Tomorrow is World Aids Day. The HIV/Aids problem is as pressing as ever, but this sobering WP article questions the effectiveness of the international efforts to combat the pandemic, calling for a change of strategy.
Reddit is another interesting site with a concept similar to Digg. When a site is submitted to Reddit, members of the service can promote the site by adding points to it. The most popular links make it to the main page. One thing that differentiates Reddit from Digg is that sites can also get demoted [...]
This is cool. A nice little compilation of keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. Anybody who spends a serious amount of time browsing the web can probably relate to this: I’m the kind of web surfer who’s never terribly happy when he has to move his hand over to the mouse Yup. I hear you. I find [...]
Discussions will start this week in Montreal to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012. I hope they can come up with something meaningful and effective that is broadly supported (sounds like an oxymoron, I know). Doesn’t it feel like the climate all over the world just keeps on getting [...]
There’s never a shortage of stories about the mighty Google… Two interesting BusinessWeek articles here and here. Good reads.
I love Thanksgiving. How can you not love a day that’s all about food (ok, I know it’s really about more than just food, but hey). And seems like I can enjoy all the goodies without guilt too…
Dr. Angela Merkel is now officially Germany’s first female chancellor. She’s got a lot on her plate, starting with the challenge of actually keeping the Grand Coalition from falling apart. Merkel will have to rely on her coalition partner’s support for most everything she does, and it remains to be seen if she can manage [...]
Feedster has updated their Top 500 list of blogs. The list is based on algorithms that determine link popularity, weighing recent links to a blog more heavily than older links. Even though any type of list will always remain somewhat subjective, I think this is, at the least, another great way to get an idea [...]
Ahh…. The dilemma. It’s Thanksgiving, and once again “Black Friday” is luring me with incredible deals for all sorts of gadgets… There are so many good deals out there, but you just know that shopping on Friday will be suicide. People go totally nuts, start lining up in the middle of the night, and trample [...]
Mountain View is getting free city-wide WiFi coverage, courtesy of Google. How cool is that. I hope more cities will follow suit soon. I travel a lot, and it still amazes me how backward the WiFi infrastructure is in most countries (including the US). You would think that at least at major airports, there should [...]
The reports about the wildfire in Ventura remind me of a fire I experienced up close about two years ago. That fire was a little bit more inland, around 30 miles east of LA. For several days, the whole area was covered in an apocalyptic cloud of smoke… you could barely see the sun. It [...]
So after getting through some of the books on my to-read list (Freakonomics, The Question of God, and The World Is Flat, among others), I finally started reading John Battelle’s much-praised The Search. It promises to be a very interesting read…
I knew I shouldn’t have quit playing the piano…
This is amazing. MIT has developed a $100 laptop, and millions of these machines will be given to children in poor countries, free of charge. This will make so many peoples’ lifes just a little brighter, and it will do so much for the social fabric of these places. Just think back to how our [...]
I just added my del.icio.us linkroll below the Google search box on the left. I’ll be using it to put up links every now and then to things I find interesting. In case you are not familiar with del.icio.us, go take a look. It’s a great social bookmarks manager that allows you to tag sites [...]