In My Head

I had a dream where I discovered that southern Sweden directly bordered Mauritania and Northern India, so I immediately started to plan the road trip of a lifetime! (For the record, Mauritania was to the east, and had a slightly longer border with Sweden than India did)

I awoke to find, somewhat disappointingly, that this is not actually the case. No offense Denmark.

Just for fun, here is a mock-up that I made of how it would actually look. The borders fit quite well together, I must say, especially India and Sweden!

Fascinating

The 21st century is a weird and wonderful place to live.

From the comments of the previous Money as Debt videos I came across this guy:




He has 126 (!) videos on YouTube, which he posts in response to other people's videos. All of them are about the same length and contain basically the same rant/information:

• he is a US armed forces veteran
• he claims his old boss was murdered but it was framed as a suicide
• he claims he was abducted and forcibly injected
• he claims someone tried to 'assassinate' him
  
• he doesn't trust the government and wants them out of power (through violent revolution)
  
• he believes we're in the middle of a technological war an doesn't trust technology (despite using YouTube to spread his message)
  

He also apparently wants to attend a local city council meeting again some day since he was (perhaps unsurprisingly) barred from them.

Now, I'm not laughing at the guy...he's obviously got serious issues. Who knows what exactly caused them or when they cropped up. But man, what a fascinating case. How many thousands of people must exist like this in the world? Does he feel like he's accomplishing anything with these videos? Man, the whole situation just blows my mind. The only reason I know about this guy is because he's chosen to make and share these thoughts on the web (I just watched a new one where he says he'd like to move to Iran) -- and yet now, because of the Internet, I have a partial glimpse into the bizarre life story of one individual whom I otherwise would never know existed. I wish I could offer the guy some help, but I really don't feel like there's a whole lot I could accomplish from across the world (I have a hard enough time keeping in touch with friends and family, let alone crazy strangers). And now the only reason you know about him is because you choose to read the thoughts that I share and publish on the web.

Wow, I love new media.

EDIT: Man...the more videos I watch, the more weird quirks I learn about the dude...I mean, it's pretty much the same material over and over again, but every now and then he'll just a drop a sentence here or there and it will completely come outta left field (my favourite so far is how he wouldn't have bombed Hiroshima because of all the beautiful japanese women there). What an incredible character!

EDIT 2: There's a new idea he seems to be advocating lately: a control child. Have one child that gets injections and medicine from the government and goes to public school and have another that avoids all of that and is home schooled. I'm not convinced either of them would turn out ok...

Money as Debt

Holy shit, this is informative. Sometimes I really wish I had studied economics...

Watch this, and then go watch the other 4 parts as well.

The Night Before Christmas

Sometimes I love xkcd.


Dude also just put a ball pit in his room. That's amazing!

Courtesy of TimeAndDate.com

For some reason blogger doesn't agree with the use of tables. Scroll down.

Location:	Date:	Sunrise:	Sunset:	Length of Day:
Toronto	Dec. 18/07	7:46am	4:42pm	8h56m01s
London	Dec. 18/07	8:02am	3:52pm	7h50m26s
Oslo	Dec. 18/07	9:16am	3:11pm	5h54m42s

BBC Bonanza

I'm taking a break from my final exam (which is discussing the jovial issues of Structural Violence and AIDS in Africa) and I came across another BBC article that made me smile:

One-fifth of Canadians Immigrants

I found this one funny but for a different reason than the last one. Although it accurately states all of the facts, it does so in such a British fashion. I realize that they're talking about first-generation immigrants, but really, in my mind, 99% of all Canadians are immigrants. With the exception of Natives (who, in all probability are actually immigrants from Asia thousands of years ago anyways) all Canadians 'come' from somewhere else. In fact, a large part of our national identity (which is a work-in-progress itself) is the concept of the 'mosaic' - many smaller pictures combining to make up one larger picture.

Maybe I'm reading my own biases too much into it, but it seems very, well, European, to differentiate between foreign-born and national-born residents. As I've mentioned here previously, the best friend I've made in Oslo is a Chinese-Canadian girl from Vancouver. Her family moved to Canada when she was 6 years old (I'm pretty sure?) but I don't think of her as any more or less Canadian than myself (or than my Anglophone roommate from Montreal or than the 2 bilingual girls I know here from the Unversity of Alberta).

I guess it just seems to me that the article places a large difference on 'immigrants' versus 'Canadians' which does make sense because it's an article about immigration, however I just don't get the feeling that the majority of Canadians would view the country through such a dialectical lens. Also, it frames statements in the negative (i.e., "People speaking neither French nor English as their native language now make up 20% of the total population, the highest recorded in the recent past.") Rather than the affirmative (something like "People's who native language is something other than English or French now make up 20% of the total population.")

In fact, compare the BBC article with the equivalent article on the CBC. The CBC article uses terms like "settling in" and "choosing to make their hometown," and opting for phrases like "newcomers" and "residents born outside of Canada" rather than the somewhat blunt and clearly differentiating "foreign-born."

The immigrants immediately become Canadians, they are Canadians, they're not separate from us.

Not that the BBC article is bad or wrong by any means, I just find the difference in tone and approach interesting from a cultural perspective.

Bahaha

It's nice to see reporters for the BBC having a little fun at work. Here's a direct quote from one article:

"It says the tiny bitch was whisked away under an assumed name after receiving about 20 threats."

Intrigued? Read the rest of it here.