Famous Magnates Cartoon

I looked at the past six months worth of Toothpaste for Dinner comics on the day that I made this, so a hat tip for Drew (who makes TFD) and another for Hugh MacLeod, the awesomeness of whose cartoons regularly makes me want to make cartoons.

How are Bricks Made?

How many bricks is that?

Bricks in Nepal start out as mud in a valley floor which is dug out by a man, woman or child using a hand tool. The use of use of child labor, poor working conditions and low wages in Nepal's brick making industry are being challenged by the Brick Clean Network.

 The mud gets packed into a wooden mold with a brand name in it, and then slapped out as a brick and dried in the sun in a row or stack. One person can mold around 1,000 bricks per day. If he/she's paid 50 paisa (half a rupee) per brick, he/she makes 500 rupees per day, or about seven US dollars.

After the bricks get cooked in those kilns with the big smokestacks featured in some of the above photos, they're trucked all over the country, and then carried in woven basket backpacks to their final destinations, where masons build houses and courtyard walls out of them.

...and some bricks just languish in piles until they return to the dust whence they came.

Click here to read a news story I wrote about bricks and other building materials being recycled by a building demolition company in Indiana.

World of Warcraft Grunt Labor is Humanitarian Gold...maybe?

This buddha really has nothing to do with the
whole Warcraft thing. Except he's made of GOLD!
Well, its just gold paint, actually.
But seriously you guys...
...some people are trying to meditate.

Some countries promote microfinance and small businesses to help lift people out of poverty.

Some countries sell piles of videogame gold.
 
It is common practice in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft to buy "gold" that has been "farmed" by workers in China. Now, one report is suggesting that NGOs should help poor folks get jobs manufacturing virtual money for the virtual market.

Jon Stokes wrote for Ars Technica that, according to a new study, "the market for virtual goods and services represents a growth opportunity for developing countries, and that NGOs should consider getting involved in connecting poorer, mostly rural residents with opportunities to help meet the demand for farmed gold, high-level player characters, crafted in-game items, and the like."

It is reprehensible that some people can afford to pay real money for play money, when others can't afford to eat. But virtual products sell. If we'll buy "fair trade" coffee and chocolate, and decorate our houses with international gew-gaws, why not furnish our videogame lairs with virtual "gold" made by paid workers in China?

Would you support an NGO whose goal was to get poor people jobs where they produce virtual money for which wealthier people will then pay actual money?

Transparency

Some politicians have more important things
 to deal with than crushing leakers.

The Obama administration is laying the smackdown on whistleblowers in the most X-treme manner seen in 40 years. 

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is patiently suggesting that the government do a better job of keeping its secrets so the NYT can stop bumming the gov't out by reporting on them. 

USAID suspended a giant international development contract, causing a multinational NGO to implode, with almost no explanation of why.

Is transparency a pipe dream?

Positively speaking, though, with the amount of TV I'm watching to distract myself from the above stated horrors, my brain should be devoid of nutrition in a matter of weeks, leaving me invulnerable to 2012's impending zombie apocalypse.

;-)

The Sum of my Curiosities, or Why Social Q&A is Awesome.

Lots of people mostly like to talk about subjects they know a lot about. I do too. Who doesn't? It's comfy to stay within our own realms of knowledge.
And also dull. You might teach someone else something by talking about things you know. But what will you learn?

I want my conversations, and therefore my relationships, to be based on what I want to know, not what I know already. I am much more excited about the questions that I have than the answers that I have.

According to a recent study I did by looking at the internet for five seconds, there are a jillion question and answer websites. Many, many people are trying to commingle Q&A style interaction with social networking technology. My two favorite such sites, Kommons and Quora, are doing a great job of making shared curiosity a basis for relationships in social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook.

Myspace and Facebook were/are all about molding an online identity. You curate the events of your life in pictures and text, so that you can show people who you were, are, and are becoming. Whether you portray yourself accurately, or carefully redact parts of your life to present a tamer self for your online audience is (mostly) up to you. Either way, most of what you post is about the past.

Question based social networking is much more forward looking, and therefore thrilling, in my eyes. Kommons allows you to "follow" questions that have been posted by other users, thereby grouping you with those users solely on the basis of a shared curiosity. By choosing questions to follow, you curate an identity for yourself, not based on what has been, but what you want to be. You and someone else have the same question. You're trying to grow your knowledge in the same direction.

Quora (whose budget, it must be mentioned, is tens of thousands of times that of Kommons) goes a step further and lets you follow people and topics as well as questions. This is one more step towards making mutual curiosity the basis for deeper relationships.



Discourse based on experience will always be valuable in its own way, and mutual curiosity has always been a basis for relationships. I am excited about online explorations of how to make all of it easier.

People often define themselves by the sum of their experiences.
I'd rather be defined by the sum of my curiosities.
Not what I do know, but what I will know. Not what I have been, but what I will be.

Find the Buddha

Scroll down if you don't like "fun" 'where's waldo?' type games.

Found him.

Tools Matter

My Macbook Pro quit its job this week, and during the few days between when it stopped working and when I took it to the repair place, I felt a surprising sense of relief...that the computer was out of my life for a while.

When I first got this computer, it was shipped to my dad's office so it wouldn't be stolen off our porch or something. I remember feeling euphoric and breathy when I finally got my hands on it, and rode the elevator back down to the office block's main floor thinking of all the projects I was going to do with it. I could make music with it. Electronic music. (I had failed to master an instrument.) I could make music videos and web sites. I could finally learn to animate. Now that I could compute anywhere I'd basically be living my creative dream during every waking hour.

Fast forward almost five years, to last week, the day before my computer stopped working. I watched six episodes of Gossip Girl on DVD that day, on my laptop. The endless creative possibilities offered by my laptop had been overruled by some horrible, sexified Stepford teens on teevee. When my computer broke, the weight of all that "creative potential," (and all that teevee that needed watchin',) was magically lifted. I was able to look around and ponder what I should really do, with what I had, where I was.

New creative tools always give me goose bumps.

"With this, I'll make something awesome!" I always tell myself.

...and then, whatever-unit-of-time later...I find myself staggering under the guilt of not having actually done as much as I had imagined I would.

I have misconceived the relationship between tools and creativity. Tools can't make me create. By being creative, I make space in my life for tools.

Inevitably, after pretending for too long that I'll become a productive, creative genius if I buy the right...markers...sketchpad...software...computer...I have to dig myself out from under my pile of tools and their weighty potentials and decide, without the help of inanimate objects, what I should actually do.

The above cartoon's caption comes from a Twitter exchange I had with Hugh MacLeod. I was gushing about these pens that I really want (which he draws his cartoons with), and I said "Tools Matter."

He said, "Yeah... Until they don't."

Creative processes get easier with tools. But the real creative spirit can use any raw material to make something great.

I am constantly forgetting and relearning this.