Being an early adopter is fun, but not nearly as fun as creating something huge. How does one make the leap from predicting a certain technology will blow up to thinking of that technology?
Found this on ye olde Gizmodo. A pretty cool graphic demonstrating just how stupidly spoiled we are by technology now. Bonus: the left side of that graphic can more or less apply to most of the 90s.
Everything here is accurate except nobody watches Leno.
I just finished reading Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s non-fiction account of his quest to determine why we eat meat and how it is produced. This is information everyone should have and I highly recommend reading it or at the very least watching Food, Inc. But let me quickly summarize the reasons to stop consuming meat:
Environmental/Ecological
Meat production is the single greatest cause of global warming (more than all transportation in the world combined) and is leading cause of climate change. If you think you can save the planet by not printing an email you are ignoring the fact that most deforestation occurs due to animal agriculture. Nearly 1/3 of the land on the planet is used for livestock. Waste from factory farms is contaminating rivers, lakes and oceans as well as the air. We are also fishing so heavily that entire species are disappearing.
Health/Medical:
Meat produced by these farms is not natural. It comes from animals that have been so genetically modified that they could never survive in the wild. They can’t reproduce or even live past adolescence. They are fed diets they would never willingly eat. They are prone to sickness thus pumped full of antibiotics for their entire lives. This causes us to build a natural resistance without taking the drugs directly. Food borne illness has received so much press coverage that we joke about it, but E. coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter are serious concerns and the risk of influenza epidemics has never been greater.
Ethical/Moral:
Factory farms raise around 450 billion animals each year. It’s easy to dismiss these creatures as unintelligent, but the vast majority are as smart as the dogs or cats that we love and are being subjected to horrific lives and deaths (I won’t go into detail but you should see this video). This suffering is big business and continues because it’s in the best interests of these companies to produce meat in increasingly larger quantities. We let it continue because it happens far away where we can’t see it and can keep it out of our minds. You might think that we need all of this meat to feed the planet but it’s simply not true. We’re wasting food that should be used to feed the hungry by feeding all of these animals.
Songshirts lets you enter your last.fm username, pulls the song titles of your favorite tracks and previews them on a shirt you can then order. Neat.
Created by last.fm’s own Matt Ogle.
