Category: Direct Action

NaNoWriMo 2007 Begins!

runnerNational Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is upon was again!

Get your plots out and your writing hands ready to write your novel in one month – remember that it’s quantity not quality!

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

We also mentioned NaNoWriMo last year.

Do the Green Thing

green thingDo the Green Thing is an online community dedicated to doing green things. What is a green thing? You can probably get an idea by looking at good news involving green things and the environment. Remember that living green is good for you and the planet!

Green Thing is a community that’s here to help as many people as possible in as many countries as possible to do the Green Thing. A community of Green Things across the world will not only make a sizeable CO2 saving, it will encourage governments and businesses to do the Green Thing too.

Free Rice and Free Vocabulary

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!

Be Fit, Be Smart

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.”

Via the CBC health blog

Designing for a Sustainable Future

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.