Archive for the 'Sociology' Category

Afghanistan Remembers Music

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

I listened to a piece from WNYC’s Radio Lab recently only to form a more concrete relationship with the loss that victims suffer under Taliban rule.
From the outside, looking in, the culture seems muddied with the intermingling of past and present times.  Between incomplete reports from the news agencies, history, and modern documentaries, it is [...]

The Home School Phenomenon

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Man has been on a quest throughout time to find the riddle of the root of all evil. Ole-Magnus Saxegard, a student of the Sydney-based University of Technology, explores this riddle in his latest frame-by-frame Flash animation (A History of Evil). It is a brilliant vision. If he’s looking for further inspiration to this age-old [...]

If one has skills…

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

…if one has skills, one could make the slums bloom with no money at all, simply by work and skills.— George Nakashima

Nerd? Geek? or Dork?

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

My Score: Modern, Cool Nerd
69 % Nerd, 69% Geek, 13% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
I scored better than half in [...]

The Guerrilla Tipster

Friday, October 26th, 2007

The Guerrilla Tipster invokes his mighty right, passed down by the hands of the gods, to assert wisdom upon the unwitting.
Today I find the signature of the Guerrilla Tipster upon the windshield of a car in the Barnes and Noble parking lot of Duluth:
LEARN HOW TO PARK DUMB SHIT!!
The words are poignant. I only [...]

Jehane Noujaim’s Pangea Day

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Jehane Noujaim, perhaps best known for her documentary (Control Room) exposing Al Jazeera for its divergence of news coverage during the Iraq war, is now to be recognized as TED’s 2006 prize winner and creator of Pangea Day. Being awarded the TED Prize provides a wish - this wish was to provide the world [...]

Flattery will get you everywhere!

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

I just noticed that a few of my pictures had been “favorited” in Flickr by a man I didn’t know. It wouldn’t strike me normally, as I don’t know most of the people on Flickr.com, however these pictures seemed to be of a particular theme.
  
So, yeah. The guy had been favoriting a lot [...]

Polar Cities

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

I must prefix this post with a bit of back story…
A reader in Taiwan, Danny Bee, left a comment on an article I wrote (”Emily Yoffe Learns The Secret“). I had first assumed that the comment was spam, though the suspect spam did not follow my preconceived notions of spam. It had no [...]

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Monday, June 11th, 2007

TED.com speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, delights the audience with his clever wit and poignant message on the worldwide problem of education systems. My aunt in Pasadena, California is a teacher to early elementary school children and can probably speak on this fact. I have had at least one conversation with her on what [...]

A Black Spot in the Road

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005

When I was younger, sometime in my Jr. High School days, I got myself into situations of remarkable trouble. One particular spot in my past that haunts me to this day is in regards to my activities as a teenage marauder. My friends and I used to go out late and night and [...]