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Great blog post on concentration via http://www.reddit.com

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Recently Frontline had and episode titled Tankman. The episode explored the question of what ever happened to the man who stood in front of a tank during the protests in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. Go see it over at the PBS website at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/ and marvel that great TV still gets made.

Check it out at: http://www.alittlemadness.com/?p=5

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via http://www.reddit.com  

Sage advice from Bertrand Russell on "How to Write". It comes down to a very few simple aphorims reproduced here for your reading pleasure:

1 - Never use a long word if a short word will do.

2 - If you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in seperate sentences.

3 - Do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

Enjoy the article over at: http://www.solstice.us/russell/write.html

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I love climbing and in my younger years spent quite some time in New Paltz with my brother doing some amazing climbing. As I’ve grown older I’ve taken more to mountaineering and sadly don’t do much rock climbing anymore. This video had me riveted, Dan Osman takes rock climbing to an utterly insane level, check it out at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-249413429042618169.

Be truly amazed, Dan is absolutely fearless!

(Found this through Mary Hodder’s dabble, its still in private beta so I can’t say much just yet but wow, its addicting)

A fascinating little piece by Victor David Hanson, classicist and author of such works as Ripples of the Battle and A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, over at the National Review. Hanson’s basic thesis is that Iran and Iran’s president (& indeed many in the third world) fundamentally miscalculate the ability of the west (& the US in particular) to rise and meet the challenge posed by those who dare to cross the line. Hanson writes:

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

I simply love that paragraph. Read it again and digest what it says. Look at history, during the last century far too many barbaric brutal dictators made the same mistake and miscalculated the ability of the west to meet the challenge. For all our problems I don’t believe the west has anything to fear, we are inevitably sliding into a world where many more billions are going to be tormented by trying to decide which iPod to buy. And if you ask me that is far better than any alternative offered by any petty third world dictator.

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