List #5: Some links for today

I've found these blogs via Google's 'blogs of note' and one on the livejournal spotlight. They're worth checking out!

1. People Reading - I saw the URL on the blogger dashboard. The author interviews one person a day who is reading a book. Apparently, it's very easy to find people reading books in all sorts of places in San Francisco.

2. Fake Plastic Fish - Again, a blogger blog of note. The author says, "Fake Plastic Fish is my attempt to live sustainably by significantly reducing my plastic consumption and plastic waste, from carrying my own bags when shopping to drinking from a reusable metal water bottle to using solid shampoos and lotions instead of those bottled in plastic. Each week I photograph and tally my plastic waste. The amount has gone down a lot since I first started, but as you can see from the following picture, even someone like me who is trying very hard can still end up surrounded by plastic." When people think about what can be done for the environment, it can make your head spin. This down to earth blog shows what we can do.

A little aside here - unfortunately, plastic is seen as modern and therefore, wonderful, in Asia. I've seen so many people putting aside containers made from bamboo leaves, cloth or bamboo containers for carrying purchases, and plates made from plant material in favor of brightly colored plastic. I've got to start my staff with this list.

3. The Carrot Revolution - An art educator website with interesting ways of looking at things and educating about art.

4. For a Good World - A livejournal community, the maintainers post a link each day about community organizations doing good and simple acts to make the world a better place.

5. The Postit Project started as documentation of the bloggers doodles drawn on post-it notes and has expanded. I never thought... but some of the drawings and collections of drawings are cool.

Some Links

It's been an intense week - wonderful events, Hmong New Year, grief and a funeral.

Trying to take my mind off it by posting a few links.

I just discovered Uncyclopedia. It had me ga-fawing, in spite of myself.

Article on Astronomy

My favorite lines:
Every school kid knows that you can't create something out of nothing (unless you're an accountant), but creating EVERYTHING out of nothing seems to be OK, presumably as long you don't try and fit it through the eye of a needle. But this is all actually wrong, because mass and energy are interchangeable.

Astronomers currently believe that the universe is made out of space, which itself is made out of nothing.

A few articles on cluster bombs. This past week, 140 civil society groups and countries met in Vienna to discuss the initiative to ban cluster munitions. Already 83 countries support the initiative, with the major exceptions of the US, Russia and China, who are the main producers of these weapons of mass destruction. These mini-bombs are dropped in a canister which opens in mid-air, spreading the cluster bombs over a wide area. They were dropped in Laos and Vietnam, and the explosive is still active after 30 - 40 years in the ground, ready to explode if someone picks them up or even moves them.

Unfortunately, I've seen too many examples here in Laos of kid vs. cluster bomb.

The article from uncyclopedia on Cluster bombs is black humor with a kick; the article is written as a marketing strategy. "They will not explode when dropped, only when picked up by a child or other innocent civilian" the spokesman promises. Strangely enough, it gets to the essence of the thing - children in countries destroyed by war don't have the playthings found in the US. If they see the bright yellow of a cluster bomb, they'll pick it up to play with it.

A more sobering article on cluster bombs is on Wikipedia.