Wired has an article on this guy who was put onto the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. As a response to the invasion of his privacy he decided to take things to extremes by giving the FBI complete rundown on his daily life.

Every day he posts about 100 photos of everything he does. The toilettes he uses, the food he eats, the rooms he sits in, everything. He also puts his credit card records onto the site so you can see everything he buys. He wears a little GPS tracker so you can see where in the world he is in real-time (currently in New Jersey).  It’s like the ultimate alibi.

It seems bizarre but it is also a commentary (he’s an artist) on the way that modern people have such serious online presences. Between my blog, my Picassa album, and my Facebook account quite a lot of my life is available for examination online. Kinda freaky but I don’t have anything to hide.

Moore’s law says that the power of computer processors doubles roughly every 2 years. Intel and AMD love that because it means that we have to replace our computers often. What happens to all those old PC’s that we throw away? It seems there is a good chance that they are shipped to China!

ForeignPolicy.com have a cool photo essay on the subject. From the article:

“Each year, between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally. Most of it winds up in the developing world. It can be 10 times cheaper for a “recycler” to ship waste to China than to dispose of it properly at home.”

These guys don’t just dump the old hardware, they also scour it for valuable parts.

“Computers are much more than just wires and plastic; they are also a source of highly valuable metals, including gold, copper, and aluminum. One ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore. Circuit boards can be 40 times richer in copper than typical copper ore.”

Today in 1939 Lina Medina a Peruvian 5 year old become the youngest mother in history. Wired has the story, but it seems that she had an extreme case of the extremely rare precocious puberty. The story was only accepted as true after a photo (on the Wikipedia story) and X-rays of the case were revealed.

The child lived until 40 (died of bone marrow disease) and Lina is still alive. Bizarre story.

You know The Voice from just about every movie trailer you see? Well there really is just one guy doing them – his name is Don LaFontaine and he has been the voice for more than 5000 movie trailers! He is incredibly sought after and does about 60 promotions a week – up to 35 in a single day.

You all know what he sounds like – now you know

This is a the greatest ever photo of a praying mantis (from Flickr). They really can be aggressive little buggers.

In fact, check out this photo and story about a mantis which captured and ate a hummingbird! He impaled the hummingbird with one spiny appendage and ate his fill with the other, before dropping the dead bird and moving on. Incredible.

Both links via Boing Boing

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