Most people avoid confrontation when possible. Makes sense, why get into a dispute if you don’t have to? But sometimes a little confrontation now can avoid a massive fight later on – by talking through things early, you can keep harmful thoughts from building up inside until they boil over. This is important in almost any relationship – business partnerships, love interests, foreign relations, etc. However, we don’t do it because it can be very uncomfortable. Some subjects are very sensitive: sexual orientation, religion, political beliefs, finances, the list goes on.

I’m generally very passive in this regard, just letting people believe what they want to believe – especially with religion and politics (but then again maybe this is just because I don’t have the burning passion about them that some people have). My thinking took a turn after reading the appendix of “Eating Animals”, in which the author explains the importance of vegetarians spreading the gospel to end factory farming and save the world. I learned that if you have the goal of making change in this world, you are going to need to recruit others on your side, even when the subject is sensitive or others don’t immediately care.

One individual can have a humongous influence with the ripple effect, where the new recruit turns around and recruits someone else. In the example of choosing not to eat meat, there are three meals a day where you influence others without getting up on a soapbox. But is that enough? To do more would require an uncomfortable conversation. I am willing to make the personal sacrifice of limited food options, but am I willing to put myself in awkward situations where I am apparently judging others’ beliefs?

Meatetarian or vegetarian is not even the most sensitive of subjects. What about other areas I might like to influence those around me? Especially those that don’t obviously and publicly occur three times a day. Even worse, during these conversations I would likely find strongly entrenched beliefs rather than the chosen indifference of meat-eaters. Good luck to anyone who wants to talk to my Grandfather about how the president is performing.

I recently watched a TED talk about the most sensitive topic of all, religion. It is ridiculous in this day and age that we can’t openly talk about religious beliefs when the other person isn’t the same religion. It’s even more ridiculous that such small differences in beliefs lead to wars. The first step to overcome this is to openly talk about religion and truly understand one another. Well, what better way to start this understanding than watching a video you are not likely to agree with? Here is Richard Dawkins advocating militant atheism. Keep reading…

The web is an extraordinary place. Anyone that has had a conversation with me has probably received an earful about how awesome the internet is. One of the most incredible things about it is the diversity. Most people have their own little corner they know well and are completely unaware of the multitude of ways other people are using the internet.

Example: it might seem unbelievable, but some people search YouTube when they want to know something rather than Google. It depends upon your preference for consuming information – watching video or reading text. Or put another way, if you didn’t grow up using old school search engines, and instead have spent hundreds of hours watching videos on YouTube, where are you likely to go when you need information?

This isn’t your grandpa’s internet – the scale of YouTube is absurd. 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day. Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day, which is more than 1 video for each person in the world that has internet access. And it is only going to get bigger, growing at 40 or 50% since last year. Wow.

These kinds of numbers made me want to give creating YouTube videos a shot. So I did a little experiment – I made a couple videos answering simple questions:

I’m intrigued to find out if anyone actually watches these videos. Will they show up in Google search results on the first page? Will they even be the top result for a Google video search? How about a YouTube search? Will I like posting videos and make this a part of my internet life?
 

Statistics source.

Photo: Sven Seiler

Almost a year ago I wrote a post titled The Concept of Infectious Disease Eradication. It was all about how the everyone has come together to fight to rid the world of certain diseases forever. The only time this has been accomplished was with smallpox from 1950 to 1979, but we are getting very close to doing it again with polio.

Armies of volunteers are mounting a heroic effort to get rid of polio forever. We haven’t had polio in the United States for many decades, so you may not even be aware that it is even still around. But it is a terrifying disease that leaves many paralyzed and is still hanging on in the poorest areas of the world. The picture above is of four people in an iron lung to allow them to breath.

There are millions of volunteers delivering the 30 cent treatment to every child in the most remote and destitute communities. Highly recommended and inspirational video:

I’ve been sitting on a few bookmarks without posting them because they are just too short to make into a whole post. Of course the logical thing is to put them together to make one awesome blog post.

The first is for the fellas. I have always felt that one of life’s little joys is urinating on ice (TMI?). Snow makes a good substitute as well. Well here is something that lasts a lot longer and is potentially cooler:

The next is for the grammar nerds. You know how when you quote a passage with a typo or grammar error you use [sic] to designate that it wasn’t your mistake but the person’s you are quoting? Well what happens if the person you are quoting put [sic] when there wasn’t really an error? Check out this post with the possibilities. This reminds me of my obsession of using parenthesis within parenthesis (not that I do it that often (but I would if it were more socially acceptable)).

Here is one for the computer nerds – what is the most common phone number? What does the internet think is the most common phone number? Not the same thing! The number 2147483647 is the largest 32-bit signed integer, so if a website stores the number that way and someone enters a number larger than that, their phone number will be stored as 214-748-3647. Which begs the question, who in Dallas actually has that number and how many phone calls do they get that aren’t for them? Keep reading…

Pop culture references are fun. They let you express yourself with minimal effort, kind of like Facebook. They can be dorky, funny, or cool, but they can also be clever. Do you quote Star Trek, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare? Are you someone that drops obscure references without expecting anyone else to understand? Can you make an original joke or are they all derived from something you’ve heard before in a movie or TV show?

Beyond simply dropping quotes into conversations, I enjoy idioms – a phrase with a different meaning than the literal words (think “back seat driver”, “flip the bird”, or “kick the bucket”). One of my favorite idioms that is widely used is “jump the shark.” The phrase comes from the show Happy Days way back on September 20th, 1977 – 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the third part of the opening episode in season five. Why is this episode so memorable? Fonzie actually water-ski jumps over a live shark to prove his braveness, wearing his leather jacket the whole time of course.

What does the idiom mean? It is the point when a television series reaches the point of no return – it has lost its original magic and tries to recapture the spark through increasingly absurd story lines. It happens to just about every long running TV show, can you think of any “jump the shark” moments in the shows you watch?

Here is my real question for you – is it socially acceptable to make up idioms based on pop culture? Keep reading…