Month: January 2014

Photo found via Archna Sawjani via Cory Smith. Click to see the source.

Be sure to follow both!

Photo by Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters. Click the photo to see it at full size.

This is a game of “bubble bump soccer” being played in Almaty, Kazakhstan on January 11th. It’s like soccer, but with teams of five players, all of whom are wearing inflatable ball suits, which I’m certain adds a few wrinkles to the world’s most popular game.

If you’re in the Toronto area next Tuesday, January 28th, and you’re an entrepreneur looking for brain food, you should check out Kinetic Café’s and Saul Colt’s event, Minds Beat Money 3.

Here’s the event description:

Being an entrepreneur is extremely rewarding but can also be difficult. So many decisions to make daily, and while advice is everywhere, free good advice is getting harder and harder to find.

This is why Kinetic Cafe and Saul Colt dreamt up Minds Beat Money.

It’s a different kind of Entrepreneur Event.  Our featured startup eProf will “pitch” a problem they are facing or an idea they are playing with to our panel of experts and in real time the experts will do a creative workshop to solve that problem or validate the idea…but wait, there’s more!

This startup will get an additional 2 hours of workshop time with the experts to really make this a game-changing opportunity for the presenters and an interesting show for the attendees tired of the traditional networking event.

Between the presentations will be a Q&A with a surprise guest!

Kinetic Café have a writeup of their last Minds Beat Money event, featuring e Wondereur.com, Dossiya, The White Ribbon Campaign, Ryan Taylor from Fair Trade Jewellery Company, and Grocery Gateway co-founder Scott Bryanwho’s now with Eventi Capital Partners.

Minds Beat Money 3 is free-as-in-beer to attend — sign up on their EventBrite page.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

I’ve been following a series of Globe and Mail articles on “math wrath”, the anger expressed by parents of schoolchildren who felt that the current math curriculum was ignoring basic math skills in favour of what’s called “discovery” and “creative strategies”.

I’ve seen some of the new ways to teach math, and while some of them seem a bit goofy to me, one technique that I think is useful is magnitude estimation. That’s where you’re given exercises like “estimate the number of jellybeans in this jar”, or “how many bricks do you think make up the school’s outer walls?”. I think that these exercises can help students get a better grip on quantities and helps point out that their math is way off. It might’ve helped whoever published the “factoid” shown on the right, who should know that the world population is on the order of single-digit billions, and therefore the number of starving people can’t be close to a trillion.

It might’ve also helped Miss Belgium 2014 finalist Cindy Sabbe. It may have been nerves — hey, we’ve all been asked questions on the spot and screwed up the answers royally — but you’d think that someone who grew up in Belgium would’ve had World War I history drilled into their heads, seeing as it’s the home of Flanders Fields and other places terribly devastated during that conflict. Here’s what happened during the Q&A portion of the 2014 Miss Belgium finals:

Feel free to add this to your “Millennials are terrible” file, if you have one.

Here’s the video (her answer, for those who speak Dutch, is “Tien jaar geleden?“):

For those of you who speak and read Dutch (or at least its Flemish variant), you might find the Never Forget WOI 2004 – 2008 Facebook page amusing. They seem to be having a field day with this topic, and they’ve got jokes and cartoons which I, a non-speaker of the language, assume are droll and will cause your beer (which I assume you’re enjoying with fries smothered in mayonnaise) to shoot out your nose:

I can’t talk about powers of ten without pointing you to the 1977 version of Charles and Ray Eames’ classic educational film, Powers of Ten, which runs 9 minutes and is the perfect way to expand and blow your mind over lunch. Enjoy!

Apparently this existed, once upon a time.

Click the ad to see it at full size.

Sometimes, you need to take the baby out for a stroll, and sometimes, you need to rev up an engine and cut loose. This pram (a.k.a. stroller) lets you do both, with a ten horsepower engine, four gears, and the ability to get up to 50 km/h (30 mph):

The presentation is spoiled by a momentary lapse into “not for girls” (because the presenter forgot it’s the 21st century and he’s not in Taliban country), but pram itself is an impressive machine.

All it needs to put it over the top is to combine it with the “devil baby in the stroller” prank:

This was an image that appeared on the ‘net back in the fall. Did anyone ever find out what Vladimir Putin said to this kid that left him with that reaction?

I imagine it was something along these lines: