All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

Most expensive sandwich in London goes on sale – UK News Headlines – Life Style Extra:

“Even if I had a pension as big as Tony Blair’s I wouldn’t spend it on an £85 sandwich.”

20 Reasons, 1 Cause:

10 Action Strategies for Eliminating NCLB
Hold a public forum in your community to explore and explain these points.
Organize community and neighborhood potluck dinners with teachers and parents to talk together about how NCLB is affecting children and school.
Persuade your organizations to pass resolutions calling for the repeal of NCLB based on these points.
Collect signatures on a Petition to Eliminate NCLB based on these 20 points. Publicize your results in the local media and send copies of resolutions and petitions to your local and federal elected officials.
Write letters-to-the-editor and op-ed pieces for your local and regional newspapers, making these points.
Get your local school board to pass a resolution or hold a community forum about eliminating NCLB.
Contact your U.S. senators and representatives about eliminating NCLB: Call them, write or email them (send these points and other information), and set up meetings with them in your district (bring a group of children).
Contact your state legislators to enlist them in the effort to eliminate NCLB; get state legislatures to pass resolutions.
Parents: Join the NCLB-mandated Parents Advisory Board at your child’s school. Bring the 20 Reasons to Eliminate NCLB to begin a dialogue.
Organize a public protest or march on test days or days given over to test preparation.

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NCLB is emblematic of the current administration it tries to fix something by making it worse. It doesn’t encourage learning or critical reasoning, it encourages rote memorization and teach to the test. Something has to be done. Here are some sugestions

Orchestra:

UNESCO’s Basic Texts on the Information Society:

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some interesting key unesco texts.

ABC News: Bush said to authorize leak of Iraq intelligence:

Apr 6, 2006 — WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush authorized
the leak to the media of classified material about Iraq, a
former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney said according to
court papers filed by prosecutors and made public on Thursday.
The aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, also testified that he was
specifically directed by Cheney to speak to the media about the
intelligence information and about Joseph Wilson, a former
ambassador who had criticized Bush’s Iraq policy, according to
the papers.

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breaking news eh… i would say this is broken news.

snubster – beta:

the snubster difference
Aren’t you tired of all of those people out there trying to grab
all of these fake friends online? It’s all about how many people
can I pretend to be friends with to make myself feel better.
Welcome to a better way at snubster.

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solid.

East Coast vs West Coast stereotypes | Ask MetaFilter:

East Coast vs West Coast stereotypes
April 4, 2006 7:29 AM
Can you give me some stereotypes on East Coast vs West Coast differences?

I’m not an American. In about every media I’ve had contact (Metafilter included), there is some stereotyping of Blue State vs Red State, or North vs South, or Urban America vs Rural America (Yeah, I know most of these overlap a lot). And yeah, much of it is offensive.

But stereotyping among the Urban, Blue State population is either rarer, or subtler. About the only things I get about this is that West Coasters are much more informal than New Englanders, and that people in the West Coast tend to use their cars a lot more than New Yorkers, and everywhere but California is damn cold.

So, can you give me some stereotypes about these places? What do New Englanders think of Californians? What about Seattleites and New Yorkers?

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some are funny, some are foolish, others have a ring of truth (like the avacado)

ZabaSearch.com – Free People Search:

find your location based on your ip….

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off:

“The hundred-dollar laptop is an education project,” he said. “It’s not a laptop project.”

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seems more like a promotional tour to me…. educational projects enable learning. how does this laptop do that? how does it enable learning? I don’t see the answer because i see a fundamental disconnect between the cultural context and the technology. i see this technology as primarily alien to the environment that it enters, and without any adaptation or educational programs to support it within that environment, will it have the major effects as claimed?

nightmare science:

In short, the elite that has been created by practice of the scientific method uses the concomitant power not just to express the results of particular research initiatives, but to create, support, and implement policy responses affecting many non-scientific communities and intellectual domains in myriad ways. In doing so, they are not exercising expertise in these non-scientific domains, but rather transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains. Science is, in other words, segueing back into a structure where once again authority, not observation, is the basis of the exercise of power and establishment of truth by the elite. But the authority in this new model is not derived from sacred texts; rather it is derived from legitimate practice of scientific method in the scientific domain, extended into non-scientific domains. Note that this does not imply that scientists cannot, or should not, as individuals participate in public debate; only that if they do so cloaked in the privilege that the scientific discourse gives them they raise from the dead the specter of authority as truth.

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there is a difference between authority, truth and power. my famous example is the use of the idea of hell in the bible…. what purpose does it serve, who does it empower, and why are there so many bibles produced that never mention hell? where did it come from and where is it going, for whose benefit?