A genius explains

this is incredible...read more via the Guardian thanks Invisibles College!

"Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because he didn't even have to "think". To him, pi isn't an abstract set of digits; it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. "I memorised pi to 22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted to show people that disability needn't get in the way." ... Few people on the streets have recognised Tammet since his pi record attempt. But, when a documentary about his life is broadcast on Channel 5 later this year, all that will change. "The highlight of filming was to meet Kim Peek, the real-life character who inspired the film Rain Man. Before I watched Rain Man, I was frightened. As a nine-year-old schoolboy, you don't want people to point at the screen and say, 'That's you.' But I watched it, and felt a real connection. Getting to meet the real-life Rain Man was inspirational."

Peek was shy and introspective, but he sat and held Tammet's hand for hours. "We shared so much - our love of key dates from history, for instance. And our love of books. As a child, I regularly took over a room in the house and started my own lending library. I would separate out fiction and non-fiction, and then alphabetise them all. I even introduced a ticketing system. I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know. So I was delighted when Kim wanted to meet in a library." Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read. When he is at home in Utah, he spends afternoons at the Salt Lake City public library, memorising phone books and address directories."He is such a lovely man," says Tammet. "Kim says, 'You don't have to be handicapped to be different - everybody's different'. And he's right."

Salon.com Books | The rebel in winter

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the charismatic, masked leader of the Zapatista movement for indigenous rights in Mexico, is hard at work on his most unorthodox manifesto yet: a crime novel. With the help of one of the genre's most popular authors, Pablo Ignacio Taibo II, "Muertos Incomodos" ("Awkward Deaths") is being serialized in Mexico City's brazenly leftist daily La Jornada and will soon be published, in book form, in eight countries. But does Marcos truly believe this novela policiaca will further his cause, or is this the pulp hobby of a revolutionary in twilight? What's the relevance of political fiction, anyway?

Warrenellis.com - Up The Creek - Hunter S. Thompson Obituary

He always wore his influences on his sleeve. JP Donleavy, Faulkner, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Kerouac,
Hemingway. He used and re-used the last line from A FAREWELL TO ARMS, over and over: “I walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Legend has it that he retyped a Hemingway novel to understand how the writer got his effects.

Hemingway, of course, shot himself in the head. Old and sick and unable to live up to his own ideas on manhood.

I always thought it peculiarly apt that the man who wrote that line, whose work was all about keeping the expression of human feeling underneath the surface, sat somewhere quiet and alone and put a shotgun in his mouth.

Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit.

Ward Churchill Gets a Warm Welcome in Speech at U. of Hawaii

"Standing in front of a crowded auditorium here on Tuesday night, Ward Churchill didn't look like a professor who had received 100 death threats just a few weeks ago. That's what happened the last time he was scheduled to speak on a college campus. But this time, the four leis draped around his neck made him look more like a visiting dignitary than a treasonous professor, as he has been labeled. " link via Common Dreams

Nobel Laureate Urges Global Tree-Planting Campaign to Support Kyoto

"Anybody, anywhere can plant a tree and make it survive," she told AFP at the sidelines of the 23rd UN Environment Programme (UNEP) governors' conference in the Kenyan capital.

Maathai, who serves as Kenya's deputy environment minister, is credited with planting more than 30 million trees across Africa.

...and that's all it would take. if we all went walking for two hours a day and planted trees in our communities and neighborhoods there would be no war, no pollution. but it seems we are incapable of doing something so simple. watch The Man Who Planted Trees, excellent animated short film, also a good book.

..:: ReOpen 9/11 - Catch The Real Terrorists ::..

"In order to 'reopen Wall Street' the Bush administration censored crucial EPA and New York City Health Department warnings that the air after 9/11 was highly poisonous. The White House forced the EPA to say 'The air is safe to breathe' at the World Trade Center. This has seriously injured the health of Manhattan workers and residents, is even killing some of the heroes who worked at 'Ground Zero'.
Christine Whitman (Book Tour Dates), EPA administrator, Mayor Giuliani, the NY, and NYC health departments lied to New Yorkers and visitors from around the world that there were 'No Significant Problems'. There were no Arabs, Muslims, or hijackers involved in these crimes; just US, NYC,and NY government officials!"

DontPardonBigTobacco.org

"The U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit against Big Tobacco is currently at trial. The lawsuit, if successful, could stop the tobacco industry from marketing to our kids ever again, stop cigarette ads that appeal to kids, and require tobacco companies to tell the truth about what they add to cigarettes.
Tell President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales not to Pardon Big Tobacco. Tell the President and the Attorney General to keep the pressure on and not let Big Tobacco off the hook. "

Cororate Fallout Detector

Too good to be true?: "The Corporate fallout Detector scans barcodes off of consumer products, and makes a clicking noise based on the environmental or ethical record (selectable via the 'sensitivity' switch) of the manufacturer. It explores issues of corporate accountability and individual choice. Due to increasingly complex global supply chains, a single product we buy may contain parts made by various companies all over the world. We may agree with the business practices of some of these companies, while not with others."

States Limit Ex-Cons' Voting Rights, Report Says

what will they think of next?About 1.5 million convicted felons who have completed their sentences are still denied the right to vote, according to a report released today.

Unlike the District of Columbia and 34 states, including California, where voting rights are automatically restored to convicted felons who have completed their sentences, 14 states severely restrict — or even prohibit — onetime prisoners from casting ballots.

Former prisoners in those states can apply to have their voting rights restored, but few have the means to navigate the cumbersome and confusing processes to do so, says the report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that studies criminal justice issues.

link via Common Dreams

Scary facts concerning our reckless shopping habits and rampant needless production

"An area larger than Ireland is used to grow cocoa beans to satisfy the world's chocolate cravings. Worldwide, factories created 4-5 trillion plastic bags in 2002. One Californian company recycled 20 million CDs in a single year, mostly of excess inventory computer software. In 2001, the average U.S. consumer added almost 50 new pieces of clothing to their wardrobe. And they drank (averaged across the country) about two packaged beverages every day, all year - 650 million containers! Curious about the behind-the-scenes of how other things are produced, used and disposed off? Stuff like Appliances, Baby Products, Beverages, Cars, CDs and DVDs, Cell Phones, Chocolate, Cleaning Products, Clothing, Coffee, Computers, Electricity, Fast Food, Furniture, Gold Jewelry, Health Care, Housing, Lighting, Meat, Paint & Varnishes, Paper, Personal Care, Plastic Bags, Shrimp, Soap? Read the free online Good Stuff publication that digs below the surface. " via Worldwatch Institute

Interactivist Info Exchange | Al Jazeera 'For Sale' Is a Sad Sign For All

Let us pray that someone with a brain, and a good brain at that, buys this absolutely fantastic media resource/source/outlet and doesn't let it die.

Collaborative Authorship, Collective Intelligence

I had no idea Autonomedia had a blog! Life is cake.

The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004

The bad-boy line-up for last year. Let's see if we recognize anyone...

Paul McCartney hammers Super Bowl Home for Nascar

Where do they get off having him play Baby You Can Drive My Car directly following all those car commercials and Nascar ads? Don't people notice how they're being manipulated here? Can't they find someone else to do their flash-bang marketing? Does Paul McCartney have no shred of integrity left? I'll never be able to listen to Hey Jude again without picturing thousands of idiots waving little glow-stick things in the air and holding placards that spell out Na Na Na Na Na Na Na. If I had a gun I would at least hold it in my mouth for awhile, to see what being that stupid might feel like. The only redeeming feature was that fucked up Lays chips commercial with M.C. Hammer and the bar was too loud for me to hear what was going on. A toast to the general apathy of this Great Nation! A toast to pre-game shows 19 hours before kick-off! A cheers to celebrity exploitation and Fox "News-Casters" and fireworks exploding across the night sky while Paul croons out our morals in a nutshell for us... LIVE AND LET DIE. We should consider changing out national motto. What is it now? Live and let buy? I'm out. Can't take it. ... update: or you could check out this hair-brained theory Paul McCartney - Super Bowl Anarchist?

The Top Ten Conservative Idiots

Not a bad list, courtesy of the Democratic Underground

Robinson Jeffers Quotes

"Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice."

"As for me, I would rather Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man."

"I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important it itself, but only the whole. The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits."

Spread The Facts On Wal-Mart

Our Number One Corporation! Cheers Capitalism! In the first decade after Wal-Mart arrived in Iowa, the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women's apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, and 111 men's and boys' apparel stores. Every year Wal-Mart purchases $15 billion worth of products from China. (Source: Washington Post). Wal-Mart sales clerks made an average of $8.23 an hour—or $13,861 a year—in 2001. That's nearly $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. (Source: Business Week). Check link for more horrible facts.

Global Rich List

This baby'll calculate your standing on the world economic scale. I wonder how effective a tool like this is at putting such principles into perspective in its users... Funny how what our government calls "below the poverty line" ... still places us in the top 15% of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Corporate Profiling

I've decided to include links to some especially nasty corporations for the perusal of interested parties... I think activists on the whole need to focus more of their energies at the multi-national corporations that exist outside the law. It might be our government's fault we are where we are but the governments and militaries of the world are no longer the ones in power. New threats require new plans.

Bechtel Corporation

What do you think Jonah did once he found himself trapped in the belly of the beast? He looked around. That's what he did. Bechtel's Vaguely Worded Simple-Minded Ethics: "Bechtel's culture is grounded in integrity and respect. At Bechtel this means adhering to the highest standards of ethical business culture. Our reputation for adhering to these standards is one of our most valuable assets. We stand by everything we do.
Bechtel does not tolerate behavior that is not fair and ethical, and all employees are required to comply with these standards and with applicable local, state, federal, and in-country laws. "

Bill Ransom's Web Page

Evergreen faculty Bill Ransom's modest website. His mentor was Frank Herbert and evidently the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Ransom's science fiction in superb, surpassed only by his skills as a poet and teacher.

PoetsWest - Online directory of Northwest Poetry

Welcome to PoetsWest

Fairly simple site with some useful links.

Dooney's Cafe

Reading an amazing book right now called Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Cafe and other Non-Globalized People, Places and Ideas by Brian Fawcett, a Toronto writer of excellent caliber. Best mix of systems analysis, local politics and global awareness I've encountered in awhile. Check out their site at:

www.dooneyscafe.com

Looking for cool links on radical parenting

if anyone out there knows of any, I'm trying to compile a reference list for radical parenting with a focus on fatherhood under the rugs and beyond the margins. send any ideas over via: skyc@innw.net

Illuminati News

Illuminati News Home Page

This is a fabulous resource for anyone surfing around out there with a penchant for trouble and a nose for sour grapes. Well documented and researched, good articles on conspiracies, government patents, the Occult, 9-11, drugs, religion and war, you name it.

Natural Capitalism

http://www.natcap.org/

from the book by amory lovins, paul hawken & l. hunter lovins: "Most businesses still operate according to a world view that hasn't changed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Then, natural resources were abundant and labor was the limiting factor of production. But now, there's a surplus of people, while natural capital - natural resources and the ecological systems that provide life-support services - is in decline and relatively expensive. The next Industrial Revolution, like the first one, will be a response to changing patterns of scarcity. It will create upheaval, but more importatly, it will create opportunities. Business must adjust to these new realities. Innovative companies are already doing that. They're profiting and gaining decesive competitive advantage - and their leaders and employees are feeling better about what they do, too. They're in the vanguard of a new business model: Natural Capitalism."

To those of you who haven't entertained the possibility...

Bombs in the World Trade Center? Surely our government was not entirely complicit in the deaths of those three thousand people? while how many children starve world wide each day? and what percentage of our military budget could feed and house and clothe every human being on the planet? what makes you think our government has NOT been the leading financier and instigator of world terorrism for some time now? What makes you think we aren't bought and sold seven times every day by politicians and corporations looking out for number one? There are many sites on this subject... this one just had some good links. you'll have to decide for yourself.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1738