FreeRice is a site that will improve the world and your mind. The site gives you a word you need to define and if you get it right you have successfully donated rice to a hungry person somewhere in the world!
FreeRice has two goals:
1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
Thanks Craig!
Exercise is not only good for you health but also good for your ability to use your brain. Sure, you can stick to sodoku, but to be really smart it seems your best option is to accompany that with some old-school Exercise.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, which show the brain at work, were performed on a percentage of children in each group and found those who exercised had different patterns of brain activity during an executive function task.
“Look what good it does when they exercise,†says Dr. Davis. “This is an important public health issue we need to look at as a nation to help our children learn and keep them well.â€
An Australian industrial designer, Paul Charlwood, has decided that disposable design is a waste. We’ve talked about consumerism here before and how it has a negative effect on the environment, but Charlwood wants to change our mind on that matter by encouraging consumerism to be something that can last.
Once Charlwood turned his mind to sustainability it meant reassessing his design philosophies. He decided he no longer wanted to design throwaway products, which led to him embracing “classic design” – products that you don’t need to, or want to, discard.
Charlwood’s conversion to environmentalism has coincided with what he sees as a “second wave” of environmentalism.
No, this isn’t a long rambiling post kind of yarn, as the OED says that yarn can mean “a long or rambling story, esp. one that is implausible.” I mean yarn as in “a spun thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.”
Yes, that’s right, today’s Blog Action Day post is about yarn and how people who are into spinning thread can help the environement too.
The Hook and I blog has a list of ten things that yarn enthusiasts can do, here’s number nine:
9) Use your stash. Not buying new materials is probably the best way to reduce our environmental impact. It’s hard for me to say this–I love yarn companies and the people involved, many of them have strong environmental missions themselves, but it can’t be avoided that lack of consumption is better than consumption when it comes to the environment.
Continuing this week’s focus on the successful Blog Action Day is an editorial from LifeHack. Dustin Wax waxes ecstatic about how the best solution for the environment is for us to buy less, just stop consuming. I agree with his conclusion, but how he gets there is not something I will blindly support. It’s a good read though and I encourage to go read it (and also to buy less).
For most of us, simply dropping out, growing our own food and living off our own labor, is not an option and is hardly desirable even if it were an option. The answer to the dreadful over-consumption that fills our landfills with completely unnecessary crap, pollutes our water sources, kills off species after species (something like 40 a day!), and leaves us in a world of ever-diminishing beauty and diversity can’t be to drop out of consumption entirely, because it’s simply not an option.
But we can change the way we consume, and more importantly lessen the demands we place on consumption to complete us as individuals. This means developing a higher sense of self-reflexivity about what we do buy, and replacing our identities as consumers with identities as part of our families and communities — and maybe even as producers, once again.