Apparently, it’s not that hard.
Turns out we can trick our brains quite effectively into thinking that we have more than two arms. Simulated attack on a fake arm will cause measurable fear. Requires nothing more complex than a fake rubber arm and a soft brush.
Fascinating guide to surviving a fall from about six miles up in the sky.
Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won’t “open up and swallow your shattered body.”
From The Arabist (2005):
The 20th issue of Cairo Magazine has been banned by Egyptian censors. It is the third issue to be banned in the magazine’s short history. Censors said that the offending passage came in the article about last Saturday’s demonstrations titled “Anti-Mubarak protesters violently beaten by police.” The offending line was this quote from one demonstrator:
“Down with the rule of the dog Mubarak.”
It’s 2011. And the rule of the dog Mubarak has been demolished.
Get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
Also check out Calendar About Nothing.
An outstanding collection of 4000+ pictures and 3000+ videos from the revolution.
We’re working on a similar project for IAmTahrir.com, trying to collect artwork related to the revolution in order to showcase it online. Please send your submissions, be it music, chants, slogans, humor, photography, poetry, comics, to tahrir.art@gmail.com
Bobbie was a dog from the U.S. state of Oregon who became famous for traveling 2,800 miles to return to his owners in the city of Silverton.
In 1923, while on a family road trip in Indiana, Bobbie—a two-year old Scotch Collie/English Shepherd mix—was separated from his owners and lost. After an exhaustive search the broken-hearted family returned to their home in Oregon never expecting to see their beloved dog again. Six months later, Bobbie appeared on their doorstep mangy and scrawny with feet worn to the bone; he showed all the signs of having walked the entire way back alone.
During his ordeal he crossed 2,800 miles of plain, desert and mountains in the dead of winter to return home.
Truly history making. Not only is this a substantial amount of money, but this trial actually took place in Ecuador. Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network:
Today’s case is historic and unprecedented. It is the first time Indigenous people have sued a multinational corporation in the country where the crime was committed and won.
Great stuff, minus the part on Wikileaks, which is total bullshit. But, what’d you expect?
It’s been a few days now since the fall of Egypt’s last pharaoh. While the days ahead are definitely both paramount and uncertain, this has been an outstanding first step and one that many hope will propel Egypt into fair democratic rule.
A month ago, if you were to tell any Egyptian (or Tunisian) that their ruler was easily disposable, that person would have looked at you as if you were crazy. Dictators do that; they almost always seem to have an apparently overwhelming power that stifles and cripples any potential opposition.
The mere fact that this revolution occurred is especially interesting and surprising.
It’s absolutely vital for us to analyze this uprising and study how something like this could have been caused. Surely the rampant corruption and poverty had to do with it, but as bad as things seem now, the Egyptian economy has largely been stagnant for the past few decades. Most citizens of that great nation have been struggling for years.
So why now? What’s the catalyst for this sudden uprising?
I’ve been reading a lot of analysis on the events these past few days, but few words stuck with me more than what Wael Ghonim, the Middle-Eastern Google executive who created the Facebook group behind the initial protests, said: “If you want to liberate a people, give them the Internet.”
Now that’s just powerful. I remember getting goosebumps when I first read that. “If you want to liberate a people, give them the Internet.”
What Ghonim is talking about is not the Internet itself; he’s not referring specifically to the World Wide Web.
He’s talking about what the Internet promises and delivers, namely the uninterrupted free flow of information. We use the Internet every day, but much like our other comforts in life, we seldom sit back and really relish how free we really are because of it.
Our web is the only platform on earth that gives anyone — regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or beliefs — full freedom in utilizing and contributing back to the Internet. No one checks your ID or badge; there’s no security that you need to pass through. In many ways, the Internet is the world’s greatest democracy: anyone’s beliefs are allowed in, whether that’s a Holocaust denial group on Facebook or an ACLU channel on YouTube, and the people get to collectively vote for what ultimately becomes more popular.
It is no surprise that the Egyptians managed to muster up the courage and get a huge number of people out to the rallies through simple things like Facebook pages and Twitter streams. What’s even more beautiful about the whole thing is the awesome power of the web to bring people around the world together. Egypt has 80 million people; many more than that supported, helped, or followed the revolution online.
What the Internet does that’s even far more remarkable is that it tends to lift our labels, bringing down a lot of walls that we typically build in the real world to separate us. When you click a link, you don’t know who created it and frankly, you don’t even care. Your link is just as good as my link; ultimately what the people choose will trump all.
All these walls have come down on the Internet. Perhaps the greatest example of this has been the use of the associated technologies assisting the revolution. Few have questioned or even brought up the fact that the top three technologies the protestors used — Google, Facebook and Twitter — have been started by Jewish entrepreneurs. When the Internet was taken down in Egypt, engineers at Google and Twitter worked extra hours on the weekend to come up with a way to enable Egyptians to get their tweets out via other ways, like phone calls.
That wasn’t taken as a Western ploy or foreign interference; they were simply humans helping out their fellow humans. That’s the beauty of the Internet. Something like that was never analyzed or questioned. Why? Because we’re all people.
When you think about it that way, no wonder it was the Internet that the Egyptian government first tried to get rid of.
In 1971, John Lennon imagined a world with no borders or countries, only filled with co-existing humans living in peace. We’re remarkably far from that in the real world and it’s still largely impossible to achieve. Yet, I think we’ve largely removed such vain labels from our web ecosystem. It’s not America’s Internet or Europe’s Internet; it’s the World Wide Web.
That’s an awesome power that we’ve yet to understand the true potential of, but today we’ve seen how it can unite us and cause true revolutions.