How to Become an Early Riser » Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog

"Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day until late afternoon."

Brain-Terminal.com » A Cultural Turning Point?

"For the first time in history, a cell-phone ring tone tops a major music singles chart. I have no idea what to make of this, but that won't stop me from declaring it some sort of significant cultural shift."

BBC NEWS | England | Gloucestershire | Three hurt in cheese rolling race

"Three people have been hurt hurling themselves down a steep slope in Gloucestershire in an annual cheese rolling contest.

Competitors throw themselves 200m down a steep hill in a bid to win a Double Gloucester cheese. Lizzie Way reports. "

'Disposition' Emerges as Issue at Brooklyn College - May 31, 2005 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper

"Brooklyn College's School of Education has begun to base evaluations of aspiring teachers in part on their commitment to social justice, raising fears that the college is screening students for their political views."

Soda Finder ® -- The United States Soda Locator -- Soda For Sale

"This site was created out of the love of travel, and the hunt for unique and strange sodas. It is a hobby I thoroughly enjoy. My primary goal on this site is to allow others to reap the benefits of my endeavors while raising the necessary funds for travel and capital to keep the hobby going."

Wilhelm scream - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect first recorded in 1951 for the movie Distant Drums. It has been featured in dozens of movies since."

Goals Reached, Donor on Right Closes Up Shop - New York Times

"Comparing them with an equal number of liberal foundations, including Ford and MacArthur, Mr. Piereson found that the right spent $100 million a year to the left's $1.2 billion. 'You don't have to have a lot of money to drive the intellectual debate,' Mr. Piereson said."

Rural Exodus for Work Fractures Chinese Family

"For the Yang family and millions of others in the Chinese countryside, the only way to survive as a family is to not live as one. Migrant workers like Shan's parents are the mules driving the country's stunning economic growth. And the money they send home has become essential for jobless rural China.

Yet even that money is no longer enough. Migrant wages have stagnated, education and health costs are rising, and the rural social safety net has collapsed -- a crushing combination that is a major reason the income divide is widening so rapidly in China at the expense of the rural poor."

Ghost Or Mist?

'Supposedly this is a car commercial that never aired. I'm thinking that it is more probably a very good student project using Computer Graphics.

About 2 seconds into the "commercial" notice something moving along the side of the car, like a ghostly white mist that looks humanish.

It is so believable. Movie animators could learn a bit from this.

If computer graphics couldn't do this kind of thing, I might be a bit spooked.'

Marginal Revolution: The Secret to a Good Marriage? Delusion

"The secret to a good marriage, therefore is selective forgetfulness. Coincidentally some psychologists have recently come to the same conclusion. The couples who stay together are the delusional ones - the ones who look at their past with rose-colored glasses."

New Scientist - 11 steps to a better brain

"It doesn't matter how brainy you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them."

Lyrical - Kermit the Frog - Rainbow connection

"Why are there so many
Songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side"

Technical Video Rental - how it works

"Technical Video Rental is a service that rents video tapes and DVDs - just like your corner video store...but we rent the kind of videos that you can't find on every street corner. Videos on running lathes, building target rifles, welding steel... cool videos!"

Marginal Revolution: Why has crack caused so much crime?

"Relative to other drugs, that is. In a CrookedTimber symposium on Steve Levitt, I offer a few speculative and possibly false hypotheses:"

Marginal Revolution: The Secret to a Good Marriage? Delusion

"We tend to remember slights and frustrations more than favors and kindnesses. So inevitably in a marriage the weight of negative remembrances of thing past comes to exceeds that of the positive. Divorce is the result.

The secret to a good marriage, therefore is selective forgetfulness."

VDARE.com: Blog Articles » Affordable Family Formation–The Neglected Key To GOP’s Future

Affordable Family Formation–The Neglected Key To GOP’s Future: "Four interlocking reasons form a chain of causality explaining why Affordable Family Formation paints the electoral map red.

I call them the Four Gaps: the Dirt Gap, the Mortgage Gap, the Marriage Gap, and the Baby Gap."

Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco - Yahoo! News

"San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city. Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under."

Leaving the left / I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity

"Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos."

Reason magazine -- January 1999 -- Dense Thinkers

"'New Urbanism,' the latest fad in urban planning, promises less traffic, better air, and lower taxes. Here's what it really delivers."

Bill Gates' 11 Rules

"For high school and college graduates, here is a list of 11 rules you did not learn in school. In his book, Bill Gates talks about how feel-good, politically-correct teaching that created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them up for failure in the real world."

SELF-REFERENTIAL APTITUDE TEST

"SELF-REFERENTIAL APTITUDE TEST, by Jim Propp (propp@math.wisc.edu) The solution to the following puzzle is unique; in some cases the knowledge that the solution is unique may actually give you a short-cut to finding the answer to a particular question, but it's possible to find the unique solution even without making use of the fact that the solution is unique."

Telegraph | Travel | France: Cowboys, Indians - et les Fran�ais

"It's hard to imagine the French embracing anything American, so why, wonders Abigail S Carroll, have they gone wild for le country?"

One Hand Clapping » Blog Archive » Bias aside it was just a lousy speech

"There are two examples I recommend to Ms. Nooyi before she gives another public-arena speech. "

To understand education budget, start with math

"Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's scorched-earth budget is approved -- a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public-school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year.

That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering."

LILEKS (James) :: The Bleat

"Indulge me, if you want – it’s not like this is some insignificant pop culture artifact. Tote all the seasons up, and Trek ran for 28 seasons. It started with LBJ and ended half a decade into the 21st century."

Grocery Store Wars | Join the Organic Rebellion

Grocery Store Wars | Join the Organic Rebellion

Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools

"Shown here is bullet proofing for jeeps; the liquid rubber inside a tire will instantly heal a bullet hole. It hardly notices nail and screw pokes."

BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Adventure Game

"THE HITCHHIKER ADVENTURE GAME by Douglas Adams - 20th Anniversary Edition"

Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

"Downloadable and very printable, I find these PDFs extremely useful....
Obviously I cannot anticipate all needs, but the grids below should cover most common ones."

The noble age of bravery

"But there is more to these tales than derring-do. There is usually a line, maybe two, that offers the modern-day reader an almost shocking glimpse of a mode of behavior based on virtues unconstrained by the strictures of modern-day hipness, smarts and irony."

Woot!

"We are sorry, but an error has occurred.
We will be sure to give our web developers
a swift kick in the butt and a pay cut."

Department of Psychiatry of Mount Sinai School of Medicine

"Seamus O'Flaithbheartaigh, M.D.
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry"

THE ECONOMISTS

What economists do.

Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

"EDITOR'S NOTE: 2005 marks the fiftieth anniversary of National Reviewpos. In celebration, NRO will be digging into the NR archives throughout the year. This piece by Whittaker Chambers appeared in the December 28, 1957, issue of NR."

Michelle Malkin: READING FOR POLITICAL JUNKIES

"The Pew Research Center alerted me yesterday to its new report on political 'typology'--the fourth attempt of its kind to categorize Americans 'on the basis of a broad range of value orientations rather than simply on the basis of party identification or self-reported ideology.'"

The Conservative Philosopher Antony Flew on Religion

"Philosophical theism is in this respect like philosophical conservatism: most of its critics simply don't have a clue about what its defenders actually believe."

Thinking Straighter - Christianity Today Magazine

"Antony Flew, one of the world's leading philosophers, has changed his mind about God. And he has agnostics worried."

Cathy's World

Cathy's World: "O'Donnell at that point began figuratively patting himself on the back as a man-of-the-people dedicated to public education and said that Arnold's troubles with the teachers are 'because of public school parents like me. Every single teacher my daughter has had has been a GREAT teacher.'

Me: 'You're delusional.' "

WILLisms.com: Reform Thursday: Week Fourteen.

"This week, we examine the five Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) funds all federal employees can choose from for their retirement. Social Security personal accounts would be modeled along similar lines.

One thing to note is how each fund, over the past decade, has delivered positive and significant returns, even through slumps in the market."

Mark Golblatt on on National Review Online

"Back to Basics
Welcome to the real world. Here’s a spot check."

Addicting Games - Free Flash and Java Games

Addicting Games - Free Flash and Java Games

Game Gardens

"A place to play online multiplayer games and a place for game developers to create their own multiplayer games and host them for others to come and play."

logicon goes foward!

"This is a new gaming studio."

Richard Dawkins and the Hermeneutic of Atheism

"When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer…when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning."

Classic Games

Classic Games: DK, Frogger, Pacman, more...

SLIS IUB > News > Dean's Notes: BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish

"One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better."

Wired 13.05: George Lucas on Star Wars, Fahrenheit 9/11, and his own legacy

"Yes, but I don't want to get into situations where people say, 'That's not historically correct.' History is fiction, but people seem to think otherwise.
...
Art is about communicating with people emotionally without the intellectual artifacts of the current situation, and dealing with very emotional issues.
...
Once people get out of college, they're set in their worldview."

FTC Mothersday Card

Happy Mothers Day from the FTC.

EU bosses told: no 'reckless competition' in the sauna

"Ever the masters of punctilious regulation, the European Union's 25 Commissioner have outdone themselves with a code of conduct for their new and beautifully-appointed Brussels sauna.


"

Wittingshire: Pope Benedict XVI Rejects Neo-Darwinism

"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."