Fun Time! Beer For Dogs!

Man's best friend deserves the best, right? Well now you can give them one of things that makes life worth living: beer.

Yes, Bowser Beer was developed  just for your furry friend. No alcohol or hops (not good for Rover) and comes in chicken and beef flavors. Yum. Oh and you can have custom, personalized labels, too!

Glasses That Let You See Disease

Now that's a sensational headline.

2AI Labs have developed a set of eyeglass filters that amplify the eye's natural ability to detect changes in hues beneath the skin. The glasses, named O2Amp, are for medical professionals to use during examinations to pick up cues about patients that can't be seen with the naked eye. The glasses use different filters to detect different conditions.

Why My Child Will Be Your Child's Boss

Awhile back I ran a post about Gever Tulley and his TED talk about the "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do." I'm not going to recap it here. You can click on the link if you'd like.

I am going to point to a recent article from CBS Moneywatch that shows why kids who do get to explore these things (that most adults want them to have nothing to do with) will be smarter and better leaders.

I will also say that our obsession with safety and security will be the very thing that undermines our safety and security and also our future.

Travel Photo of the Week

Taj Mahal, India

Loch Ness Monster Proves Darwin Wrong!



photo taken by God

At least the brilliant school boards and parents of some Louisiana school districts believe this. Perhaps this entry should have been posted in Saturday's Fun Time slot, but this was just too good to have to wait.

Apparently, some fundamentalist schools in Louisiana plan to teach children that the Loch Ness monster is real to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution.

From the article: "One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: 'Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the "Loch Ness Monster" in Scotland? "Nessie" for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.' Another claim taught that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. I bet that was a great Bar-B-Q night!

What's next? They'll be showing King Kong and claiming it's a documentary.

Skunkworks

Many business start-ups begin with a brilliant idea and verve. Once the company is established and its first product has matured, it needs to grow but by then caution has replaced the energy that characterized the start-up as internal politics, risk avoidance and fear of failure take over for verve and brilliance.

Here's a great article from the Harvard Business Review on the subject of keeping things going when the inertia of success threatens to wind down.

One great thought: start an R&D department so people can play.

Snail House In Sweden

Here's a nice little house in Sweden. Nestled in a valley on Sweden's west coast, the Hus-1 Ecohouse is a home so small that it can be literally lifted on to the back of a truck and moved elsewhere.

Kitchen, sleeping quarters, dinner table, hallway all in 269sq/ft of living space.

Fun Time - Triumph the Insult Dog Takes Down The Weiner's Circle

Okay, this IS vulgar and if you have delicate ears, you might want to skip it. This is also hilarious. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Work Hard = Life Sucks

I've always had this suspicion that hard work does not always equal a good life. In the TEDx video, Jon Jandai proves the point.

Crazy DIY Spaceflight Project

Have you ever wanted to launch your own rocket? I don't mean the little things you can buy at the hobby store. I mean the full-blown, manned, get-to-outerspace variety. Well, so did Kristian von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Peter Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer. Bengtson had already created a 40-ton submarine and wanted to do something more ambitious, so they cooked up the idea of building a rocket that would take them 60 miles up, to the edge of space.

 Their first prototype went two miles up with a crash test dummy. Now it's the big time. They are looking for help, if you're so inclined. Here's a link to the Wired article where I picked this up. Below is a video of their first launch.

Travel Photo of the Week

Ballynahinch castle, County Galway

Floating Home/Compound

Here's a video of a little floating compound on Clayoquot Sound off of the coast of British Columbia. Totally off the grid, three greenhouses with a group of people calling it home. Low impact, composting toilets. These folks have pretty much thought of it all.

Here's a link to an article that explains it all.

Reclamation Road - Recycling Small Towns USA

At Heritage Salvage the past comes back to live in the present, if you are old building materials. Flooring, windows, doors and other recycled items are available for re-incorporation into an existing or new building. Now Michael Bug and crew have decided to light out across the country to small towns that are going bust and do what they can to keep that from happening. Here's a video of their new reality show, Reclamation Road.

Father's Day Bonus - Groucho Singing

Smile, Yoko!

Yoko has a project we can all participate in. She has created an app that posts a picture of your smile into a world map and she wants to have every person in the world's smile included. Foolish you say? I say ambitious and wonderful. Here's a link to the app on iTunes and here's a link to the twitter website.

Smile. It makes everyone feel better.

Fun Time - Kermit the Frog and Pepe the King Prawn in London

Bionic Men

As the art of prosthetics has advanced, we've finally come to the point were the art is a science and we are ever so so close to the point where we are able to craft limbs that behave and function like the original body part that has been replaced. This video from CBS news is proof. Here is a link to the accompanying article.

One Minute Vacation by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly (kk.org) is one of my favorite sources for interesting things. Here's a video he made of his recent two month long trip in Asia. He took a one-second clip each day on his Lumix still camera (sometimes two) and it edited on iMovie.

Travel Photo of the Week

Palau's Rock Islands

Food From Your Backyard - Meadows And More

Here's great site for information on foraging: Meadows and More. What's foraging you ask?

Foraging is the art of looking for food in the wild or even just in your back yard. Many of the plants we pull up and discard as weeds are edible and have more nutritive value than what we're buying at the store (big surprise there, right?)

What's for dinner? How about stinging nettles?

American Kids Should Be Building Rockets and Robots, Not Taking Standardized Tests

I have long been critical of the way we're doing education in America. We spend more and more time and money on testing kids and therefore less and less time teaching the things they actually need to know. My personal belief is that this is mostly driven by the "privatize education" crowd in an attempt to show that public schools fail our kids so they can get their hands on that money. I won't go into an in depth explantion of this point because I believe that we need to abandon testing and get back to teaching.

I'll let this article in Slate do the arguing for me. The author shows a text of instruction in the use of a microscope and then test questions supposedly based on that text. He couldn't figure out the correct answer based on the text. 60% of kids couldn't either.

The author then goes on to explain: "This is what test designers want. As an educator once told me, if the question was such that everyone got the right answer, then it wouldn’t be a good question"

Okay, I'll only ask this once: This is want we want education to do? Fail almost 60% of our children? The point here is that we should be engaging our children instead of finding ways to make them and our schools, look like they're are failing.

Enter Maker Faires. If you don't know what these are then you are missing one of the most vital ways to gets kids to learn: get them to MAKE something. Remember Science Fairs? Maker faires get kids to make something.

Read the article. If you have young kids, get involved.

Caine Monroy, whose homemade cardboard arcade recently became a viral Internet sensation, hosted a

workshop at Maker Faire, where he invited young makers to build alongside him, sharing his materials,

construction techniques, and spirit.

Modern Thoreauvean Living

Here's another great video from faircompanies.com. Diana and Michael Lorence live a 12-foot-square home they built in the mountains on the coast of Northern California. Although they have running water, they eschew electricity. They are not hippie, back-to-the-landers. They just want to live a simpler life, less cluttered with the technological noise so prevalent in today's world.

Fun Time! Chaos or Order: Which Kind Muppet Are You?

This in from Slate: Which kind of Muppet are you? The concept is quite simple. There are two kinds of Muppets; chaos Muppets and order Muppets. Chaos Muppets are Gonzo, Cookie, Ernie Grover and of course, the poster child would be Animal.

Then you have the order Muppets, Kermit, Scooter, Sam the Eagle and all the way to full-blown OCD, Bert.

The article has some wonderful comparisions to the "real" world such as our Supreme Court (Scalia = chaos, Roberts = order) and if you're really honest about yourself, you can discover your own inner Muppet type.

Privacy Pop Bed

If you have kids packed into one or two rooms, this is an option that will give them the feeling of having their own space. The Privacy Pop is a pop-up tent designed to fit the confines of various standard size beds, on top of the mattress, It's also good for travel if you're staying in cramped places such as youth hostels. A little pricey (they start at $179 for a bunk size twin), but if you want to be alone in a crowd, this might just do the trick.

Lives and Forests Saved by Award-Winning Water Filter

This video from Reuters presents a simple water filter made from rice husks that is helping the poor of rural Cambodia improve their health and slow the deforestation that is destroying the nation's jungles.

Travel Photo of the Week

Buddha, Ayutthaya Historical Park, Thailand

Just In Time For The Political Season: Logical Fallacies

Because we are entering a particularly rancorous election season I thought I'd post a couple of links to sites that offer lists and explanations of logical fallacies. These are rhetorical tricks that speakers (read politicians) use to fool their listener into thinking that they've made an important point in a debate when in reality all they've done is crafted a falsehood that is designed to sway your opinion.

Here's one of my favorite - Argument By Laziness (also known as Argument By Uninformed Opinion): the arguer hasn't bothered to learn anything about the topic. He nevertheless has an opinion, and will be insulted if his opinion is not treated with respect.

Here are the two of the sites that I like the most. You might want to print them out and have them by your chair when the televised debates start and the half (or quarter!) baked ideas start to flow.

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/fallacies_list.html
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html

Lehman's

When I was a teenager and was part of the "counterculture," I dreamed of my own small farm: off the grid, self sufficient and full of pure, organic, goodness. Well, that one never did come to pass, but I've still always been interested in the tools and practices that make that happen.

Enter Lehman's. At the time I leaned about them (early 1970s), they were a primary supplier to the Amish and Mennonite communities, people who were experts at not depending on modern tech to make whole, happy lives.

Lehman's is still here and although they have added some more contemporary items, they still have all the good old anachronistic items that were the foundation of their early business.

Hand plow anyone?

Five Business Lessons From The Banana Man

And as a follow up to Friday's entry I offer wisdom from the Banana Man, Samuel Zemurray. He made his fortune in "ripes," bananas deemed too mature to be sell-able by the time they reach the market. Starting in 1895, by 1903 he had $100,000 in the bank and by the time he died in 1961, he had been a hauler and a cowboy, a farmer, a trader, a political battler, a revolutionary, a philanthropist,a CEO and he lived in the grandest house in New Orleans.

Here are his rules for success.......

1. Go see for yourself.
2. Don't try to be smarter than the problem.
3. Don't trust the experts.
4. Money can be made again, but a lost reputation is gone forever.
5. When in doubt, do something!

If you have any doubts or need these simple rules explained, read the entire WSJ article on Mr. Zemurry. You just might learn something.

Fun Time - How To Open A Beer Bottle With Just About Anything

Just in time for Summer! This great video was a part of Adam Young's solo show at Common House Gallery.

Seven Principles of Admirable Business Ethics

We often ask ourselves, "Why is the world in such a state?"

One simple word explains it all: ethics. From Websters - ethics: a set of moral principles : a theory or system of moral values.

It's not that we don't know what ethical behavior is, we just don't pursue it. Especially in business, where today pretty much anything goes as long as you can get away with it.

Here is a little article from About.com that offers seven guidelines for engaging in good business. The article offers more fleshed out descriptions of each point for clarity, but I think just listing them makes it clear enough. Here they are:

1. Be Trustful
2. Keep An Open Mind
3. Meet Obligations
4. Have Clear Documents
5. Become Community Involved
6. Maintain Accounting Control
7. Be Respectful

Wouldn't things be different if we all followed these simple ideas? And for those that think these are too personally restrictive of their liberties and freedoms, well those are just the kind of folks and businesses you want to avoid.