Animated Maps

Some interesting animated maps!

Personality Test

What's your Personal DNA?

Mouse over the boxes for more details.

("Agency" is defined as "How much you believe you determine your own outcomes." "Functional" is the split between a preference for performance over aesthetics in things -- that one could have gone either way!)

Jihad Hotline

Been getting some traffic from the blog, Jihad Hotline, linking to a John Quincy Adams quote.

I also like Winston Churchill's.

I find it appealing how the blog's owner, apparently an accountant, has developed a plan consisting of simple steps and actions:

STEP 1: Call the 5-minute recording every freedom-lover needs to hear.

STEP 2: Study this web site to learn about the threat of radical islam.

STEP 3: Find 3 people who will repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 just as you have.

(Repeat these 3 simple steps Until Islam Is Exposed To The World)

I haven't called the hotline number and have no idea if it's going to cost you to call or not, but I love the straightforward "action steps" (with informative links) spelled out on that page!

Like:

ACTION STEP: HEAR ARAB-AMERICANS DESCRIBE ISLAM IN THEIR OWN WORDS.

ACTION STEP: READ WHAT OUR FOREFATHERS SAID ABOUT ISLAM.

ACTION STEP: READ THE SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF ISLAM

ACTION STEP: DOWNLOAD THE JIHAD HOTLINE RECORDING AND SEND AS AN ATTACHMENT TO YOUR EMAILS

ACTION STEP: WATCH, THEN SHARE THIS MUSIC VIDEO WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

And so on.

Simple, straightforward, and effective!

Windscale!

Oh, the irony!

A fantasy ideology spawns unintended consequences -- that I happen to embrace!

Britain backs new nuclear power plants

LONDON - The British government on Thursday approved construction of the first new nuclear power plants in a generation, saying atomic energy could help fight climate change and secure the country's energy supplies in an increasingly unstable world.

Britain joins a growing list of countries rethinking the long-unpopular nuclear option, driven by global warming, geopolitical uncertainty and rising fuel prices.

The best part:

Environmentalists, however, condemned the move as an expensive and dangerous folly that would divert resources from the search for genuinely clean forms of energy.

Doesn't anything make them happy?

Other than human extinction?

Anyway, I loved this reference:

Nuclear opponents also evoke the memory of Britain's worst nuclear accident, a fire at the Windscale reactor in northwest England in 1957 that released radioactivity into the surrounding area.

Windscale!

That word haunted me ever since Richard Burton's comatose telekinetic character scrawled it on a pad in the movie The Medusa Touch.

Many commenters recall a similar effect from seeing that movie when young! I had no idea what it meant at the time but it was chilling.

W...I...N...D...S...C...A...L...E...!