It’s simple really. If you’re an aspiring musician just wait until you hear Google is updating images of the streets in your suburb and then follow these steps and you’ll sell millions, if not billions of copies to workers in Indian call centres.

1. Get a guitar.
2. Get a sign.
3. Drive around until you see the Street View Car.
4. Go one block past the Street View Car.
5. Set up a placard and pose.

The result: Priceless.

Did you know that water droplets are perfectly spherical? You could measure it for yourself if you could remember the formula for the volume of a sphere and if you had one of these pi shower curtains featuring pi to 4,600 decimal places.

Email you can do from the bathroom without fear of condemnation or suspicion.

The Oatmeal has ten reasons. I like this one.

This made me:
a) wish I had a little brother.
b) glad I don’t have a little brother.
c) laugh.
d) all of the above.

UPDATE: I posted the wrong video – I’ll leave both up.

My little sister obviously didn’t get the memo. You know. The one I addressed to the whole world inviting contributions for the increasingly inappropriately named “Mad Skillz Week”… you can decide the basis that I think the name is inappropriate for yourself. Anyway, Maddie, aka little sister number 2, had this to contribute.

I was annoyed that Nathan didn’t ask me to give input during mad skillz week. I thought perhaps he didn’t believe I had any mad skillz, and he may have been right.

I’m Mad, but the skill part still eluded me. I considered giving 5 tips on how to be me. But then if all the readers took my advice there could be maybe 3 or 4 of me running around and so I thought the better of it.

I considered writing 5 tips on how to be a cat lady.

1. Buy two cats of the opposite sex.
2. Never shower.
3. Walk hunched.
4. Wear scarves and cardigans.
5. …

Well now you see the problem. Plus since I’m not actually a cat lady it seemed like a fallacy.

Still I was convinced I could give 5 tips on something. Then it hit me…

Mad on How to share mad skillz:

(in no particular order of importance, except point 4)

1. Be humble. Suggest you’re not that skilled, that there are a million people better than you and that you only have the skills because they were bestowed upon you by a mentor/teacher/father figure.Including other people’s names makes it clear you’re not a self centred blogger and that you’re part of a real world community without suffering some superiority disorder. I’m not really sure I’m qualified to advise you on how to write about your real skills, but growing up with Nath has taught me a little about writing stuff.
2. Never say your skills all come naturally. If people are reading about your skills part of them wants to be like you. Fill them with a little false hope – tell them if they work hard they’ll be able to do your skill too. Anyone could write 5 tips to others, all you need is a skill and a communication medium – chisel/stone tablet, pen/paper, fingers/iPhone.
3. “Although seemingly contradictory to rule number 1″ – this phrase should always be included in your 5 key points. why? Because it shows there are shades of grey, there’s no best way, and it makes it look like your skill is a fine balancing act – so is actually a real skill.And although seemingly contradictory to point 1, it’s important your 5 points show that you are skilled, don’t shy away too much from your abilities because if people think you don’t know what you’re talking about why should they listen??? I know this because I won a public speaking award in grade 10.
4. Always have something funny in point 4.
5. Don’t put too much technical jargon in your points, but do include examples, photos, diagrams, flow charts – things that can be grasped fast. People outside your world aren’t familiar with the culture and stuff. And to be honest they probably don’t care about technicalities because how many people are going to become substitute roller-skating photography teachers? Not many.
   
   They are interested in the general gist of your skillz. So stick with simple words, concepts and grammar. Keep it short. <- see?

Sometimes I read links to awesome posts about cool stuff where the person does such a good job of describing the content at the other end that I don’t feel the need to click through. This is probably a bad thing. A few weeks back Kottke linked to a post about how to write an incendiary blog post. His post was good. I shared it via google reader, and thought nothing further of it.

Then Amy linked to the same post and I read the original. It’s funny. You should read it – and make sure you check out the comments too…

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is “Um.” This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

Here’s my favourite comment…

“This comment is by a trolling Jehova’s Witness who is filled with brotherly love for all the other commenters, but knows without meeting any of them that they all deserve to burn in hell forever. Fortunately, anyone willing to read this far is already jaded from way too much time spent reading comments.”

The moral to this story (other than that you should read both Amy’s blog and Kottke.org) is that you should always click through to interesting links.

Part of me wants to celebrate this video as the epitome of exuberant youth, the other part of me wants to run screaming down the street aiming for some sense of mind numbing catharsis. You will be simultaneously richer and poorer for listening to this song from a teenage band in the states. It’s everything that is bad about overproduced Christian music – and I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys get some sort of recording deal in the wash.

“Shine” by Final Placement from sharity world on Vimeo.

This video has gone viral and the funniest part of the story is that the guitarist dudded his mates in an attempt to salvage some pride – he jumped onto the discussion thread on the Dangerous Minds blog and defended his role in the cacophonic catastrophe.

Your enlightenment: Hello. I apologize for the rhythmless trainwreck of a song before you. The bassist and singer take all of this very seriously. This stuff is of paramount importance. They recorded this and asked me and a drummer to come play some parts on it. Whenever friends do this, I just follow ther direction blindly, letting them do whatever they want. This stuff will never get out to the public, right? Wrong on this one. So I guess this is me defending myself and the drummer. We are not members of the band. We were not asked if this could be made public on YouTube. If we had been, we would have undoubtedly said no. I guess we could have saved them a lot of trouble if we had just told them from the beginning their recording sucked. Questions? Feel free to ask more.

And the lyrics.

there are times when we all fall down
can’t seem to get it off the ground
you put your hope on what you do
but still feel you never get through

you know it’s hard
most of the time
but one fine day
you will find

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a second chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

you think the world has got you and
you can’t seem to like happy end and
it’s a one step forward two steps back
the train is running off the tracks

you know it’s hard
most of the time
but one fine day
you will find

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a second chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

(solo)

take it all in stride
one step at a time
cause someday you will find
the words you’re looking for

take it all in stride
one step at a time
cause someday you will find
the words you’re looking for

this is your life
this is your time
it’ll be alright
you’re gonna shine
a second chance
a brand new day
don’t give up
you’ll find a way

so take a deep breath
and close your eyes
this is your life
you’re gonna shine
cause this is your life

An article from Freakonomics has caused a bit of a stir. A family from the Bible Belt confessed to feigning Christianity in order to fit in. It’s sad. If the church is pressuring people – either overtly or covertly to conform behaviourally without a change in beliefs first then it is not doing its job. The church should be loving and seeking the welfare of non-Christians – and Christian parents should be encouraging their kids to play with the non-Christian kid next door. If they’re so worried about their kid being converted by the friendly neighbourhood atheist then maybe they should reconsider their parenting strategy lest the kid make up their own mind when they reach his/her 20s only to discover a big and scary world of ideas beyond their sheltered milieu.

Here’s a quote from the article…

We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.

It seemed silly but it’s all very serious business down here. We don’t go to church or teach or children one belief is “right” over another. We expose them to every kind of belief and trust that they will one day settle in to their very own spirituality.

I know we Christians want our children to grow up just like us (and I’m not a parent – though I have been a child) but surely we can be just as confident that our children will make the right choice as the agnostic is about theirs… I wonder if there’s a correlation between the parents who don’t believe in vaccination and parents who don’t let their children play with the scary atheists.

This was not the most interesting part of that particular Freakonomics post. Oh no. The most interesting part was this study of the effect of using an open collection plate rather than a closed bag thing – this further demonstrates the hypocrisy inherent in the system.

In these churches, the collection was taken up in a closed bag that was passed along from person to person, row to row. Soetevent got the churches to let him switch things up, randomly substituting an open collection basket for the closed bags over a period of several months. He wanted to know if the added scrutiny changed the donation patterns. (An open basket lets you see how much money has already been collected as well as how much your neighbor puts in.) Indeed it did: with open baskets, the churchgoers gave more money, including fewer small-denomination coins, than with closed bags — although, interestingly, the effect petered out once the open baskets had been around for a while.