Scott Adams on how to build a green house (and how not to).

Let's say you love the Earth. You see an article in a magazine about a guy who built a "green" house using mostly twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. You want to build a green home, too. So you find an architect, show him the magazine and say, "Give me one just like this."

Good luck with that.

******************

Thanks to the shortage of water supply and the frequent powercuts, many houses in India have solar water heaters. The newer ones must be built with a mandatory water harvesting system. Amongst the most crucial of problems faced by the climate-change supporters, is to convince people how grave the situation really is. Humans, as it turns out, are not adept at grasping catastrophic problems of chronic and gradual change. But give people real, tangible, sometimes embarrassing problems- such as finding there's no water in the pipes when you're all soaped up or to have no hot water and to bear the guilty secret of having gone to work without having had a decent shower; then things will automatically fall in place.

Roger Eberts empathizes with the state of Christopher Hitchens. One has survived the worst of cancer and the other will hopefully see the other side as well.

Eberts also discusses his views on God which match those of Hitchens, and as a matter-of-fact mine. Henceforth, I shall refer to anyone who cares to know my views on God to this article. Because try as I might (and I have attempted to several times), I have never been understood. Perhaps Eberts has a better chance of being understood.

Regardless, Roger Ebert's choice of words as always is delicious.

“I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.”

Dalton Ghetti, a professional carpenter who has taken 25 years to perfect the art of making miniature pencil-tip scultptures.

Man! I envy people who have the focus (let alone the creative genius) to commit themselves to creating works of art.

More pencil sculptures here...


Years from now,  when touchpads become the preferred tool for creating the written-word, can anything as beautiful be created from keyboards.  To me the keyboard looks like a pretty hideous device :/

Meanwhile, save all your pencils.

Someone's got to start taking quality control of the news and articles in their hands.

Tom Scott decided to do it himself.
He created journalism warning labels and goes about posting it on articles on all the free papers he can get his hands on.

Now if only the fed will take the lead and create a whole agency for it, we'll have reduced unemployment and improved quality of life.

But while, they choose to ignore these possibilities, Tom Scott's labels are free for anyone to use.

One would think Steven Slater would be embarrassed at his behavior and that a judge would be inclined to send him to anger management therapy. Instead, Steven Slater seems to have won everyone's hearts by doing what all of us have wished we can do but have never had the gumption to try - jump out of the emergency chute of an aeroplane!  He now has fans on twitter, facebook, and donations are pouring in to foot his legal bill.


"We live in times of grave danger your honor. The world needs leaders.  It needs people who're not ashamed to cower in times of deep distress. It needs people willing to show them the emergency chute"


So it seems that Slater may now end up with a book contract

And may very well be one of the new-age folk heroes.

 What people can do in 160 characters continues to amaze me.

Not too long ago, Josh Cagan came up with the clever idea of matching Kanye West's tweets with cartoons from the New Yorker.

This time,  @veryshortstory is coming up with O Henry-esque twists in no more than 160 characters. All he needs is inspiration in the form of simple nouns. He'll come up with a whole story around them.

Take this one :
"I smashed the pocket watch on the ground, freezing the moment, so I'd have time to change my ways and stop you from breaking up with me." 


or this  one :

"4am. You are asleep again. I am awake. I am making a tape of you snoring. I will use this in court when I plead insanity"


For those of us who don't have time for big novels anymore, there's always twitter. 

English is such a remarkably plastic language. Yet it doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun. With women's suffrage and what not, we can no longer pass of as sensitive and liberal if we deign to use a singular pronoun with a masculine tinge.  It's about time we got ourselves a general-neutral pronoun.


Johnson. the language blog at The Economist looks at whether English is ever capable of evolving a Gender Neutral Pronoun   .

The fight for gender neutral pronouns has been on for nearly 2 centuries now. Among the several interesting links  is the post by Dennis Baron., chronicling the attempts of the many increasingly exasperated people demanding and suggesting words to fill this glaring vacuum in the English Language.

Johnson at Economist's language blog argues that all these words are in an evolutionary race to beat each other into popular parlance. We need to let evolution have his/her way. People coming up with new words ad-hoc is not going to work he says. The English Language will refudiate it.

His bet for the gender-neutral pronoun is "they".

Mine is on s/he. Because it is also about time a few characters got added to the English alphabet.
@ABCDEFGHI/JKLMNOPQR$TUVWXYZ.