Mike Rowe’s creed and philosophy is contained in The Sweat Pledge, which he has for sale as a poster on his Mike Rowe Works Foundation website. All proceeds go the foundation, which does a wonderful job (pun) promoting the dignity of work in general and work in the trades in particular. I love Mike’s sense of humor and mission. He’s a good man.
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Some think the seeds of life came from the Big Bang, but that misses a critical part of how the elements of life came to be. All the elements we have discovered and mapped on the periodic table contain a certain number of protons. For example, iron possesses 26 protons, and gold (Au), a much heavier element, contains 79.
The Big Bang produced ONLY elements with one and two protons, hydrogen and helium, along with trace amounts of three and four proton elements (you can look those up on the periodic table). However, life on earth requires carbon, which has six protons, as well as a bunch of other elements. Where did those heavier, more proton-dense elements come from if not from the Big Bang? …
Because I’ve been told I’m part Slovenian but know nothing about my homeland, any time I encounter a reference to Slovenia, I’m all over it. I recently found this picture of a Dragon statue in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I don’t know where Ljubljana is, nor how to pronounce it. But since I’m XX% Slovenian, I’m damn proud of it. …
I’m reading a book by Edward de Bono titled, The Happiness Purpose. In it, he states something that I thought was counter-intuitive:
[T]he price of freedom is decision.
This quote, misattributed to George Orwell, gets at the “nut” of the civic role and responsibility of real journalism.
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(Below is blog post. It contains naive ramblings and no great conclusions—and lots of mizpellings and grammatical errors.)
Why is it hard to mix cultures?…What is a culture?
A culture is a collection of people who share certain beliefs and values and, to some degree at least, share ideas on how those values should be expressed. For example, I was raised a Catholic, but I’m not Catholic anymore. To become a Catholic, I adopted Catholic values and beliefs; indeed, to become a member of the Catholic Church I had to profess those values and beliefs in various rituals.
So why did I leave that culture, that community? …
xkcd comic offers some helpful advice on creating memorable but still difficult to hack/guess passwords. …
The original quote from Diane Von Furstenberg is…
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.”
But as a male of the species, I prefer this gender-neutral adaptation: …
My former employer, Razorfish (now SapientRazorfish), won a digital marketing award for a fascinating ad/social media campaign they did for Dove, a subsidiary of Unilever. …
Exploding Pyrex? I didn’t realize this was a thing, but apparently it can be, particularly in the U.S. where Pyrex glass manufacturing ingredients are different for some reason (regulation?) from European products. Below is frugality guru Clark Howard‘s account of what happened to him and his family. He doesn’t provide any advice in the video, just a description of the aftermath. Below the video is some advice on how to reduce the chances of your Pyrex glassware shattering like Clark’s. This advice comes mostly from the makers of Pyrex via Epicurious. …
