Stuck on what to get someone for Christmas? Try a Kiva.org gift certificate!

Usually charity gifts aren't really satisfying. Giving in someone's name doesn't give them much enjoyment, or even much of a warm fuzzy feeling. They aren't personally doing the giving even if it's in their name.

Kiva.org gift certificates are different! The person gets to go online and pick and entrepreneur in the developing world to help fund. It's interactive so it's fun, and the person gets the warm fuzzy feeling of charity at your expense instead of theirs.

Many people's lives could be improved by getting a small loan, but credit often isn't available to them because it costs as much to administer a small loan as a big one. Kiva.org is part of the growing microfinance movement that aims to fix this by putting up the capital for these small loans so that the receiver gets a much lower interest rate on the loan than they otherwise would. Learn more. Try it out!

That Woman is Terrifying.

Today, Palin mocked fruit fly research despite it being the basis of much of our modern knowledge of genetics, and responsible for a Nobel Prize. This is more enraging to me than anything else in the broad spectrum of outrages that have come out of the McCain campaign. Basic science research is the most noble thing that humans do, and to denigrate it without so much as a Google search, while still claiming to be qualified to be president . . . I don't have any language strong enough to condemn her without wishing her bodily harm. It is terrifying to me that given a choice between voting for Bush and voting for Palin, I would vote for Bush.

Decision 2008

There are many stark differences in policy and temperament between the major party candidates this election. However, there is one fundamental ideological issue that eclipses all others and has been completely ignored by the mainstream media. When voters enter the booths this November, they will undoubtedly be asking themselves whether they prefer group orgasms through breathing techniques, or spiritual warfare to ward off African curses. The choice is yours.

Kahili Ginger!

From Plant Portfolio

The plant that ate my apartment is finally blooming! I bought it as a bulb at the gift shop of the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden in Hilo two years ago. My plumeria came from the same store. Below you can see pictures of what it looked like right after it sprouted, (that's a six inch pot!) and what it looks like now. The smell is incredible. I could tell it was blooming just by opening the door of my apartment. The scent spilled out into the porch.

	From Plant Portfolio

Here are a few facts about it:

• The plant is named after the feathered standards that were the symbol of a Hawaiian Noble's power.
• When it is sending up a new stalk it grows something close to an inch per day. The roots completely consume the soil.
• I haven't fertilized it at all, and it's been in a shady south facing window for most of the last two years. I try to saturate the soil with water once per week, but as the pots have gotten bigger that has gotten harder.

Next time you are feeling cynical about humanity …

… inspired by McCain's recent polling numbers perhaps, check out the featured content in the Sporepedia. The amount of creativity is just stunning. Everything in there was created by amateurs in their spare time for fun. In case Wikipedia wasn't proof enough, when you give regular people great tools, they will make amazing stuff just for kicks. Most people have worlds of creativity that isn't used in their jobs, and they just need a convenient outlet to amaze you.

More generally, there's huge potential for harnessing our leisure time to produce useful work, and at the moment it's largely untapped. Google Image Labeler is a great (though horribly named) pioneer of this. You play a fun game, and in the process you give Google an awesome data set of images labeled with tags. Fold.it is another. Playing that game is equivalent to computing the lowest energy state of a protein. If you are good at it, you could cure cancer. The sky is the limit for this sort of stuff though, and the internet is finally giving us the organizational tools to bring it about. Imagine if instead of working out in a gym, people had access to volunteer landscaping groups. You'd get a similar workout, but you'd beautify a landscape in the process instead of just pumping iron and wasting all that energy.

Here's a great talk on the subject, Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus. My favorite quote:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into … an architecture of participation.

Beyond Blogrolls

Usually the links found to the right of a blog are only useful to bored people clicking randomly, or to pass PageRank (The latter being a model of the former.) As such, I've updated all the banners and links on my sidebar with some information about what they are and why they are there. Some of these deserve much more than a paragraph. Boy Scouts, in particular, deserves essays. For the time being though, this should give you a reason to click on them.

Rainbow

The skies are usually boring in California compared to the nightly shows in the midwest, but every so often there's a real treat.

From Mountain View Rainbow