I just finished watching the movie “Flight 93″
It was heavier than I expected
That day I was at school
I didn’t hear about what happened until school started
It’s a saddening story
I wish it never happens again
And that the world finds peace before we destroy ourselves
I have nothing else to say
Novaya Gazeta must have been an excellent journalist. Reading the news article of her murder saddened me, and while reading it, this part had the most impact on me:
“Anna has been receiving threats for seven years [since the beginning of the war in Chechnya] and was afraid, but she knew how to overcome her fear, because she understood how important what she was doing was,â€Â
Why did this have the most impact? Because she (in my opinion) is a real journalist. She’s out there, going places where others are afraid to go. Not only that, she was doing it, and was scared, but knew how important it was that she brings truth to the public.
These days American journalists aren’t doing that. I remember my Journalism teacher saying something like “there aren’t a lot of real journalists out there, who take risks to get information and publicize it.”
Russia is a large country, but one that has lots of problems (or so I hear). Hopefully proper legal action can be taken against those who need it, and the murderer of Novaya is found. This is truely saddening.
Clinton recently said Blair’s government was a “stunning success”. Here are some parts of the story I thought was interesting.
“I think one of the biggest problems right now is that people take your achievements and your ideas for the future for granted.
“The reason is we have produced prosperity and social progress for so long it’s easy for people to believe its just part of the landscape.”
-Former President Bill Clinton
I thought I understood that saying pretty well, that “you only realize the things you took for granted after they are taken away from you.” But I found out, after coming to Japan that I didn’t understand it as well as I thought I did.
When you live many places, and start to settle down in one. You start to get tired of it, don’t you? Well, I did. But after I moved to Japan, I realized all those things I might have hated, or disliked, I miss.
I think the same thing may happen for the UK.
An article published by the Guardian helped publicize the fact that papers were uncovered to prove there was a secret group within British government that investigated UFO sightings.
I was, excited to hear it. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if we already are in contact with aliens? If you took a moment to think about it, their civilization would have to be much more advanced to be able to have that much technology. And my opinion is they would also be peaceful.
Why? Well, if we, as a human race are able to maintain peace and work as a whole without conflicts between nations, we could spend much more money on research to improve technology, and we wouldn’t kill each other off.
There are some private companies that are trying to make space tourism possible by 2020 (ie. visit a space station in orbit around earth), and I think this would be a great step to our future.
Some things that may come up though, is when permanent residency comes around, it will be like creating space colonies. And like all colonies, they want to part, or at least have more voice, in their home governemnt.
If there is a world governemnt by then, hopefully they will have a way of voicing the space colonists. If not, there may be some conflict that arises.
One of my dreams is to be able to travel and live in space in my lifetime. Hopefully it will happen. Maybe it wont.
The owner of the Virgin Group pledged to donate $3 billion to combat global warming.
The world right now is too selfish. A lot of people just want money, to be rich, and get whatever they want. They don’t think about the future of mankind, let alone the world… But the few who do, like Mr. Branson are going in the right direction.
When you have the power and wealth to help stop a global problem, you should put it to use. And that’s what he’s doing. Kudos to him for doing so.
I know Japan has had a magnetic train for a while now, and I thought because of the time multiple countries have spent developing them, they would be pretty stable and safe.
But it seems Germany wasn’t too lucky on that front. There was even 1 death and about 21-25 injuries involved with their accident!
Death is a sad thing, but we need to improve our technology at a faster rate, and accidents do happen. Nothing we can do about it, except work harder and make sure there are no mistakes in what we do with the work, and in life.
For the first time Forbes’ top 400 of the world richest people have over $1billion each. Totalling to $1.25 trillion! Just wanted to say this interested me, now that more and more people are getting that wealthy, I want to see how they use the money.
With all the ‘wiki’ sites out there, you’d think there would be enough. But I guess not, and this idea seems to be pretty good: a wiki where you can write about where you live, and where you’ve traveled to, so other travelers can get to know it before they go there.
World Wikia is just like any other wiki from the WikiMedia Foundation: a good idea. I’ve traveled to many places, and I’d like to write about them sometime, somewhere, and I’d definately make a few posts to this wiki.
CivicEvolution is a wiki. But not just any ordinary wiki. It has a ‘government’ built-in… As in instead of just moderators, admins, and users, the users promote other users just like in a governement.
Also, it’s more project based, so people can plan and carry out ‘projects’ on the wiki, with support and leadership from the other users.
The past month was summer break! I didn’t think I’d be taking a break from the web too though! Haha
Meeting friends is something I needed. Badly. And I’m glad that I did, spent lots of time with them, especially towards the end.
Forgot what the name was, but basically you bicycle across all the bridges in Portland… We didn’t do all, but we did do about 24 miles worth of cycling.
And so much for my attempted summary post of my summer vacation. It wasn’t that eventful, but very enjoyable.
Well, school starts now, and it’s time to get back to doing what I love (not school, but internet stuff). 
I’ve been trying to get to know different people on imeem!, the social networking site that i told you about before, and I came across this: Think Different.
It’s an old Apple commercial during their “think different” campaign, and a very inspiring one too.
With that video, there was also other ‘related’ ones, like their Newton commercial, and their 2002 iMac introduction video.
Watching these… It’s like looking at what Apple has done. They may not have the biggest marketshare, but they have made a difference in the world.
They introduced the first personal computer back with Apple II in the late 1980’s. Soon after they had their GUI (graphical user interface) Macintosh ready for the public. Which Microsoft copied…
They also released Newton in the 1990’s, and their color iMac’s. The Newton was a first of it’s kind. Other PDA’s never got similar features (wireless capabilities, handwriting recognition) until wayy later in the game. But the Newton was just too early, and it wasn’t a succesful product.
Every new computer Apple releases is always a design marvel. They look great, are powerful, and have the best operating system out there.
Now I feel like I want to do something, to Think Different.
Presentation Zen always has stuff worth reading, seriously. I’ve been watching the TED conferences lately, and it just blows my mind away. All of these intelligent people, in one room, presenting what they know to each other… Wow, I wish I could go to a conference.
So far I’ve seen Al Gore, David Pogue, and Hans Rosling. I’m about to watch Tony Robbins and Sir Ken Robinson once I finisht this post.
Hans Rosling’s presentation was enlightening. He has a software company that displays data. Literally, but in a way that you can see how the world is changing more than what we expect and what our stereotypes are. Here’s a link to Gapminder. It’s really great, and I encourage you guys to take a peak at some of the vids available at TED.
After I posted my last post, I kinda felt bad. I always write pretty harshly about christians, but in truth, I really don’t care who believes in what. So I may seem like a really anti-christian person at first, but if you do take the time, you’ll see whenever I talk/chat with people I’m really not, I’m pretty laid back.
Just wanted to get that off my mind, sorry if I offended anyone.
Well, it sure seems that darwin’s theory is right. Frickin’ christians, some of them are nice, but the extremists, they’re just agh. Ignorant.
I wish I had my Time magazine which had a report that “believing in god” is in our genes. It really makes sense, lol. It described how there was a gene in our DNA that made us “want” to believe in a higher power. Those of us with that gene being dominant are stronger believers, and those of us without that aren’t believers. Now, I’m not sure if that is true, kuz I don’t want any missing genes in me, but it sure makes me feel good. 
I’ve gotten into the whole “am I religious” conversation with my mom. And in the end, I’m somewhat a Buddhist. I’m not convinced I am, my mom thinks so though.
So, I don’t believe there is a ‘higher being’, or any sort of god. I do think though that after you die, you don’t just dissappear. This world is still new to us humans, we don’t know every thing about it. There’s so many (so far) unexplainable things. But the more we ask our selves about them, and the more we look into it, I think we’ll discover that the whole world is just one big ecosystem.
I’ve been big on Steven Hawking’s work, I read a lot of his work and wrote multiple reports on them. (though, my memory being what it is doesn’t exactly help me all that much, so if i get terms wrong, sorry about that I’ll fix em up later, just want to get this down while it’s in my head).
So, our universe is expanding at an increasing rate, from which at one point in time all our galaxies came from. So there was a big bang. But what was before the big bang? Did we all just come from some small infinite density thing? I don’t think so. We’re talking about only our universe now. And who knows if other universes had influence on it then, or have even now.
There’s also the theory that maybe our universe just expands and collapses and keeps doing that, like a bouncy ball. (okay end of that train of thought)
Another thing I think helps with my idea of multiple universes/unkown things, is the n-reactor. (err…) Okay, so I had forgotten the name of the thing, and that made it even harder to search for it… So I just gave up. But what it did, was it produced 2/3’s more power than it needed to run. So out of 3/3, 1/3 was used to run the machine, and 2/3 was just the output power… Man do I wish I remember the name fo the damn thing.
