bStandards

I’ve wondered if Wikipedia ever was going to branch out more into Google’s space but I never thought about the reverse.  Their new project is totally inline with Google’s vision and at the same time bringing more credibility and incentive for people to publish online.  I love it… I wonder how or if Wikipedia will have to change how they do things.  I imagine a war of purists of Wikipedia going against the “paid” Google model.  It’s a risky proposition for Google to go against a non-profit powerhouse like Wikipedia in terms of internet culture but I think this might be a win.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a website with a simple picture and a snippet of text by astronomer Carl Sagan:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

While I may not be as eloquent, I hope that by sharing this with others, we can all see something worth saving in each other and where we live.

With love,
Billy

Part of Blog Action Day

Think classic children’s novel stay the same? Think again. Publishers do update them and this guy has an interesting photo evolution of it happening.

Via Reddit

If you didn’t know, I’m blogging at china.bstandards.com and I have some pictures posted too.  Check it out!

Unless Facebook has not been on your browsing list in the past month or two, you have probably noticed the numerous applications flooding people’s profile (and maybe flooded your own profile!).  I appreciate Facebook’s openness to allowing other companies to get into their network, all the blocking and restrictive policies of MySpace have done nothing but make MySpace less accessible, user friendly and less fun in general.  My only fear is that Facebook turns into MySpace, not functionality wise, but in the way that the pages will be too cluttered and people will be so application hungry that they will not realize that their profiles may be more than even friends would like to see.  I have added a few applications myself, but try to limit them to the side bar so that my friends do not have to scroll 50 pages down to see my wall, which is really my favorite part of Facebook.Less visible though is the awesome business and user impact this has on Facebook.  By allowing outside applications into their network, it provides more value and turns Facebook into an internet of its own.  Kind of like how AOL had their own sites and “keywords” you could visit, Facebook is making itself an internet home for millions of users where they can access tons of interesting and fun stuff.  The real strength is that all this information is related to people they know, making it a great filter and counter to the vast amount of information out on the internet.

I recently read a great article from Marc Andreessen about the new Facebook upgrade that discusses the ins-and-outs and pros and cons of the new application API Facebook has been offering at a more business and technical level.   It is interesting to me that these applications have to be large-scale, rather than catering towards small developers (like most of their users).  I hope they allow individuals to host their applications on the Facebook server though, as that would mean the people providing the applications likely aren’t trying to make any money, but are adding serious value to Facebook.

Online social media is an amazing and interesting beast, it really has changed things socially.  The way to make friends, bond and keep in touch has been changed greatly by these applications.  My best wishes go out to Facebook because I think they are doing the best job at keeping the online social space legit *cough Dateline vs MySpace cough*.  I wonder if 20-30 years from now, my friends will include my children and sons and daughters of my friends.  Imagine being able to Poke your grandparents!  Needless to say, I am ecstatic over the growth of social media and can not wait to see what tomorrow holds.

Wow, this is one of the saddest pictures I have ever seen in my life.  It comes from an article I Stumbled Upon, about how a huge plastic island, twice the size of Texas, floats in the Pacific. While trash has obvious effects like the picture above, there is more to this story:

The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Best Life Magazine

Here’s some of the video I took for Steven’s surprise party and some footage of Yaddi, Steve, Tiff and I at Denny’s after we all watched Knocked Up. I edited most of the beginning footage, but the last half is largely untouched since I wanted the clips to be included but didn’t want to spend a billion hours editing it to be all super cool. The video of Peter swinging and jumping is in the last half… and I realize that I meant to say Steven instead of Peter during the violating.

Enjoy!

Oh and sorry if any of you are embarrassed by any of the footage or annoyed by the song, but it took my computer 2 hours to compile the video so I’m not redoing this hehe.

It pretty much is impossible to avoid chemicals, even if your home is completely “organic” the outside world continues to use chemicals in practically every product. Unfortunately chemicals tend to stick around. I leave you with this disturbing tidbit:

10 Americans is the story of environmental legacy and heritage, of evolution, revolution and degradation; specifically man’s unique ability to foul his own environment on the most fundamental of levels. We got to know the 10 Americans through the research project, BodyBurden. They were chosen at random by the American Red Cross, over a period of 4 weeks in later 2004. The subjects’ blood samples, identified only by birth date, were tested at the same time, at a testing cost of $10,000 per subject. The tests, looking for a possible 413 toxic chemicals found 287; 212 of those had been banned more than 30 years ago, and the average was 200 toxic chemicals per subject. The results indicated exposure to carcinogens, and risks associated with developmental progress and disease of neurological, pulmonary, endocrine, reproductive and cognitive systems. Considering the average woman uses 12 personal products per day, exposing herself to a mean of 168 chemicals, the test results were not so surprising; that is until one other fact is revealed. That is the blood samples were umbilical cord blood, taken at the birth of each of the full term, ‘healthy’ subjects. Industrial pollution begins in the womb.

From Triple Pundit

Water droughts are going to be one of the biggest problems of climate change, while economic growth is adding to pollution. People in the US take water for granted, typically not even knowing where their water comes from. It just comes out at the turn of the tap. However, across the globe, people are struggling with getting clean water, even being forced to use water they know is bad for them:

“We have to use the polluted water to irrigate the fields, since we have no other choices. We don’t have any money to start a water project,” says Liangqiao resident He Chunxiang. “We know very well that we are being poisoned by eating the grain. What more can we do? We can’t just wait to starve to death.”

In a painful juxtaposition, the rush to feed the world has increased water usage, amplifying the need for access to clean water. Check out this Newsweek article discusses some of three most desperate water situations on the planet, China, India and West Bank.

Via Jetson Green

Via Digg