Ma Vérité

Sissel - O Mio Babbino Caro

Great intepretation by Norwegian crossover soprano Sissel Kyrkjebø. Another version I like other than Maria Callas.

Maria Callas - O Mio Babbino Caro

Gravitational Force

Mutation

Pythagoras Theorem

(more…)

One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power thirty years later.

Critics argue that the Soviet Union’s numerous internal failings and subsequent collapse were a direct result of the practical failings of Marxism. Most Marxists on the contrary claim that it was precisely the abandonment of Marxism in the Soviet Union that led to its demise, due to its isolation in a backward country not ripe for socialism according to Marx.

Marx saw more advanced modes of production as growing out of mature capitalism, and needing widespread education and democratic apparatuses to allow the eventual control of the state by the people themselves (and eventually, the “withering away of the state” under a truly mature communism) - only possible with a well educated and democratic populace. Marx did not appear to suggest that a stage of economic development could simply be skipped over, as the Soviet ideology implied. Rather, no nation should realistically be able to achieve socialism (let alone a mature communism) until it had developed a modern capitalist system, and mature communism was supposed to require a level of wealth and technology that would allow the basic material needs of all citizens to be produced with very little labor, on average, per person in a given time period. That achievement would then free people’s time and energies to fully participate in the democratic running of society, and then to finally overcome the alienation that the pattern of technological revolutions had caused throughout history—a giant arc in which societies developed from the “primitive communism” of small bands that had little or no structural inequality, through the great agrarian empires (usually involving slavery at one end and the richest monarchs at the other) which Marx considered to be the pinnacle of inequality, through feudalism and capitalism to the socialist organisation of society in which all can participate equally due to this technological development. The “elites” of feudal and capitalist society become less able to dominate others either through economics or ideology - their role in society is finished - as the working class develops its strength and becomes the “gravedigger” of capitalism.

An intriguing critic of Marx, although he also paid tribute to many of Marx’s basic ideas, was Louis Feuer, the late professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley. In his introduction to Selected Works on Economics and Politics by Karl Marx, published in 1960, Feuer argued strongly for the viewpoint, also expressed by others, that Marxism has many of the characteristics of a religion—in other words, that Marxism largely depends upon a fervent kind of faith, not provable scientifically, which is typical of religious believers. Just the same, Feuer in his introduction, and in other works, argued that Marx has had a very enduring and positive influence on the social and economic thinking of almost every modern country, particularly in Western Europe, but also in the United States. He made the interesting comment that Marxism largely depends upon the injection of ethical thinking into economic and political analysis—in contrast to modern trends which prefer to discuss these important areas in a totally “objective” manner without ethical values.

I’m keeping this as my favourite OSCommerce contribution list for most of my ecommerce store projects. The most important criterias for the list are stability and usability of the contributions.

• Administration Access Level Accounts 2.0
  Imagine your store backend administration without password protection. OSC should have added this on their milestone 2.2 years ago. This is the first contribution I’d install after a clean MS 2.2 installation.

• Dynamic menu manager for OsCommerce
  Dynamenu will implement an add-in box that will display your product’s categories as a pre-defined DHTML menu. You can choose from drop-down or vertical fly-out menu, expandable/collapsible tree menu or even a plain vertical or horizontal menu. You can even opt not to display the usual “box” so that it can be easily integrated with your store template for a real custom look.

• SEO-G
  Have you ever wondered how to optimize your OSCommerce website links for the search engines? If yes, this component will greatly suit your needs. It will change your URLs from:
  http://www.yoursite.com/product_info.php?cPath=1_4&products_id=1
  to:
  http://www.yoursite.com/Hardware/Graphics-Cards/Matrox-G200-MMS/
  This component has proved to largely increase the website page rank.

• Article Manager v1.0
  Article Manager is a comprehensive article publishing system written for 2.2MS2. If you want to offer articles on your site with the option of cross-selling to your products, then this contribution is a must. I’m using this contribution to add contents for Search Engine Optimisation purpose.

• oscThumb
  Instead of sending the full size image to the browser and let the browser resize it, which can seriously slow down the loading time of your pages and look ugly, oscThumb will generate thumbnails and save them in a cache folder on your server, for future use.
  Use the manual installation included in the guide if you are not installing on a clean MS 2.2 installation.

• Advanced CartBox
  Advanced cartbox infobox, replaces the existing cart infobox and includes the following features:- Displays product attributes.- Displays quantity up/down buttons and a remove button for each product. So the customer can manage their cart without going to the view cart page.Very cool and easy to install!

• Recover Cart Sales
  If you have used the report Unsold Carts and are ready to step up to a tool that is designed to help with sales, then you are ready for Recover Cart Sales. The tool contains a sales tool (that is also a report tool) and a separate report tool to see how well you have done in converting sales.

Hans Rosling Presentation

The software used for presentation is called Trendalyzer, a remarkable piece of software for statistic presentation and analysis. Trendalyzer was acquired by Google on Mars 2007.

Public data provided by: www.gapminder.org

Bumptop

That’s the kind of desktop I’ve been waiting for!

It’s a man… NO!

It’s sushi… NO!

It’s a birthday cake!

Su-Yin -Décorateur

Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

“I am Chinese(Malaysian),a student at University(UNSW), enthusiastic,energetic, charming and in love with FOOD! I cook daily for my house of 3 with limited resources, free time and very basic culinary skills; however,I take is as good practice. I intend for this journal to be a fun guide and personal reference to keep track of my many cooking adventures. So join me as I embrace my love for cooking, discover new culinary inspirations, improve and mature with my new found skills in the culinary arts; while making a big mess along the way! *cheeky grin*”

Checkout her blog.

http://www.photoshopsupport.com

Great resources for webmasters.

http://www.miniajax.com/

Neat stuff. Nice AJAX and DHTML codes that spice up you web site.