
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Iraq war continues unimpeded, soccer players at risk
Bullet-proof, the new trend in laptop marketing
It’s sad when our military personnel have more heavily armored computers than humvees, but I think that’s a different discussion. The second computer to take a licking was this MacBook Pro which, according to this “Wired article,”:http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/02/bullet_doesnt_s.html earned its purple heart in a Brazilian mugging.
It seems there is actually a reason that people pay a premium for titanium computer casing, this thing still works!