Aviary, the Flash-based online image editor has just released their time-machine software, Dodo. Dodo let’s users ages and adjust images of people. It’s pretty amazing and free, so signup for their beta if you can.
It’s only natural that someone would come along and adapt what was briefly the most technically advanced movie ever. It’s perhaps a little less natural that adaptation would be in cardboard.
If you were a really talented high school basketball prospect - talented enough to be able to play anywhere - how would you make your decision? The coach? The campus? The program?
What about the median graduate salary? Payscale.com is giving future college players exactly that option. Love the state of North Carolina, but not sure if UNC or Duke is your best option? Duke grads are making $20k more a year, on average. Tennessee your favorite state? Take Venderbilt over Tennessee for that same $20k boost.
Sure most of these kids are dreaming of the NBA, but if they’re willing to indulge in a moment’s prudence they should consider that an extra $20k a year over a 30-year non-basketball career, invested modestly, is well more than $1,000,000.
Dead simple, greatly needed. The only question is how long it can last.
Ironically I heard about this from Peter yesterday morning before I saw it anywhere else, but he hasn’t uploaded a mix or posted anything about it on his blog.
Here’s my mix (mux?). You should also give yewknee’s a spin.
Twitter still seems a little ridiculous to me. But Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis would probably disagree, since they were recently engaged via the micro-blogging platform.
Then again, I recently grew a beard for four months, posted a daily photo featuring the beard then travelled to Nashville for a giant party with the fellow beard-growers, most of whom I’d never met in real life before. So perhaps proposing online, growing a beard online with a community or picking a stranger’s attire only seem strange because they’re very normal actions in a new context.
Blurry Pic of the Ring, originally uploaded by Stef Sull.
What a perfect way to flaunt the worth of gold during this economic downturn.
This is the latest photograph from Elizabeth Soule’s Little Zoo series.
Other favorites are little elephant, the swan on blue and the deer and vines. Really, the whole set is worth a few minutes perusal.
You can buy prints and cards from her Etsy shop - I’m purchasing this card right now - or some mounted work at the shiny squirrel.
It’s old news to many, but freerice.com is a great way to help the hungry and your vocabulary at the same time.
Hunger and starvation are very real problems and a mark of shame on the wealthy Western world. It’s genius to connect casual gamers with solving world hunger once multiple-choice vocab quiz at a time.
There are some definitions Freerice.com deems correct that I take umbrage at: compendium is not a ’summary’, it’s more a collection of related works; and ambivalance is not ‘unknown’, but closer to indifference. But the strange mix of words they quiz with more than makes up for the occasional shady synonym. Strangely, umbrage, which I wrote earlier, was just a quiz word. And sesquipedalian came up this go around which helped end my long and heretofore vain quest to remember that word over the last few weeks. (I knew I came across it reading something about the recently departed William F. Buckley Jr., but I could not find this article despite my great commitment of time to the search until now.)
The full text of his speech is here.
There are two passages I find especially illuminating.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
I think he meets the bar of success with this deft turn, near his conclusion. I’ll post video when it’s available.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.