Map of the Painted Monasteries of Moldavia
I'm going to be visiting the Painted Monasteries soon, and I noticed that there weren't any decent maps out there of where the monasteries actually were. Consider this my small contribution to future travelers.
View Painted Monasteries of Moldavia in a larger map
The Seven Wonders of the Internet (well, six plus three)
I was browsing Ask Reddit today and came across a thread here about people think are the Seven Wonders of the Internet. I commented and said my piece, but... I wasn't satisfied, not even with my own answer.
You see, the Internet is a big place. I don't know all of it. If something is going to be a "Wonder," it has to instill a certain amount of wonderment.
I did some searching and some thinking, and feel like I can at least settle on the following six "Wonders", but the seventh is hard to settle on.
Wikipedia
To me, this is the mother of all Internet wonders. Written by the hivemind, maintained and guarded by a cadre of dedicated nerds, this repository of (almost) all human knowledge is a metaphor for the Internet itself. At any time, I can go to Wikipedia and type in any topic and learn about it. Doesn't matter what it is, somehow someone has written a Wikipedia article about it. In just today alone, I've learned about Br'rer Rabbit and the Uncle Remus tales, the Apostolic Period of Christianity, and Rhyming Slang. There are reasons to criticize Wikipedia (territorial editors, article quality), but I think it's given me more knowledge than my university education.
Google Maps
A friend of mine lives somewhere in here. View Larger Map
I love maps in general, but Google Maps takes the cake. It's all maps in one. It's a street map, world map, local map, terrain map, bird's-eye-view of everyone's house, clear or not, all in one in one of the net's best user interfaces. In Google Maps, there's no part of the world (except North Korea) you can't explore.
That's not even mentioning Street View, the geolocated Wikipedia articles, and all the photographs. You can go anywhere on Earth with Google maps. Hell, you can check out Mars and the Moon too. That's three worlds at your fingertips.
Skype
Since we're talking about the Internet and not the Web, Skype makes live video chat free worldwide and relatively easy. Anyone with a decent-enough connection can see and speak to anyone else -- for free. It's so amazing, the first time anyone uses it, it's all they can talk about.
Trust me on this: you have not lived until you have spoken with a centenarian over Skype on their 100th birthday.
WordPress
What is most amazing about the Internet is that the barrier of entry is the lowest of any media form. Anyone can start a free WordPress site and start posting right away. With a little more knowledge and some money, you can download the a powerful community-driven CMS for free and get contract a good designer for a few thousand bucks and you have a professional, high-quality medium for getting your voice out there.
I want to point out that it's hard to pick just one of the hundreds of community-developed, open-source content management systems out there to laud. I pick it as a stand-in for all of them: Joomla, Plone, Drupal, even Blogger and LiveJournal deserve honorable mentions for the ease with which they allow someone to make their views known. Where WordPress makes the cut above the rest is it's sheer simplicity combined with the huge amount of resources available for it. It runs on any LAMP/WAMP machine, and many hosts even have a single-click "install WordPress" button in their backend. That and the number of themes and plugins just keeps growing and growing.
Project Gutenberg
When I think of Project Gutenberg, I don't think about how I can get any book written before 1920 for free. Frankly, I don't care. Most of that stuff is dry and boring anyway.
I think about the Library of Alexandria.
That will never happen again. If just one copy of Project Gutenberg survives the downfall of our current civilization (someone should download both PG and Wikipedia and put the copy in a vault), as the Library of Alexandria did not, the great works of humanity will survive, too.
Linux (and all open source software)
When I first heard about Linux and open source software in general, my mind was blown. I mean, they make it and then they give it away for free, no strings attached. I still have no idea how any companies in open source manage to make any money, but they do, and their "flagship" product is what the Internet runs on.
Linux was built not by a single company in a single building, but as a collaboration between thousands of companies and individuals around the world, all connected by the very systems they themselves had designed. If one story shows that collaborative networks can do amazing things, it is the story of how the Internet made Linux.
Honorable mentions
I'm really struggling to pick a seventh and final wonder. Instead of narrowing it down, I'm going to pick a few I want to mention and just plop them all here and let the reader pick the one they think is most awesome and profound.
Wayback Machine
When a major site takes down an article or changes their front page design, the previous version is lost to the rest of the Internet. Mistakes, design, history as it happens, all of this is preserved for posterity.
Some of the most interesting ones to me: the first McDonalds site and the New York Times on 9/11.
Why is it not an actual wonder? Because half the sites on there don't cache well or break in modern browsers. For example, check out the original Myspace. It's not a wonder if it doesn't work perfectly.
Khan Academy
Free, college-level video courses available for free for everyone. Want to learn about organic chemistry or cosmology or macroeconomics? Lucky you, its all here. This is awesome, but currently incomplete as the range of topics seem mostly limited to the sciences. And who is going to accept a degree from them?
Youtube
Like Wikipedia, its content is made by the hivemind (unless it was just stolen by it). Like WordPress, it empowers regular people to join the conversation, often by posting videos of government/police abuse (don't taze me, bro!) or history in the making. Khan Academy, Ted, all these video lecture sites run on it or one of its clones. It changed the face of the Internet by making online video mainstream. When you stop to think about YouTube, it is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, the pop-over ads, the idiocy of the comments, and having your video removed if there's a radio playing a copyrighted song in the background kind of dull the feeling.
My Idea for NHL Realignment: be prepared for more moves
I have a confession to make. I like hockey.
This doesn't make any sense if you know me. I don't have many/any friends who do like hockey, and I'm not athletic. I don't even like any other sport. That said, as a man with Canadian heritage, I've been around hockey the fandom of hockey all of my life, even if going to an NHL game or regularly watching a specific team on TV was something I could rarely do.
So when I follow hockey, I do so through newspapers and the Internet. One story that I have been following closely is divisional realignment as a result of the relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg.
There have been hundreds if not thousands of ideas spread around the internet regarding realignment of the NHL as a result of this event, all of them flawed and full of potholes that would prevent them from being easy sells in the real NHL.
I'm not going to go over every plan here (there are too many!), but I will say that they all seem to ignore the elephant in the room, namely that there will be another move in the next few years. It will probably be the Phoenix Coyotes, but it could also be any number of other teams.
A key problem is that any realignment which preserves the current six-division format will could be broken by these future moves because they will require key rivalries (think Montreal-Boston or the NYC trio) to be broken up.
Abby’s idea for a sport: Bubbleball
Anyone who knows Abby knows she has a vivid imagination that works in ways no normal person can pretend to understand. Normally, when she thinks strange things up, I let it pass, but this idea was so strange that I had to chronicle it.
Abby and I were at a Liga 3 soccer game in our Romanian hometown of Fieni. The home team was down 3 - nil. As she watched, probably bored, she suddenly blurt out:
"There needs to be a sport with hamster balls."
I couldn't just let her say that without explanation.
The conversation that ensued became the codification of the rules of Bubbleball.
You have two teams of five, and all of the players are encased in human-sized hamster balls. Lucky for us, such equipment has already been invented. It's called a zorb, and it's primarily for rolling down hills in. Makes my stomach feel great to think about it.
Click to read about Zorbing at wikipedia
Anyway, Bubbleball is played on a field twice as long and wide as a soccer field (I tried to get her to make it the same as a soccer field so the resources necessary to play it would already exist worldwide, but she said, "This is my imaginary sport!"). At either end of the field is a hole 3 meters wide and 2 meters deep. The field would have walls around it, like a hockey rink, so the ball would never go out of bounds.
The goal is to get a ball measuring 2.5 meters in diameter into the holes. The ball is weighted down so that it is exactly 20 kilos (Abby was insistent on this number) so it won't just go flying around. Getting the ball into the hole is worth 2 points. If a member of your team accidentally falls into a hole (they'll be fine. They're in a bubble), they would need to be pulled out with a crane, causing the game to be delayed. To discourage this, falling in the hole will cause your team to lose 1 point. Negative scores can exist.
Edit: forgot to mention that there are no periods in Bubbleball. The game is played without interruptions for 60 minutes, except of course when a goal is scored or a player falls into the goal.
The way I see this game being played is like rugby without passing, human strength being the only way to move the ball. Teams would have to push together, overcoming the strength of the opposing team to get the ball anywhere. Things would get most interesting around the goal itself (as in any sport, I suppose). Defending players would probably be pushed into the goal more often than the ball since they would be on the goal-side of the ball, trying to keep it out of the hole.
Abby also thought up a variation of this which we are calling "Courantball." It's even more bizarre.
Basically, you start with the same setup as Bubbleball with a few key differences. First, the ball is significantly lighter, such that it can bounce up and above the players when struck. Second (and this is key here), the whole field is covered in irrigation tubing blowing compressed air up so that the ball is levitated, never really touching the ground.
Instead of holes at the far ends of the field, you have a goal about two meters wide above the ground, lets say in roughly the same spot as the field goal posts in an American football field. Fans in the goal "suck" the ball into the goal if it gets too close.
I see this game as more fluid than Bubbleball, and brute strength wouldn't be as important.
One cool idea that came out of this conversation is that it could be used in an English class. Get your kids to just think up a game with weird equipment or rules, then write them down. I think it would be great for the more sporty classes out there.
Practice Vocabulary While Feeding the Hungry
While I was at the PCRO TEFL Conference in Sinaia last week about integrating exciting Web 2.0 sites into TEFL lessons. I intend to post them and those materials in a future post.
But I really wish I had known about this.
Answer the question on the left correctly and the United Nations will donate ten grains of rice to the world's hungry. You can practice your English vocabulary, but you can also practice other languages, science, math, or increase the difficulty if you get bored.
This isn't just the UN asking people to do something stupid or else they'll let people starve. The money for the rice is actually generated by advertisements on the site. They're raising revenue, not allocating it. Ten grains of rice isn't a lot, but Google is a multi-billion dollar company and they make only a fraction of a penny on every Google ad you see.
As a Web designer, I am surprised they didn't place the ads higher on the page. I can't even see it on my tiny iBook. Don't anyone tell the advertisers!
Check it out here: http://freerice.com/
I suppose I should say “Hello World”
Just launching and testing the new blog. More to come!