The Life of Mammals

I love David Attenborough. He was the creator of "Planet Earth," which was absolutely beautiful, and I've started exploring his earlier work. Right now, I'm obsessed with the series "The Life of Mammals." Attenborough leads the viewer from the most primative of mammals all the way up to human beings. Even if you were the type of kid who was obsessed with all things animals, you'll still learn something new. Much of Attenborough's work is available for instant view on Netflix.

A Word to the Wise

Nine-year-old Alec Greven gives his advice on dating from his book "How to Talk to Girls."

A Multilingual Nation

Now that we're on the topic of language, here's an article to read about multilingualism, or the lack thereof, in America.


Now for a joke:


What do you call someone who speaks four languages?
Multilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?
American.

BBC Rocks

Mild disappointment with the latest Indiana Jones film left me nostalgic for the theological mysteries and Christian iconography of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade and today I felt compelled to re-watch my favorite clips from those films.

As always, I found myself fascinated by the mysterious contents of Sean Connery's grail notebook and curiosity led me to research the origins of the grail story. I found that bbc.co.uk/history provides an excellent overview of the grail myth, complete with a gallery of artistic interpretations ranging from 14th century French illuminations through modern films.


Further exploration of the BBC history site led me to the amazing, interactive Timeline of British History. Anyone who was entertained enough to stay awake during a hypnotically narrated Simon Schama documentary will appreciate the BBC's efforts.

Incredibly comprehensive and browsable, the flash timeline loads up in only a few seconds and spans from the Neolithic Age to the present, providing expandable links and summaries of every major event in British history. A variety of filters allow you to focus your timeline by subject, region, and period.

The New Humanities Initiative

Today in the New York Times:

New Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
...a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
Read the full article here

...also of interest in today's Times:

On The Trail, One Aide Looms Over Obama
...some unofficial rules have emerged between the candidate and his aide. From Mr. Obama: “One cardinal rule of the road is, we don’t watch CNN, the news or MSNBC. We don’t watch any talking heads or any politics. We watch ‘SportsCenter’ and argue about that.”
Read the full article here

ted.com

i'm just putting a link here - http://www.ted.com/index.php - that has some pretty interesting videos on it. TED stands for a conference held every year in California where 1000 different "brilliant minds" in a variety of fields are challenged to give the most inspiring / incredible speech of their lives. the website linked above started the past couple years and is attempting to catalog videos of all the speeches given since the conference started in the 80s. i recently saw one by Bill Clinton, talking about his efforts to institute a health care system in Rwanda and then using the same model in every developing country. he's had the system working in Rwanda for some time and says it's been a great success so far (i recommend listening to the talk - just search for bill clinton - it's from last year).