THOUGHTBOX

aka  the floppy table

Africa for Norway is a fake PSA campaign launched by the Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund (SAIH) with the expressed intent to raise global awareness of typical, one sided Western stereotypes and clichés that often prevail in ads and campaigns for relief and humanitarian funds in African countries. It's a clever video that highlights how often non-African nations, especially developed western countries, often perceive nations in need of aid exclusively through the filter of their most prevalent and mediated issues. For Africa, that's HIV, poverty and the corruption of African leaders. But just like the Kony campaign or the  Romanian Gypsy  documentary I mentioned some time ago on my blog, the issue is often simplified, one-sided and lacking in context. Let Radi-Aid be a lesson to us, then!

It seems that with Obama's re-election, NASA have found some reassurance that their plans (which were secret so far in case Romney gets elected) will continue to get a presidential thumbs up. The "secret" plans in question involve going back to the moon, building a permanent base on the far side, parking cool spacecraft in the L2 point and testing out a new heavy duty rocket, with more exciting stuff yet to be announced. Well... this is fucking cool! John Logsdon, chief space policy expert: “NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan ” The L2 lagrangian point is a an orbital location around the moon where the Earth's and Moon's gravitational pulls cancel each other out, so spacecraft and space stations can sort of chill there almost indefinitely without having to actively maintain an orbit. The plan is to eventually set up a manned, 

Let's start this day off with some crazy crazy news from Pakistan. A 15 year old girls was gruesomely murdered by her parents for allegedly sullying the family's honor by looking at a boy, according to BBC. The story varies from news source to news source, but the gist of it is identical. The poor girl was killed by her own family by pouring acid on her. I can't stress that enough - for looking at a boy .  According to her own father, who recounted his version of the story on October the 29th, he'd caught her looking at a young lad who drove by a on motorcycle. If that seems harsh, let me tell you what her mother said: "She said `I didn't do it on purpose. I won't look again.' By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way," the mother told the BBC reporter. I'll let that sink in for a moment. This is just one story out of the many so called "honor killings" happening in Pakistan, where the

via  thedailywh.at

Admittedly, I'm not much of a connoisseur of American politics though I'm pretty sure I know what rape is. But here's my question, America. When did something as simple as rape become so convoluted to label? That's a tell tale sign something's seriously wrong with either the system or the people.

So what's been happening recently is that Christian fast food business Chick-Fil-A has been getting a lot of backlash over their stance against gay marriage. Former US presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee instituted "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day" as an opportunity for customers who strongly believe in Christian values to celebrate their belief, and the event has been a major success with packed restaurants coming to support the company CEO, Dan Cathy, who recently came out with statements against same sex marriage. The backlash has really divided the American nation and global public into two separate sides. On the one hand, you have pro-gay activists and same sex marriage supporters boycotting restaurants in the chain and lashing out at Dan Cathy and his company for their homophobic stance, while also criticizing Chick-Fil-A for giving millions of dollars to groups that advocate against gay rights and same sex marriage. On the other side of the fence, conservative

Via   livescience. Read more about the discovery of the boson   here.

After 30 years and 9 billion dollars, CERN scientists working with the LHC have finally  announced   the  discovery of the elusive Higgs boson. The sensitive instruments inside the LHC have experimentally detected a particle at an energy level around 126 GeV (which, in the world of subatomic particles, is a really big fatty), and the scientists over there are 99.99999% sure it's the fabled Higgs boson, as it behaves exactly as theoretically predicted. However, scientists are being understandably careful in calling it a "new boson" - just to be safe, until it's confirmed that it is indeed what they started out to discover in the first place. Heck, the discovery was so big, that Peter Higgs, the man who's given his name to this theoretical - well, not anymore - particle went up in tears when he  explained  just how amazed he was to see his theory proven within his lifetime. The large Hadron Collider - or as the scientists themselves call it: the large HA

We all know there's a ton of stuff in our urban lives that make us fat. Fast food makes us fat and we know it. Drinking sugary sodas and fizzy drinks makes us fat. Every day new studies and magazine articles scare the confidence out of us with new results that slowly paint a picture in our heads: this fucking world wants to make us FAT by any means. Well, I'm here to shake that confidence a little bit more, unfortunately. Say you stay away from fats foods and sugary drinks already, and put lots of veg and fruit in your diet. Say you work out a couple of days a week and you think you're pretty much safe from random obesity. About the only unfit thing you do is the car ride to and back from work every day, so it's no surprise your reward yourself with a nice little downtime each day, say watching your favorite TV show. Nothing wrong could possibly go wrong and make you fat now, can it? WRONG. That's right fuckface - it's the only exercise you'll do a

Wow - after today's Oreo  story , I didn't expect to see even more stupid people in the world today. But, that's the thing about idiots, they pop up everywhere. This time, the idiot is mainly a 38 year old American woman called Ebony Berry, who's under arrest for starving her 16 year old daughter to death. The story goes like this: the mother was obsessed by the teachings of one doctor Andrew Chung, a certified cardiologist who mixes medicine with scripture and advocates eating just two pounds of food a day. Ebony Berry, a friend of the doctor's, followed the doctor's recommendations and eventually led to the tragic death of her young daughter, Markea Blakeley-Berry - who weighed only 20 kilograms at  the time of her death! Berry is currently in prison, arrested on charges of murder, and has been visited by the "good doctor" in jail. So, who the hell is this doctor and what's up with his pro-hunger doctrine? Maybe the woman got it all

Hey. You know Oreos, right? The delicious sandwich cookie with a creamy filling from Kraft Foods that has been the number 1 selling cookie in the United States, as well as extremely popular in countries around the world? Yeah, that one. Bet you never thought people might have a reason to hate these little tasty bastards. But the world being the world, with ignorant idiots everywhere, this beloved cookie has become the target of hatred and boycott. Why? Kraft Foods, the manufacturers of Oreo cookies, have been faced with a   shitstorm   of backlash and bigotry after doing something otherwise ballsy for a food manufacturer: take a stand on the homosexual debate. Oreo posted a picture of a cookie that sandwiched multiple rainbow-colored fillings along with the text "Proudly supporting love!". I think what Oreo did was both awesome and risky. It's risky  because having an opinion on this very hot topic is a brave move, one that has the potential to seriously h

The Galapagos tortoise, often called the rarest animal on earth due to its count of one ( one), is now extinct after the death of its last living member, Lonesome George, at age 100. Conservationists have attempted to mate El Solitario Jorge (as locals call him) with female tortoises that were as genetically similar as possible, but all attempts have yielded unviable eggs. George has lived in Ecuador's Galapagos National Park since the early 1970's, and unless a turtle named Tony, living at the Prague zoo, is proven to be a member of George's species, was the last surviving member of this rare island tortoise.  The passing was noted by the Internet and Wikipedia's entry on Pinta Island tortoises switched from Endangered to Extinct following George's death on Sunday. The Galapagos archipelago The Ecuadorian archipelago of Galapagos is famous for both the journey of the Beagle that carried Charles Darwin in his famous expedition and for its amaz

The U.S. Army is working on experiments with a Lightning Gun. Specifically, a laser weapon that creates a charged plasma channel through the air, conducting electricity towards its targets - tanks, bombs, etc. This works because those targets are better conductors than the air or ground around them, and the electricity seeks the path of least resistance. In other words, that's exactly how freaking lightning works. The nerd is strong in lead scientist George Fischer: " We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated (targets)". If I had a lightning gun in my backyard to play with as I see fit - oh, I'm sorry: I meant "experiment" - I'd zap shit all day too. Here's how the tech works in more detail: an ultra-short pulse laser of modest energy keeps the beam focused by way of its own intensity. The laser's electromagnet harvests electrons from air molecules to create the charged plasma medium the electricity then foll

Imagine the following scene. You're a chubby or overweight person trying really hard to lose that extra weight. It's hard, what with all the cheap Mickey D's or that viscerally awesome smell you can detect every time you waltz by a pizza place. It's hard to say no to your hunger and just man up and buy a salad. It's hard to see the pounds go away much slower than they accumulate. But hey, you're trying: you're on a diet ( sort of) , you drink tons of water, eat veg, go jogging for the 5 minutes you can keep it up. You decide to take the next step and go to a local gym, which is an obstacle course in itself: you need the time, you might miss out on going out with friends, you might miss that really awesome NatGeo documentary about Orang Pendek, not to mention you'll sweat your ass on the way there, as well as during and after the workout. And pretty much once you're done, you're sweaty and stinky anyway, and the realization that you'll have