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via Why Is America So Religious? – By the Numbers Blog – NYTimes.com

• “How Star Wars Changed the World,” A map of Star Wars and its affects on the world.
• An amazing audio-article from the New Yorker on auto-tune.
• via BJ’s thoughts, it seems Record-Rama was purchased for $3,000,000 after all.
• McCain’s voicemail to Palin. (Don’t dress too sluty.)
  
• Not sure who this was from: The Enron Document Explorer.
• 
  via Coudal

• 

  I spent most of my time in Shiga prefecture when I stayed in Japan.via Coudal

• Paris Hilton Porn-rescramble:
  

2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Taken with a Canon G9

From some notes scribbled at the pool:

The sound of ocean waves hits you the moment you open the door. Like a wash of relaxation and solitude you soon realize that you are indeed being bathed in not just sonics but lifewaves of a very different kind of energy.

You go to bed, partly from exhaustion, but mostly from the hypnosis of the visual and sonic landscape that you have been drenched in.

Your first day begins in a bath of pure happiness. It was the first time you awoke rested in years – years! You grasp for a clock, yet realize that they have been removed from the room. Your watch, resting in the bottom of your carry on bag reads 8. You are awake and rested at 8am. (What has gotten into me?)

–

Leaving wasn’t painful, as I knew that I would go home with the one I came to relax with: my new and wonderful wife.

Golden Ray photos of amazing mass migration – Telegraph [via Naz Hamid]

TOMS makes life more comfortable through its ultra lightweight design and the company’s commitment to match every pair purchased with a donated pair to a child in need. There are no complicated formulas, it’s simple…you buy a pair of TOMS and the company gives a pair to a child on your behalf.

How excellent! Buy a cool pair of shoes and help put a pair on someone else’s feet. They’re a great deal too!

I’m ordering two pairs, cause I just can’t decide between all the rad patterns.

[via Dean (who does not blog)]

I wrote this a month or so ago, and never published it.

We live in amazing times. Just amazing.

The internet has blessed us all with the power to communicate with each other. It took a while, but we finally realized that the internet doesn’t have to be all about cats and animated gifs. Even though, those are still two very popular topics.

Not just geeks are on the net anymore, either. I just learned, Kanye West has a blog… and it’s probably actually HIM blogging on it! Not to mention he has a Vimeo account (”suck on that Flickr,” says Vimeo founder j/k)! BTW, Kottke, who I rubbed the wrong way many years back, alerted me to all this, on his unimaginably popular blog.

After watching this video, how can you not love the internet?

We’ve finally learned that there is more to life than “me” and that the “we” is what makes the world go round.

The internet does have a heart. It enables us to do some really amazing things.

Recently, along with Coudal Partners, 37Signals, Metafilter, Happy Cog, Iconfactory, Core77, Daring Fireball, Emma, Business Brickyard, and skinnyCorp, I got to help kids benefit from your filthy gambling habit. My design studio eight6 donated $1000 to buy some books for kids, by matching your donations.

I’ve always been unnaturally excited to help others. Being able to do that through my work, is gratifying. eight6 is heavily focused on helping the world and it will always be a core part of who I am and what my company represents. It sounds “deep,” and kind of corny. But it’s pretty simple. We build and design things (usually websites), using design to clarify communication and in return, help make good things happen.

In the next few months I’m going to be launching a program to help loving geeks help the world become a better place, just by doing what they do. Sounds interesting? I think it is. It will be an experiment, but an interesting and, hopefully, a fruitful one.

Even just a $1 is helpful. Donate through Amazon.com for the Myanamar tragedy.

My friend Jeff lives in Japan. He’s one of my best friends and I miss him every day. That’s besides the point: His MINI lives in a cave – 2nd level to be exact:

Our MINI is on the 2nd of 3 underground levels. There is a Peugeot on top, but nothing underneath. Not yet, anyways.

• Dean’s back. A man, with witt and character to be reckoned.
• Joe has a nice set of Captioning Sucks! banners up on flickr.
• I can now create a google on top of google – if I wanted to. Related, “cloud computing” is really popping onto the radar.
• BMW 520d Beats a Prius in Efficiency:
  

  “…on a 545-mile London-Geneva run, when a diesel-powered BMW 5-series posted better MPG stats than a petrol-based Toyota Prius hybrid. The BMW 520d with a 2.0-liter diesel engine and regenerative braking posted an impressive 41.9 mpg – about 0.9 mpg better than a full hybrid Prius. The difference may not seem huge. But given that the Prius weighs about 500 lb less, BMW’s fuel economy lead was significant enough to raise new questions about which drivetrain technologies are more envir [via motoringfile]

• Japan sings Turkey’s national anthem: