Saudade
Saudade: Pronunciation: (from Forvo) Definition: Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you...
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A history of the world in 100 objects
The Rosetta Stone (image from Wikipedia). The BBC has an excellent podcast series called, A history of the world in 100 objects, which does a nice job of getting into history and culture by talking...
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North American English Dialects
Link to map of Rick Aschmann's American English Dialects Linguist, Rick Aschmann, has wonderfully detailed maps of the various dialects of English used in North America. It includes lots of audio...
View ArticleAnd Women Inherit the Internet
Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce. –Aileen Lee (2011): Why Women Rule The Internet on TechCrunch.com. Last month I observed that the...
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Zipline to School
Nine year old Daisy Mora takes the zipline to school every day. Her five year old brother is in the bag. Image by Christoph Otto via the Daily Mail. Photographer Christoph Otto has a few utterly...
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How People Spend Their Day
Flowing Data has an excellent set of interactive graphs showing how Americans spend their day. It’s an interesting look into modern American culture. Main takeaway: we spend most of our time sleeping,...
View Article2012: Not the End of the World
I’ve fielded the question about if the world is going to end in 2012. My first-order answer has been to cite the poor level of success that previous predictions of apocalypse have had. NASA has had to...
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In Response to National Stereotypes
The Guardian asked six major newspapers from across Europe about their local stereotypes of the other countries: Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Germany. Then they asked six “cultural...
View ArticlePhagwah (Holi) in Slow Motion
Variable captures Phagwah (aka. Holi), my second favorite Hindu festival, with a high-speed camera. ↬ Zoë Pollock on The Dish Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. Phagwah (Holi) in Slow Motion,...
View ArticleOn the Loss of Boredom in the Internet Age
I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God!...
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Diwali
Dias in St. Louis. I remember driving around town looking at the lights … arcs of dias sitting on split-bamboo trellises … everywhere. Hundreds and thousands of little flickering lights. I remember...
View ArticleChoosing Extinction
We talked about the Voluntary Human Extinction Project (VHMET) in Environmental Science, when we were covering issues related to overpopulation and the need for genetic diversity. While I’ve never been...
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