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The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise is a very interesting exploration of racism, but I don’t entirely believe everything (and not just because as we all know it’s the people with blue eyes who are superior).

Dyslexic kids suddenly gaining markedly improved reading skills because of a one day change of expectations? Adults, who have to see what the point of the exercise is in advance, actually mirroring racist behaviors?

I don’t know, it just sounds like experimenter bias coloring anecdotal results to me. I would really like to see it in action though because it sounds fascinating.

Bob Parson’s Sixteen Rules for Survival.

I drove up to Topanga to hike through Hondo Canyon. It’s beautiful, but the trail wasn’t as well maintained as I would have preferred.

There was a lot of tall grass growing over the trail so I couldn’t always see where I was stepping. As a result, I kept feeling like I was going to step on a rattle snake at any moment or something. Clearly I am not captain nature.

Don’t get me wrong. I like nature. It’s great to get out of the city, and it was a fantastic work-out trying to huff my way up some of those steep switchbacks.

I just prefer to have 1 1/2 to 3 feet of well trod trail on either side of me as a buffer zone between me and nature. Also, I should probably figure out what poison oak and poison ivy actually looks like. Then I wouldn’t have to feel so paranoid about all the plants reaching out to grab at me.

Anyway, you can see a few photos here.

Marshall Brain’s presentation to Duke University students, How to Make a Million Dollars is surprisingly good.

Now, if I could just think of an idea so I can start swimming in that pool.

The Kenya Flash animation is SO stupid. I had to watch it like 6 times.

The Daughters of Freya is a mystery story told entirely through e-mail. I’ve thought of doing an interactive story spread across various web sites/blogs/e-mails, but the complexity of it seemed really overwhelming to me when I sat down to think it through.

Confining the story to just e-mail is certainly easier. I imagine you end up with a modern day version of one of the old epistolary novels like Dracula.

They’ll send you the first 3 e-mails for free, but you have to pay $7 something if you want the rest. It only takes 3 weeks for the story to unfold. I’m intrigued, but it seems overpriced to me. I guess it would depend on how many e-mails you actually get over the course of those 3 weeks. I suspect not enough.

Wow, clickable hotspots in QuickTime! I had no idea that was possible. It’s an interesting technology, but Van Sowerwine: Play With Me is a creepy, creepy, seriously CREEPY!!! implementation.

When she took off her clothes, I was like I don’t even want to know what comes after this. This is not at all where I was expecting this thing to go. Of course, after I ran through all the other iterations, I had to go back and see anyway. Man that thing is completely F’d up.

Look out Canada. We’re coming for your oil shales next.

This picture of Oil Depletion in Saudi Arabia shows how close we are to running out of oil in one of the world’s (at one time) largest wells. There are still a few other sources in Saudi Arabia, and they mention something about the vertical scale being exaggerated, but still….Wow.

We’re just about out of that sweet, sweet grease that powers our economy. Thank goodness we still have plenty of coal we can strip mine out of the North Eastern United States (and the aforementioned Canadians who must be harboring weapons of mass destruction somewhere).

Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density presents a very interesting perspective on Hong Kong. The whole place feels very cramped and oppresive in these images somehow. I need to search out some other photographers’ takes on the city by way of contrast.

I’ve only watched 2 of Ninjai: The Little Ninja shorts. They’re cute, but I need to get back to a few things and wanted to bookmark it before I lost it.