Hilarious photo booth

Aunt Linea scores twice in one day!  (I wrote "strikes twice," then thought wait, no...)  Nice find again!  Just silly humor here...

What's a solar highway? The answer we're looking for...

Slick!  What if the road by your house generated all the electricity for your house?  It's starting to be able to!  Check it out!  Thanks, Linea, for finding that!  Once that's up & running, all we need to add is electric Google Cars, and all kinds of crises get solved!

strange bedfellows: two ordinary sports oddly combined

The March 2011 edition of Wired magazine has a short blurb that almost missed my attention, then "Wait, wha-- WHAT??"  The sport that you'd bet you'd never see has become a reality-- CHESSBOXING.  Seriously.  So these are the smart jocks.  These are the ones who take a break from beating each other's brains with a nice round of beating each other's brains.  Ah, relaxing, good times, good times...

Don't believe me?  Look here.

And then I HAD to see it to believe it.  

(well, I couldn't get any of these videos to load right now, maybe you can)

You know, the next sport I predict we'll see, based on this, is "Death by calculus," maybe called "calcu-hyper-lus."  (which will soon lead to the "calcu-hyper-MORE" series)  It'll be where math folks get together, remove all jewelry, strip down to tight-fitting clothing (perhaps that's what they were already wearing), stretch, limber up, face the opponent, square off, get into a low ready-for-anything stance... and then out-derive each other.  When your theoretical equations blow your opponent's mind, thus he/she dies, YOU WIN.  I'm not seeing a large pay-per-view audience, unless it's only shown in university campus math buildings, and you consider tuition to be what the audience pays to see this spectacle.  But heck, I'D pay to watch someone scribble so madly on a chalkboard that it results in cardiopulmonary resuscitation right behind them... wouldn't you?    ;-)

Google Car-- well, we'll see if this works

Have you heard of the Google Car yet?  We're still a long way away from seeing it on the roads (outside of test drives), but it has high potential.  It's a car that drives itself.  (more details)  Man, if I had one of those, no more of this "stops at 6:30pm", "only come once an hour", "doesn't run at all on Sundays" Greenville Transit Authority NONSENSE.  So let's see if I can get in on this racket and help them sell it:

Google Car pitch

children/altruism

This comes from my textbook, Creative Activities for Young Children, ninth edition, by Mary Mayesky.  When I read it, I was just blown away.  Awesome!

"According to a Yiddish proverb, "If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm."  A study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, offers another place to find a helping hand-- children and chimpanzees.  Researchers developed several scenarios in which an adult was struggling with a problem and needed help.  In one such scenario, an adult accidentally dropped objects on a floor and was unable to reach them.
Felix Warneken and Mike Tomasello found that children as young as 18 months willingly and spontaneously helped complete strangers in several tasks.  "The results were astonishing because these children are so young-- they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language," says Warneken.  "But they already show helping behavior."
Going to some effort to help someone, without any benefit to yourself, is called altruism.  So far, only humans are proven altruists, but never before has this ability been shown in children so young who have not yet developed much in the way of language skills.  The study shows that even infants without much socialization are willing and able to help spontaneously.
But is altruism unique to humans?  Warneken also conducted the same helping tasks with human-raised chimpanzees.  Although the chimpanzees did not help with more complex tasks, they did help when their human caretaker was reaching for something.  These new findings show that rudimentary form of altruistic behaviors are present in our closest evolutionary relatives.  "This is the first experiment showing altruistic helping toward goals in any nonhuman primate," says Warneken.  "It has been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends, but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped" (Max Planck Society, 2006)."
HOW COOL IS THAT???

take part in government... it's YOUR government

So a while back, I found http://www.opencongress.org, the free/easy way to keep track of what's going on at the national level, on the issues that matter to you.  Check it out.

Then today, they sent me an email saying they've gone local.  Aha!  OK, right on!  I haven't even tried it yet, just spreading the word on a new way to get involved.  This new one makes it clearer what's going on at the federal, state, city, and all the way down to the local levels!  (neighborhood block associations)  Check out opengovernment.org!

the dangers of Facebook

OK, so I don't like Facebook, and I only have an account there since it was useful to me as I learned about my own life after the "car incident."  "Oh yeah, I do know them... and them..."  These days though, I never go there.  "So your Facebook status says that you just moved the clothes from the washer to the dryer, and are about to go blow your nose-- WHY DO I CARE?"  But this link was included in the Kiwanis newsletter I just got, and I wanna pass it along to any Facebook'ers.  http://www.tvkim.com/watch/654/kim-on-komand-what-you-should-never-say-on-facebook

NOT A SPOOF: death by armed rooster

Sometimes, just sometimes, there's a news article you just gotta share.  Voilá, your dinner is served:

Death by armed rooster

Mission Impossible squirrel

My aunt just sent me this video, and it's GREAT!
http://www.break.com/usercontent/2010/5/17/mission-impossible-squirrel-1839035

And it's not the only one of it's kind either...
http://www.google.com/search?q=mission+impossible+squirrel&tbo=p&tbs=vid:1&source=vgc&aq=0&oq=mission+impossible+squir
(or maybe it's all the same one, I didn't bother to thoroughly investigate)

Time magazine picks the 50 best inventions of the year

This is pretty cool stuff!  My favorites:

#50: Kickstarter, which funded #49

#49: EyeWriter

#47: Power-Aware Cord

#32: Deep Green Underwater Kite

#31: Google's Driverless Car

#25: eLegs Exoskeleton

#21 Electric-Car Charging Stations, #20 Antro Electric Car, #19 Edison2, #18 The Straddling Bus, & #17 Road-Embedded Rechargers

#2: The (Almost) Waterless Washing Machine

Go see the whole list at time.com/bestinventions