Category: Culture

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Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Education, Health & Fitness, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior, New Viewpoints

Blind man trained to be a scuba diver along with his white stick

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Underwater exploring in a whole different way.

Despite being blind from birth, Robert Ainsley-Raffel has never let his disabilities stop him achieving his ambitions. He is already well on the way to becoming a qualified plumber, and even trains his own greyhound. Now the 25-year-old from Hexham is training as an underwater diver. Robert passed his dive theory test with a flying 100% mark and is now looking forward to his first open water dives en route to a full Ocean Diver qualification…

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Analysis, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior, Latest Trend, New Viewpoints, People Making a Difference

Is digital money the new way to buy drugs?

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Are ones and zeros gonna pay for doobies and lines now?

I’m not gonna name names, but someone just mentioned paying for weed with a Square account. It’d be equally easy to use Paypal, Venmo, Bitcoin (RIP) or any of the myriad mobile payment systems that allow you to send money from your phone…

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Analysis, Big Problems, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Historical Perspectives, New Viewpoints

Meltdown – The men who crashed the world

“The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world.”

From Open Culture:

Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now airing a four part investigation into the great financial meltdown of 2008…

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Analysis, Art, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Current Events, Historical Perspectives, People Making a Difference

Rome considering ‘living statue’ ban

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Art or not art?

Culture officials in Rome are mulling a ban on “living statues”, arguing that dressing up in costume and standing on the street to solicit spare change has no artistic merit.

“Living statues demonstrate no artistic activity, to the extent that they can’t be compared to mimes, and they amount to a veritable racket,” said Federico Mollicone, deputy culture chief in Rome’s mayorship…

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Analysis, Birth, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Current Events, Food, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Viewpoints

Cost of raising middle-income child in USA increases by 40% in ten years

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Costs have risen dramatically for raising children.

According to the US Dept of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child in a middle-income family has increased by 40 percent over the past ten years. Every major category of child-rearing expense has seen steep increase: day-care, education, food, gas, medical insurance, and so on. At this rate, childrearing may become a luxury item for America’s increasingly wealthy super-rich…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Crazy Photos, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

Google Earth reveals strange Nazca-Like ruins in Saudi Arabia

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An amazing new find.

Chalk another one up for Google Earth seeing everything we can’t. Australian armchair archaeologist David Kennedy simply fired up the app and managed to rediscover the ancient ruins of structures that rival the Nazca lines in southern Peru.

The lines were originally discovered by British RAF pilot Percy Maitland in 1927, but this is the first time they’ve ever been seen in all their glory. Kennedy used Maitland’s photos with Google Earth to pinpoint their locations. And Google offers really the only high resolution glimpse at them that can be seen by the ordinary viewer…

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Analysis, Breakthrough Thinking, Culture, Globalism, Historical Perspectives, Latest News, New Discoveries, New Viewpoints

US download speeds ranked at just 26th in the world

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If you live in the US and think the internet speeds are as fast, you may be surprised to find out that the country is actually ranked 26th in a list of average global download speeds. In the eye-catching infographic below the US (outside of Google’s offices that is) looking like a digital laggard, but who could be sitting pretty at the top?

Digital download delivery company Pando surveyed about 35 petabytes (a petabyte is 1000 terabytes) of data from 27 million downloads from 20 million computers in 224 countries, and found that South Korea has the world’s fastest internet service, in terms of download speed. The country averaged download speeds of 17.62 Mbps. Compared to the download speeds in the US, 4.93 Mbps, South Korea is lightning fast…

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Analysis, Big Problems, Business, Corporate Manipulation, Crazy Stuff, Culture, Current Events, Education, Historical Perspectives, Hot Issues, Latest News

Patent Trolls costing an astronomical $500 Billion

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Another reason the patent system is so difficult.

Last month, Google stepped up to defend Android coders against notorious patent troll Lodsys. Apple fought the company a few months earlier on behalf of iOS developers. Patent reform is a hot topic right now, especially after President Obama just signed legislation that means the U.S. is shifting to a “first to file” (over “first to invent”) system. This won’t help much with the patent troll situation, which Boston University researchers James Bessen and Mike Meurer say have cost publicly-traded defendants $500 billion since 1990…

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