Best video on how memes spread I've seen

If this doesn't make you want to get up and do the T-rex-ish dance move, I don't know what will ...

Spotted over on The World's Fair ... A video on how memes spread, as depicted by silly dancing.



Awesome, absolutely awesome. ;)

A break from Berlin6 for a brief message on corn

Just spotted this on Wired.com. It caught my eye largely due to the fact that I'm reading (yes, still reading ... it's been eternally in my travel bag) The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which takes a close look at where our meals truly come from.

It's a fascinating book, one that I hope to finish in the coming week

Fast Food: Just Another Name for Corn
By Brandon Keim -- November 10, 2008 | 7:17:01 PM

That the $100-billion fast food industry rests on a foundation of corn has been known more through inference and observation than hard scientific fact — until now.

Chemical analysis from restaurants across the United States shows that nearly every cow or chicken used in fast food is raised on a diet of corn, prompting fresh criticism of the government's role in subsidizing poor eating habits.

"People had talked about what they observed or found out about, as individual journalists or individual consumers," said University of Hawaii geobiologist and study co-author A. Hope Jahren. But anecdotes do not add up to scientific proof, she said. "We got national data on how this food is being produced. It's very objective."

Corn is central to agriculture in the United States, where it is grown in greater volumes and receives more government subsidies than any other crop. Between 1995 and 2006 corn growers received $56 billion in federal subsidies, and the annual figure may soon hit $10 billion.

But in recent years, environmentalists have branded corn as an icon of unsustainable agriculture. It requires large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, both of which require large amounts of fossil fuel to manufacture.

Most of the resulting corn is fed to livestock who didn't evolve to subsist entirely on corn. In cattle, eating corn increases flatulence emissions of methane — a potent greenhouse gas — and creates an intestinal environment rich in e. coli, a common cause of food poisoning. That necessitates mixing cow feed with antibiotics, in turn producing antibiotic-resistant disease strains.

Many of those livestock end up in high-calorie, low-nutrition franchised fast foods, which have been repeatedly linked to obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Fast food's biggest selling point is its low price — and that, say industry critics, is largely possible because of corn's ubiquitous cheapness.

"We're seeing that corn is the number-one reason that fast food is so cheap and available," said Meredith Niles, a food policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety who was not involved in the study. "U.S. programs are subsidizing obesity in this country."

More after the jump ...

A bit of holiday fun ...

Man, next Halloween, I've got to get my hands on one of these ... ;)

Delving into unknown territory - Ruby

Yes, you read that right.

I've decided to take a stab at learning rudimentary programming in Ruby, to help broaden my understanding of taxonomies and programming syntax in general - as the first step towards increasing my technical understanding.

So far, I can successfully use my Terminal app to do basic math, and say "Kaitlin is the coolest."

That's skill.

No, but seriously, as silly as this all sounds, I don't come from a technical background, hence the need to help build up my own base knowledge on not only programming, but ontologies, taxonomies, RDF etc.

The road is not easy, my friend ... but entertaining for the skilled to watch ;)

(By the way, any suggestions for additional tutorials are welcome. Time to put myself back to school - metaphorically speaking ... )

Blogging about this song ...

Spotted on FSJ, hands down the best tech bubble song I've heard. Music to my ears.



Simply amazing.

Flashback: Baby food for adults

From a CNN.com article with a bit too much alliteration in the headline - "Funky Fries and other foods that flopped", brought to my attention by a colleague of mine. The most astonishing item in the list of marketing disasters being Gerber singles, a take on traditional Gerber baby food but designed for single adults.

From the article ...
---------------

8. Gerber Singles

At some point in time, almost every adult has tasted baby food and discovered that the stuff isn't half bad. But that doesn't mean people want to make a meal out of it.

For some reason, Gerber had to learn that lesson the hard way. In 1974, the company released Gerber Singles, small servings of food meant for single adults, packaged in jars that were almost identical to those used for baby food.

It didn't take long for Gerber execs to figure out that most consumers, unless they were less than a year old, couldn't get used to eating a pureed meal out of a jar -- particularly one depressingly labeled "Singles."

Baby food for grown-ups was pulled from the marketplace shortly after its birth.
---------------
Further Google-ing delivers photos of the next-best food for singles outside of SPAM (scroll down to the bottom, beneath the funny face drink mixes). It gets better. The pictures reveal a few of the flavors one could once choose from, including pureed mediterranean vegetables, beef burgundy, blueberry delight and creamed beef. Nothing better than creamed steak products. M'm! How'd they know?!

Search engines also produced this gem, bringing another failed product to my attention ... Garlic Cake. This item was lumped together in this article with, what else? Edible deoderant. Needless to say, regardless of my relationship status, baby food will never be on the menu.

A little Web 2.0 fun

Fantastic. Happy Sunday to me.

Dilbert, on Web 2.0

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-Web 2.0. Just ... apprehensive, I guess, when too many companies try to reinvent the wheel, but there is a lot of good beneath the buzzwords.

OK, with that out of the way, on to the laughs. This Dilbert strip had me in tears ... maybe because of this, this (newer version, here) and my personal favorite, this. All supposed to be comedic. Sadly, I can name a slew of companies and organizations who have similar slogans. ::sigh::

So in the name of data-driven folksonomies and user-generated communities who love tag clouds ... goodnight. :)

Drawing on walls

For those wordsearch fanatics out there (me being one of them) ... Wordsearch Wallpaper, brought to you by 5.5 designers. Simply amazing.

This brings me back to my childhood, not just because of the countless hours in a car on family road trips, but reminds me of my older brothers' wall decorations. An entire wall of their room was covered in a maze with 70's cartoon space figures and other creatures, all done in a burnt orange color scheme that matched the burnt orange shag carpet. (No, I'm not kidding. My room had a nice blue shag, fwiw.) The maze lacked a start or end point, just a mess of tunnels amassing the entire wall of their shared bedroom.

To this day, you can still see the pencil marks towards the bottom half of the wall where my older (not so much wiser at this point, looking back) brother had started the maze, half believing my parents put the wallpaper up with the intention that he had to finish it before he could move out of the house.

Needless to say, he soon realized this wasn't their intention ... after being scolded for marking up the newly applied wallpaper. :) And that was that.