I’ve linked to TED for quite a while in my sidebar and I urge everyone to subscribe to TED’s video RSS feed if you are even remotely concerned about the world and people around you.
TED talks tends to focus on the grand scheme of things, but this talk by Yossi Vardi talks focuses acutely on the local issues that plague many bloggers. The topic of this talk effects at least 50% of bloggers and all bloggers who care about the future of the world should not only watch this video, but also take immediate action. (If you are not in this 50% you should probably pass it on to someone who is.) Warning this video is not for the faint of heart.
It’s is nice to wake up once and a while to something this amusing in your feed reader isn’t it?
Statistics states that the group tends towards the medium. Thankfully, this person is not within the group or the average IQ of the entire world would be quite-a-bit lower.
Osama bin Laden’s new video with full video and transcript.
Friday, Osama bin Laden released his first video in three years, and it has been posted, in full, online. Unlike his fire and brimstone videos in the past, this one is more relaxed and he talks in a calm, definite manner as if he was trying to teach people his beliefs rather than indoctrinate them by force. Bin Laden doesn’t directly attack America as a whole—as he is prone to do—but instead attacks certain aspects of American culture and history that he disagrees with and which demonstrate the faults he believes America has.
( At the end of the post there are two videos: the first video is of a newscast from Al Jazeera English and the second is the actual full 26 minute speech which is rather hard to find and isn’t being distributed by the major video networks.
The Pale Blue Dot and the Human Condition.
In February of 1990, Voyager 1 turned away from its primary mission and took a picture of the Earth from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles.) This picture featured the earth as a single small dot. A crumb on the surface of space, just lucky enough to rest inside one of many sunbeams many times its size. It demonstrated, graphically and irrefutably, what many people had believed for centuries: the earth is not special, and petty human conflicts were less important to the universe than an single ant’s life is to the earth.
Carl Sagan believed this wholeheartedly and this image inspired his book Pale Blue Dot. In response to this image he made the speech that is presented in the video in the next section. This video overlays Carl Sagan’s thoughts with images from movies that most people believe to represent themselves and their history. The power of the words combined with the visuals is stunning and well worth your time.
The Female Face In Modern Western Art
Here is another composite image video from YouTube. This one shows the evolution of women’s faces through the style of painting over the previous 500 years in Western art.
