Art of the CSA

CSAs require 90 seconds or less of our time and, when done well, can be artful while they make great impact. This is a particularly good example, thankfully tipped off by Julian Gough, who we tip our hat to for it:

Education at its Finest

BFIS and Habitat for Humanity in Senegal A small window into the experience of students from the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona who spent a week near Dakar, Senegal in Keur Mbaye Fall, working in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. “If we wish to teach fish to swim, it helps if we put them…

Senegal 2010

The Senegalese are among the friendliest people in the world. Given the challenges they face as a people, this is magnified ten-fold when considering the grace with which they shared their homes and hearts with us this past week. Below is a rather large sampling of still images from our week-long visit to work with…

Dakar

View Larger Map As I write this, I am taking meds to fight off malaria. I am leaving for Dakar this morning for a week and the meds are a final, though ongoing, step in a series of vaccines administered to me en masse (The first of two rounds knocked me for a loop for…

Kicking the Habits of Double-Glazing

The first week of living in a new place is somewhere up pretty high on the list of things that don’t get any easier with practice. Like a new anything, after the initial infatuation wears off, what’s left is this: the realization that what worked before is no longer valid here. Here, in a new…

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Go Malamud

Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud: Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. By the People is an inspirational and education piece…

Neil Postman

From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…

BEEF

How to handle a whole side of beef: Meat Appreciation: A NYC Restaurant Honors the Whole Animal from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Boston

Things Wikipedia teaches us about Boston: It’s the capital and largest city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the US. The largest city in New England, Boston is considered the economic and cultural center of the region and is sometimes regarded as the unofficial “Capital of New England”….

satellite browser

NASA hopes we enjoy J-Track 3-D. Clicking on the thumbnail below or here or there will activate JTrack3D and it will appear in its own window and begin loading a database of over 900 satellites. What you will see (presuming the system you’re on supports Java) is a plot in 3-dimensions showing the position of…

You’re a wolf

Sam Easterson used to work at the Walker. Here’s what he’s doing now: The Museum of Animal Perspectives (MAP) collects and displays wildlife imagery that has been captured using remote sensing cameras. Through the presentation and interpretation of this imagery, the MAP endeavors to expand the public’s capacity to empathize with animals and plants. Now,…