Life has been too busy for me to write much recently. There are a lot of ideas in the works that I hope will see the light of day soon, Turtle Redux, CoPolicy, more on programming the watch and teaching kids to code. Perhaps even something on SocialMediaSunday and Ramadan. Thoughts about undoing racism, various political campaigns, like Zephyr Teachout’s in New York. Then, there is the Facebook experiment.

Without having the time I would like to delve into any of these with as much depth as I would like, I’m doing a quick summary of thoughts. Currently, I have twenty tabs open in browsers. Many of them are articles about something else I want to explore.

From those silly quizzes, I’ve found that I’m like Walt Whitman, the musical Les Mis, and the Norse God Njord. Besides the Facebook issue, there is an article on gender and education, Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio. At some point, I should spend some time responding to that.

Another post which caught my eye, which I should go back and read more closely is Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (The Real Reason For The Forty-Hour Workweek). It seems like combining this with the gender article, the Facebook research and THX 1138 could yield some interesting writing.

I also have a page open to Viewster’s online film festival. The voting has closed, the winners will be announced on the 7th, but I should spend some time checking out some of the films.

Also worth noting is that the 2014 Emerging Artists Showcase Performers for Falcon Ridge have been selected. I need to review them.

Fiona is interviewing SuperMonkey on her radio show tonight.

In geek space, a couple links that caught my attention are Biltzortung. This shows realtime lightning information and you can set up your own detector with information from the page. There is an article about what is claimed to be The most efficent wind turbine, so sale soon for about $5,500 and generating “an average of 1,500 kilowatt-hours of energy” per year.

I’m also looking at Basis, another smartwatch/fitness tracker. I’m curious about how it compares to Gears 2 and other devices. How programmable will it be? Next to that tab, I have the Samsung Gear Application - Getting started guide. I also have a tab open about Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). I’ve been thinking about better ways to organize photos.

Also, there is the news that the Chrome OS will Run Android Apps Natively, Sync with Android Devices. This sounds really interesting, when it is ready. I’m also waiting for the next update to Glass which is expected to include a viewfinder for the camera.

In the area of health equity, I recently came across People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism. I’ve also added Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, The danger of a single story to my viewing list.

On the political side, there is Policies to Address Poverty in America. It looks like there is a lot of content there, but the question becomes, how to digest it into policy statements for a campaign. This reflects an interesting way to look at policies. On the one hand, you have the talking heads on cable news, spouting simplistic black and white talking points. On the other hand, you have policy briefs from think tanks that are so dense that they do get read as often as they should. Then, you have the problem of how to take all of this and weave it towards specific, attainable legislative action.

Staying on the more theoretical side, I’ve been thinking a lot about social contracts, and recently, how they relate to biblical covenants. This has led me to the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center’s Social covenants and social contracts in transitions.

Then, there is the recent news about health issues in Connecticut, Access Health CT Looking Into North Haven Woman’s Policy Cancellation

Wrapping things, up, the latest thing on Facebook, that I’ve been finding annoyingly inane are the “If you think you’re so smart, in ten seconds think of a word that begins with T and ends with T, or starts with A and ends with E or starts with S and ends with P or a city that doesn’t have an A in it, etc.” It fits with all those things that no one will ever believe or will blow your minds.