On Friday, we’ll be airing a very special episode of Sesame Street.
A hurricane has swept through Sesame Street and everyone is working together to clean up the neighborhood. When Big Bird checks on his home, he is heartbroken to find that the storm has destroyed his nest. Big Bird’s friends and neighbors gather to show their support and let him know they can fix his home, but it will take time. While everyone on Sesame Street spends the next few days cleaning up and making repairs, Big Bird still has moments where he is sad, angry, and confused. His friends help him cope with his emotions by talking about what happened, drawing pictures together, and giving him lots of hugs. They also comfort Big Bird by offering him temporary places he can eat, sleep, and play. Big Bird remembers all the good times he had at his nest and realizes that once it is rebuilt, there are more good times and memories to come. Finally the day has come where most of the repairs to Big Bird’s home are done and his nest is complete. As he is about to try it out, though, the city nest inspector says it not safe, yet, because the mud isn’t dry. Big Bird is sad that he has to wait another day, but Snuffy comes to the rescue and blows the nest dry and he passes the test! Big Bird thanks everyone for being his friend and helping to rebuild his nest and his home.
Please check your local listings to see what time the episode will air on PBS.
Federal funding for disaster relief is “immoral
PlainTasks is a to-do list plugin for Sublime Text.
Might be worth giving this a spin.
Currently the top voted response:
Extinction. An ecosystem which has existed for millions of years will be gone forever. Some specimens will continue to be kept in aquaria and laboratories. But if we continue to burn all the oil and natural gas we can find, the oceans won’t be a safe habitat for reintroducing them for 10,000s of years.
In an experiment, researchers found that crows were more likely to forage when they could attribute changes in their environment to a human presence.
I’m consistently impressed by how smart (and devious) crows really are.
ER MAH GERD!! ERNERCERNS ERND RERNBERS!!!
Watercolor, pen and ink: 2” x 3”
..and for some fun!
A wind map of the US and, uh, Hurricane Isaac, no big thang right?
(Image via The Atlantic)
A couple good quotes from this article:
According to research by the psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues, visualizing a successful outcome, under certain conditions, can make people less likely to achieve it. She rendered her experimental participants dehydrated, then asked some of them to picture a refreshing glass of water. The water-visualizers experienced a marked decline in energy levels, compared with those participants who engaged in negative or neutral fantasies. Imagining their goal seemed to deprive the water-visualizers of their get-up-and-go, as if they’d already achieved their objective.
And later:
[T]he relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity.
I think this is where “Corporate Happy Talk” comes from. I personally find it annoying, and it often damages the potential of addressing the negative aspects of work when they come up.
Today, I learned this exists.
Our group thought that the need for a WiFi deployment system was high enough to justify further exploration, and eventually we hit upon the idea that we could also use a robot to deploy a network while doing reconnaissance, and that this robot could also be controlled over the network it was deploying.
That is really fucking awesome.
