I recently read an article written by a paramedic about how stupid it is to drive without your seat belt fastened. Really, really stupid…

The potential (and avoidable) injuries are pretty frightening – and well described. If you don’t always fasten your seat belt then I recommend reading the whole thing. But here is a great paragraph from the article:

“In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments-and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.”

I got one of Google’s great tools, Google Analytics, to keep an eye on the people visiting this site. The package provides stacks of great statistics and trends which mean very little to me since so few people visit the site!…

Anyway, one cool piece of data that they provide is a world map overlay showing where the site visitors are from. This is a summary for the visits over the last 10 days. You are not alone….

And yes, I made sure that my own visits are not counted.

Check out these amazing pics from a performance they put on in North Korea. 100,000 people trained for a year to put on this show – and they have one every year! To celebrate Arirang Festival (The Mass Games) they get all these people into a big stadium with hundreds of dancers on the field putting on an awesome show. The really mad part though, is the backdrop on the other side of the stadium. It is made up an thousands of people holding up cards with different colours – like a picture with human pixels.

The level of detail and synchronisation in incredible and you really have to see this to get the idea. So check out these pics, and if you can I really recommend taking a look at this clip.

This kind of thing could only be achieved in a totalitarian society like North Korea’s and it really caught my imagination. My first instinct was to think that this was a massive waste of time and resources (North Korea has millions of starving people). But I realised that while these kids (many are school children) were training and working together to produce something incredible, kids in my own society were getting fat on the couch watching mind-numbing TV.

Still, the ability to make our own choices about what we do with our time is an important freedom. We should just make better choices

Check out these pics from Hanoi, Vietnam. The guys over there have just gone crazy with cabling – no waiting for bureaucracy. Need a cable from A to B? No worries, we’ll just run it along next to all the others.

I like this kind of chaos, and it must be a pleasure to be able to “just get things done”. It’s a bit how I imagine London or New York back when things were crazy and people could just innovate and get things done. We live in such a controlled world these days…

Only problem is that this is not sustainable – imagine trying to fix a problem in one of the cables in that mess!