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For many Iranians the cinematic movie ‘300’ may come as a shocking revelation. But to those of us who came up through America’s school system, the ‘Battle of Thermopylae,’ which is what the movie ‘300’ is based on, is as familiar as George Washington’s fabled “cherry tree” episode.

The Battle of Thermopylae was of course written by the classical Greek author, Herodotus, who lived in the Persian city of Halicarnassus. His book, ‘The Histories’ became part of Western folklore only recently. It was not until about 1850 that America embraced Herodotus as the leading authority on Persian history.

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4th Annual World Hepatitis Awareness Day

1st October 2007

http://www.hepatitisday.info/index.php

The fraudulence of the “War on Terror” is clearly revealed by looking at the pattern of actions that preceded and followed its launch.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is “big enough” to confirm Joseph Goebbels’ testimony. It is a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the “War on Terror.”

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How to breathe deeply when you’re nervous.

http://www.ftrain.com/lungvacuuming.html

1. Exhale completely, as if you’re blowing out the candles on a very big birthday cake.

2. Bend over. This expels the last bits of air from your lungs. When you’re totally out of air, don’t let any air come into your throat.

3. Stand up. This increases lung volume, so air will want to flow into your lungs, but don’t breathe. Wait until your body needs a breath—10 seconds or so.

4. Then, when you can’t take much more, breathe. Your body will have moved over from your normal, everyday breathing to unregulated, autonomic “response breathing.”

That’s it. Once you let your body take that unregulated breath in step 4, it sort of “reboots your lungs,” and the nervous, “holding-pattern” breathing becomes a thing of memory.

Some are a bit dodgy but it’s worth checking out now and again.

http://www.pizdaus.com/

This is absolutely great. Watch it here.

From the Kickin’ the Darkness blog.

I’m a terrible programmer. You would think that having done this for nearly 25 years that I should be pretty good at it by now. But nope, I still put bugs in my code, use the wrong types for variables or subprogram arguments, forget to make the right library calls, mess up the expression in an if statement, and on and on and on now for 25 years.

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From Le Monde.

Here’s number 10:

Check out the rest here.

One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet. Web services APIs (application programming interfaces), web services protocols like REST and SOAP, the new Facebook platform, Amazon’s web services efforts including EC2 and S3, lots of new startups talking platform (including my own company, Ning)… well, “platform” is turning into a central theme of our industry and one that a lot of people want to think about and talk about.

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