A urine-soaked egg.
At the end of the school day in the eastern Chinese city of Dongyang, eager parents collect their children after a hectic day of primary school. That is also the start of busy times for dozens of egg vendors across the city, deep in coastal Zhejiang province, who ready themselves to cook up a unique springtime snack favored by local residents.
Continue reading… “Urine-soaked eggs a spring delicacy in China”
Will all coins go away now?
Finally, after years of talking, the Canadian government killed the penny in its recent budget. Finance Minister Flaherty was clearly thinking of decluttering and interior design, noting “Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home.”
There is also a real green side to this; the weight of all those pennies adds up, as does the cost and footprint of shipping them.
Continue reading… “Canada kills the Penny”
Croatian seamstress Radmila Kus
Croatian seamstress Radmila Kus has revealed she is struggling to cope with the huge demand for her latest product – her very own range of willy warmers. Knitting fan Radmila said ‘she just can’t keep up’ after launching her bespoke men’s product – and has had to recruit a small army of knitters in a bid to increase production…
Continue reading… “Woman making fortune from made-to-measure penis warmers”
Don’t take away the iPad!
At five years-old, it’s no fun getting interrupted while you’re focused on something. As a parent, I compensate for that by employing a series of intricately planned measures to guide my son from whatever he happens to be doing towards whatever it is that I want him to do instead.
The extremity of these measures depends entirely what’s being interrupted. If he’s playing outside with his sister, the steps I take are fairly mundane. I give him a few, gentle time checks (“five minutes until dinner” … “3 minutes until dinner” …), and then offer something enticing enough to make putting down the ball seem like less of an intrusion (“Tonight’s chicken has both teri and yaki on it!”).
If I need to transition my son from building a cardboard village with grandma to going to bed for the night, I need to combine my time checks with some subtle threats and an Obi Wan Kenobi-like response to his three hundred or so repetitions of some variation of, “No. I don’t want to. But you said. Why are you doing this to me?”
The techniques are all pretty simple and effective. Until it’s time to get him to put down the iPad.
Continue reading… “Screen rage is the new temper-tantrum”
The demand and popularity of coding keeps increasing.
There was a time when people used to go to night classes or buy DIY guides to learn foreign languages in their spare time. But theNew York Times is to have us believe that French and Spanish are out of the window, to be replaced by Python and Java.
It’s an interesting concept. There’s certainly no denying the fact that as a nation we’re becoming more tech savvy—you only need to look around a coffee shop to tell you that—and with that is bound to come an increased shift to learning how to make devices work better. This is giving rise to new fast coder training programs like DaVinci Coders. From the New York Times…
Continue reading… “Is learning to code more popular than learning a foreign language?”
Solve your wardrobe problem.
The model for how women purchase clothing is essentially broken. Because it is an ever-changing status symbol and subject to trends, fashion is not exactly like any other goods.
For example, with furniture you buy a new couch or a bed and then you have one, you don’t need another one or a different one two weeks later. Not so with dresses or shoes. In fact if many women, myself included, had their way, we’d never wear the same thing twice.
But spending $$$ on something you’ll only wear once isn’t really economically feasible, for even the 1%ers among us…
Continue reading… “99dresses wants to give women an infinite closet”
Rupert Murdoch
Everybody’s favorite octogenarian media tycoon is at it again. This time, Rupert Murdoch is accused of hiring hackers to crack a pay-TV rival’s encryption system and then post the hack on the internet in order to financially cripple them. It worked: they’re now bust…
Continue reading… “Rupert Murdoch employed hackers to destroy a Pay-TV rival”
Anticipation of blood-shed. How is there not a word in our language for that?.
Quote of the Day: “What a nice night for an evening.” – Steven Wright
Continue reading… “Top 10 Photos of the Week”
The world’s most expensive cup of tea is set to go on sale in China at £130 ($200) a cup – fertilized with panda dung. An Yanshi, a 41-year-old former teacher and journalist, is using the bamboo-eaters’ manure to help fertilize the organic green tea, which he believes will make the perfect brew…
Continue reading… “Panda excrement used in making world’s most expensive cup of tea”
It was all fun and games until he had to start eating giant regurgitated worms.
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Quote of the Day: “I’m a heroine addict. I need to have sex with women who have saved someone’s life. Hmmm, I’m gonna fix that last joke by taking out all the words and adding new ones.” – – Mitch Hedberg
Continue reading… “Top 10 Photos of the Week”
The CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA program got huge quantities of LSD distributed throughout the US.
Newly released documents shed light on the San Francisco edition of the CIA’s notorious MK-ULTRA program (through which people were unwittingly given massive doses of LSD to see if the drug would be useful for brainwashing), which ran from 1953-1964. There’s lots of detail about MK-ULTRA’s work in NYC and Montreal, but the San Francisco operation has been shrouded in mystery. The newly declassified documents form the springboard for a good investigative piece in SF Weekly, in which Troy Hooper speaks to Wayne Ritchie, one of the survivors of MK-ULTRA’s San Francisco operation…
Continue reading… “Midnight Climax: CIA’s MK-ULTRA LSD experiments in San Francisco”
This may just be the best TED Talk video I’ve seen: listen.com/Rhapsody founder and extremely funny person (and soon-to-be debut science fiction author) Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like. Here’s Ars Technica’s Ken Fisher discussing Reid’s philosophy…
Continue reading… “Copyright Math: the best TED Talk you’ll watch all year”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.