Montag, Juli 30, 2007

A lot of what I post on here is pretty much just things I read on my different RSS feeds. I've decided to start using Google Reader's sharing feature. So I now have a mini-blog which can be found here. All it is is basically a filtered list of links and articles that I think are cool.

So if we have similar tastes, you may want to subscribe to the feed there to get a John-filtered list of links I read and think are funny / cool / thought-provoking / weird.
Iraq won the Asian Cup against Saudi Arabia - and right away, people took to the streets to celebrate....by shooting their guns into the air. That's awesome, I wish more of that would have happened in Germany during the World Cup. :)

Another excellent example of the many little and ...uh... not-so-little differences between cultures.

Also, it's amazing to see (once again) the incredibly uniting power soccer can have.

Donnerstag, Juli 26, 2007


OK, this is awesome: Chore Wars. It's basically a fantasy role playing game web site with experience points and gold and armor and leveling up, etc. But the hilariously cool part is that you earn your experience points by doing real-world chores at home. So the idea is - your household or office signs up together, and the more chores someone does, the higher he or she levels up.

Man I wish this would have existed when I was a kid and we had chore lists and stuff. This would have made things a bit more fun. :)

Found via WebWare.

Dienstag, Juli 17, 2007


Wow, quite a weird but cool "inverted world map", where the oceans are land masses and vice versa. Stare at it long enough, it plays tricks with your mind. The big (better) version is here.

Montag, Juli 16, 2007

Here's my favorite scene in the trailer for the new Simpsons movie.

Mittwoch, Juli 11, 2007

From The Corner (via Noel Heikinnen), a graph displaying "belief in God" in percentage. Note this is not about belief in Jesus, Christianity, or even if God is personal.

Freitag, Juli 06, 2007


Just added this great daily comic to my feed reader: http://xkcd.com.

Why? Well, believe it or not, this comic is 11:0 for me - I've seen 11 of them, and have actually laughed at every single one.

That's quite a contrast for example to the Berlin U-Bahn Willmor comic which seriously is at 0 to about 40. They're just. not. funny.

Edit: Actually, to be honest, now the comic is at about 25:1. It's spooky how similar my humor seems to be to that guy's humor. And I REALLY need to get back to work.

Mittwoch, Juli 04, 2007


I continue to be amazed at my brother David's photography skills. He's currently on a trip throughout Europe after graduating from high school, and he's already taken some amazing pics and posted them on his blog. Check it out, as well as his photos on his Flickr page!

Dienstag, Juli 03, 2007

In Nigeria, the average price of machetes dropped by 50% (from $6 to $3) after elections were held (and politicians stopped employing thugs for their campaigns).

Whoever came up with the idea to do a survey on machete prices has got to have one dark sense of humor.

Montag, Juli 02, 2007

After a bunch of studies, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth has discovered that babies actually start "lying" and deceiving their parents from around when they're 6 months old. Until now, mainstream psychology has said kids aren't capable of willfully deceiving till age 4. Of course, as almost any parent will tell you, that is complete nonsense.

This new study definitely confirms a suspicion I've had for quite a while: Little kids and babies are WAY smarter (and way less innocent) than we give them credit for.

One example that happened all the time with my son Joshua was that he knew he wasn't supposed to touch something and so he would look a different direction and then move his arm as if to grab for something else nearby, thereby "accidentally" brushing against precisely the object he wasn't supposed to touch. He'd then pull a mock "shocked" face, as if to say "oops, I didn't mean to do that". And he was maybe 10 or 11 months when he started doing this.

Psalm 51:5, baby. Psalm 51:5.