Mittwoch, 8. Januar 2014

AMA - Ask me anything!

One of the most useful, popular and informative social networking sites on the entire web: Reddit. Discover Reddit AMAs, and no question will ever remain without an answer! 
This is the best platform to aks, be asked, interact with real people on real topics, read about experiences others have had, things they have seen and learned.

What does AMA mean?

AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything.” You can access all the AMA threads here: http://www.reddit.com/r/all/ You’ll find lots of posts, related to lots of topics, either listed as IAMA or AMA.

IAMA (I Am A): In an IAMA post, a person posts who they are, what they did or what they currently do. Other users can than ask the person questions: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

AMA (Ask Me Anything): In an AMA post, users will answer questions about literally anything from the Reddit users.

A Couple of the Top, Most Memorable AMAs

Rapper Snoop Dogg/Lion AMA on Reddit in December 2012 attracted over 1.6 million page views to the social news site just for that day. Reddit announced that it was the second biggest AMA to ever take place on the site.

The biggest ever AMA to take place on the site was the one posted by Barack Obama. The AMA garnered almost 3 million page views on that day, with many more millions of page views following for the days after the AMA took place.

Enjoy!


Dienstag, 7. Januar 2014

Death occuring on 12.01.2018

If you knew today that you would die in 20 years, would you do something differently? What about 10 years, or 5 years?
If you knew today that you are going to die in 1 year and 2 days, would you change your life today?

Apparently there is a watch coming out this year, a watch that will be able to calculate the approximate date of your death.

In 2005, Steve Jobs told a class of graduating students at Stanford University, “for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’"

The idea of the watch is that we should live each day like it was our last and value the time we have, do things that do matter and make a difference.

“Tikker will be there to remind you to make most of your life, and most importantly, to be happy.”
A new watch called Tikker claims to have created a way to calculate approximately when, according to its creators, a person is likely to die, and then to input that date into a wristwatch. 

“Tikker is a wrist watch that counts down your life from years to seconds, and motivates you to make the right choices,” the company, which is a Kickstarter-project-turned-real-thing, writes on its site. “Tikker will be there to remind you to make most of your life, and most importantly, to be happy.”

The creator of Tikker is Fredrik Colting, a 37-year-old Swede with an original idea!

It’s not an entirely bizarre idea, though. We tend to value things that are scarce, and death is, after all, a scarcity of life. Thinking about death can make us appreciate life more, and it can also make us into better people. For example, when researchers told subjects to imagine dying in an apartment fire, and then asked them a series of questions, the participants showed less greed, more spirituality, and more gratitude.

The first Tikkers will ship in April. And while you can’t put a price on the icy breath of your impending demise, one watch will set you back $59. You can already pre-order under: http://mytikker.com/

Would you want to know the date of your death? I am sure that many of us would live in a very different way, including myself.

Donnerstag, 21. November 2013

Welcome to Texas!

      - Where are you from?
      - Romania.
      -  Awesome, I love Romania!
      -  Have you ever been there?
      - No, but I love it!
*POKERFACE*

Ok, this does not happen on a daily basis, but it can give you a pretty good idea about the depth of some conversations that I have had during the past months. Funny though, a business card that has Texas written all over it, who would have thought?

But let’s get to business and let me show you around Corpus Christi, which is a controversial place, since I cannot decide if I love or hate it. I guess it depends on the day ur asking.
As a picture is worth more than a thousand words, enjoy!

The amazing sunsets:



Cool jogging trails:

Best dressed beer with a pickle on it, yum!


The pools in the apartment complex, which really can be used all year long J

And lots of open doors!

Freitag, 21. Juni 2013

How old are you really?

A little mind game:

You wake up tomorrow morning and have no idea how old you are. All sense of time has disappeared. Your birthday? Yeah, you still remeber.
Your birthyear...no idea


If you really were to wake up one morning and not know how old you are, how old would you feel? If you had to name your age just based on how old you feel, would you know your true age?

Do you live your age? Or would you feel older, a sum of your experiences so far? Or maybe younger?

Dienstag, 18. Juni 2013

Fake it ‘til you make it!

All the things we buy everyday…where do they come from? Do we know? Do we even care?  We buy brands – do we really buy brands? We buy fakes, produced god knows where under awful conditions, but we still buy them. Fake, refake, overfake.



A good exhibition I have seen. Got me thinking and reading, until I found a chilly post in the NY Times.
A woman in Oregon randomly bought a Halloween decoration at a supermarket and found the following letter in it:

Here's an excerpt from the letter, grammatical mistakes included:  
"If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.
People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month).
People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others."
10 yuan = 1.61 $
The letter has been written by a Chinese worker, who has been identified by the NY Times. The worker described how he was imprisoned in a labor camp where "inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards." The worker claims to have written 20 letters over the years. The people are imprisoned in one of many Chinese labor camps, Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang.

Of course nothing happened, the camp still produces, fakes, refakes, kills...

If you want to be informed about Chinese Labour camps, visit Chinaview and think twice about what is written on your label...'Made in China'.

Donnerstag, 13. Juni 2013

The Geography of Bliss - lessons from the unhappiest place on Earth

Eric Weiner has travelled the world to make an analysis of the most ‘happy’ and most ‘unhappy’ countries and see what the backgrounds for a nations happiness are.
And he came up with one very interesting book: The Geography of Bliss. Here the Amazon link.
Here is a brief summary of his research:
‘Extroverts are happier than introverts; optimists are happier than pessimists; married people are happier than singles, though people with children are no happier than childless couples; Republicans are happier than Democrats; people who attend religious services are happier than those who do not; people with college degrees are happier than those without, though people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA; people with an active sex life are happier than those without; women and men are equally happy, though women have a wider emotional range; having an affair will make you happy but will not compensate for the massive loss of happiness that you will incur when your spouse finds out and leaves you; people are least happy when they’re commuting to work; busy people are happier than those with too little to do; wealthy people are happier than poor ones, but only slightly.

It is extremely hard to figure out why people living in certain places are happier then others, because the reasons for our happiness are not linked to the economic situation or our income; rich country does not equal happy inhabitants and vice versa.

‘The happiest places, Eric Weiner explains, don’t necessarily fit our preconceived notions. Some of the happiest countries in the world— Iceland and Denmark, for instance— are homogeneous, shattering the American belief that there is strength, and happiness, in diversity. One finding, which Veenhoven just uncovered, has made him very unpopular with his fellow sociologists. He found that income distribution does not predict happiness. Countries with wide gaps between the rich and poor are no less happy than countries where the wealth is distributed more equally. Sometimes, they are happier… 
Many of the world’s happiest countries also have high suicide rates. People who attend religious services report being happier than those who do not, but the world’s happiest nations are secular. The United States, the richest, most powerful country in the world, is no happiness superpower. Many other nations are happier than we are.

Iceland is the perfect example of how much having friends around counts for your happiness:
‘On a practical level, Iceland’s smallness means that parents needn’t bother with that old bromide about not talking to strangers. There are no strangers in Iceland. People are constantly running into friends and acquaintances. It’s not unusual for people to show up thirty minutes late for work because en route they encountered a parade of friends. This is a perfectly valid excuse, by the way, for being late. The Icelandic equivalent of traffic was hell.

But the small population in Iceland has its disadvantages as well:
‘Geneticists have found that everyone in the country is related to everyone else, going back seven or eight generations. Icelanders can go to a website and find out how closely they are related to a colleague, a friend— or that cutie they slept with last night. One woman told me how unnerving this can be. “You’ve slept with this guy you’ve just met and then the next day you’re at a family reunion, and there he is in the corner eating smoked fish. You’re like—‘ Oh, my God, I just slept with my second cousin.’

The most interested country in its citizens’ happiness is…Bhutan! They even have a Gross National Product for a Gross National Happiness scale. Progress measured by happiness, and not by money – an approach that is very far from our consumer society

‘In a nutshell, Gross National Happiness seeks to measure a nation’s progress not by its balance sheet but rather by the happiness— or unhappiness— of its people. It’s a concept that represents a profound shift from how we think about money and satisfaction and the obligation of a government to its people.

See his opinion on America:
‘America’s place on the happiness spectrum is not as high as you might think, given our superpower status. We are not, by any measure, the happiest nation on earth. One study, by Adrian White at the University of Leicester in Britain, ranked the United States as the world’s twenty-third happiest nation, behind countries such as Costa Rica, Malta, and Malaysia. True, most Americans— 84 percent, according to one study— describe themselves as either “very” or “pretty” happy, but it’s safe to say that the United States is not as happy as it is wealthy.’

And which place is the unhappiest place on the planet, according to his study? Moldova!

See why:
‘Many countries are poorer than Moldova yet happier. Nigeria, for instance, or Bangladesh. The problem is that Moldovans don’t compare themselves to Nigerians or Bangladeshis. They compare themselves to Italians and Germans. Moldova is the poor man in a rich neighborhood, never a happy position to be in.

Not even democracy is a source of happiness for the people living in Moldova:
It’s not that democracy makes people happy but rather that happy people are much more likely to establish a democracy. The soil must be rich, culturally speaking, before democracy can take root. The institutions are less important than the culture. And what are the cultural ingredients needed for democracy to take root? Trust and tolerance. Not only trust of those inside your group— family, for instance— but external trust. Trust of strangers. Trust of your opponents, your enemies, even. That way you feel you can gamble on other people— and what is democracy but one giant crapshoot? Thus, democracy makes the Swiss happier but not the Moldovans. For the Swiss, democracy is the icing on their prosperous cake. Moldovans can’t enjoy the icing because they have no cake.

What lessons can we learn from Moldovas‘ unhappiness?
Lesson number one: “Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people’s problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you’ve dodged the bullet, but you haven’t. The bullet hit you as well. You just don’t feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: “The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society.” 


Lesson number two: Poverty, relative poverty, is often an excuse for unhappiness. Yes, Moldovans are poor compared to other Europeans, but clearly it is their reaction to their economic problems, and not the problems alone, that explains their unhappiness. The seeds of Moldovan unhappiness are planted in their culture. A culture that belittles the value of trust and friendship. A culture that rewards mean-spiritedness and deceit. A culture that carves out no space for unrequited kindness, no space for what St. Augustine called (long before Bill Clinton came along) “the happiness of hope.’
And what is the conclusion of his work?

‘Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

I just love this book! Read it!

Donnerstag, 16. Mai 2013

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

On the banks of Mali's Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad.

A couple traveled the world exploring how the eating habits differ from country to country and presented their results in a photo album, called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

As it is very visual, you are directly confronted with obvious social issues. The album shows the differences around the world, the divison of lifestyles all across the globe. It is easy to see that, as a paradox, the more money we spend on food, the poorer the quality of that food is. People who spend more money on food it more processed products, while fresh and healthy ingredients never see their plate.



How much money do you spend on food? And what kind of food do you eat in the end?

Mexico, Cuernavaca

The Casales family spends around $189 per week.

Ecuador, Tingo

The Ayme family spends around $32 per week.

United States, Texas

The Fernandezes family spends around $242 per week.

Guatemala, Todos Santos

The Mendozas family spends around $76 per week.

United States, North Carolina

The Revis family spends around $342 per week.

Canada, Iqaluit

The Melanson family spends around $392 per week.

Italy, Palermo

The Manzo family spends around $295 per week.

Cuba, Havana

The Costa family spends around $64 per week.

China, Weitaiwu

The Cui family spends around $65 per week.

Kuwait, Kuwait City

The Al-Haggan family spends around $252 per week.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo 

The Dudo family spends around $90 per week.

Egypt, Cairo

The Ahmed family spends around $78 per week.

Australia, Riverview

The Brown family spends around $428 per week.

Germany, Bargteheide

The Melander family spends around $568 per week.

Mali, Kouakourou

The Natomo family spends around $30 per week.

Canada, Gatineau

The Finken family spends around $158 per week.

India, Ujjain

The Patkar family spends around $45 per week.

Japan, Kodaira City

The Ukita family spends around $361 per week.
For more images and information check out the Hungry Planet book.
Pictures from boredpanda.com