Friday, March 19, 2010

Mama Bean posts links on Friday - March 19, 2010

- The week kicks off with a Christoph Niemann collection from the New York Times, of abstract maps illustrating things like an omelet, or chewing gum. It totally made my Monday-morning-after-Daylight-Savings-Time better.

- I always love internet addictions that are also for a good cause. FreeRice is a vocabulary quiz, with fairly hard words. (As Mike said, "man...tabor!!") For every correct answer, ten grains of rice are donated to a country in need. Ten grains doesn't seem like much, but there's a handy little picture that shows what your answers have amounted to. After about 500 grains, you get a sense that someone's actually going to get a meal from your efforts. The words do repeat, especially if you get one wrong, so you can get it right the next time - and get the rice!

- Desiring God posted a link to a free download of a coffee-table-ish book (well, the pdf is free, I don't know how much the book costs) about street people, compiled by volunteers on the (American) west coast. I got a little cynical about the project by page 3, I don't know why, and I don't think it says anything particularly complimentary about me. I am pretty jaded, I know, but I'm not heartless. My reaction to this book made me think otherwise. Maybe someone more heartfull will get more out of it than I did.

- I was really hoping someone on facebook would take up the challenge of The Impossible Quiz and tell me how they fared. I got totally hooked on this thing for most of an afternoon. It's basically a series of trick questions, and some you just plain have to guess. Papa Bean helped me get past some of the trickier ones. Go waste some time!

- This is the US National Debt Clock. I wrote on facebook that I wished there was one for Canada, so I googled it. The Canada Debt Clock puts our debt around $15 billion, but it isn't all broken down like the US one.

- The last two links are both from Her Bad Mother. First, she responded to a New York Times article about mommy blogging. The next day, she posted some hate mail she received. The gist of both posts was moms rock, blogs rock, women rock, why can't we all be nice too each other. But she says it so much better.

So I've worried, as the Link Love posts got longer, and my facebook profile got crowded with linkages, that I was sharing Too Much Internet. And then this week's post feels kind of lame. I exercised excessive restraint. With the RSS feeder, it's even easier to wade through the Not and find the Hot, if I posted it all I know 'twould overwhelm. But I guess I don't have to be sooooo discriminating, or I'll have more boring posts like this one. And I know how much y'all are Depending On Me (ha!)

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