Sojka's Call

If you get sick of looking at all the advertisements on webpages then try Readability. The writeup below is from Pogue's Best Tech 2009 list. READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away. You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business. You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place. Go forth and i...

The only solution to the drug problem is to legalize all drugs. Why? Am I saying this so I can do drugs legally or get more drugs? No I do not advocate drug use either. My children were raised to understand the problems associated with drug use. The reason the US needs to legalize drugs now is that the so-called war on drugs has corrupted our society and other countries as well. Recent killings in Mexico highlight the depth of the corruption in that country. Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Córdova, a special forces sailor killed last week during the government’s most successful raid on a top drug lord in years, received a stirring public tribute in which the secretary of the navy presented his mother with the flag that covered her son’s coffin. Then, only hours after the grieving family had finished burying him in his hometown the next day, gunmen burst into the family’s house and sprayed the rooms with gunfire, killing his mother and three other relatives, officials said Tuesday...

Parents should trust their own analysis of their children's learning capabilities. I can still remember being told to hold my son back a year in preschool for no other reason than he was a boy and on the young end of the curve for other children in his grade. It had nothing to do with his ability to learn, comprehend or socialize. I am very happy I did not listen to the well-intentioned advice. He now is in his 4th year of engineering school and doing fine in all aspects of his life. The quotes below from a recent article summarizing recent cognitive neuroscience research illustrate the capabilities many young children have that teachers of preschool and grade school age children may completely miss because of their own education which has created blind spots to what is possible. Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer dis...

Lots of excellent photos of recent scientific achievements, applications, natural phenomenon and new technologies. Link is here.

This article on growing wine biodynamically explains one winemakers understanding and vision. A few highlights of the article are his analogy of fertilizer to salt; his opinion about plant cloning (don't think I agree with this one yet); and how the natural yeast growth on grapes is a sign of a healthy system. These concepts would apply to any fruit, vegetable or ornamental plant. Link is here.

This could revolutionize how we store and interact with data. Think if you could just store pictures and did not have to tag that picture like today to say what was in it. Also, then you could just store pictures of information and completely eliminate digital text - what would that mean to us? Pictures take up more storage but with the cost of data storage lowering by leaps and bounds (1 TB HDD's Google demonstrates quantum computer image search - tech - 11 December 2009 - New Scientist

Watch and you be the judge. Please post your comments! Addendum: when first posting this video yesterday I had not completed watching it. Long, at 1 hour and 15 minutes, it does not waste your time. For those of us that were convinced of man-induced global warming by the ice core data presented in The Inconvenient Truth, I recommend you watch this (around 22 - 30 minutes in) and know the science of understanding that data has changed since the movie was made. I consider myself an environmentalist and when the co-founded of Greenpeace says to watch out (towards the end) I listen to him. If you have an open mind to this subject, please watch. If you are more dogmatic in your beliefs about Global Warming then you will probably not make it through the first 15 minutes.