Created for a talk at New Think Festival, May 2012 at Al-Hussein Park.

The presentation has images and directions, but here’s the list for those of us who need information NOWNOWNOW:
1. Turtle Green
2. Jabal Al-Qalaa (the Citadel) during the call to prayer
3. The stairs in Jabal Amman
4. El 7ara
5. La Calle
6. Jo Bedu
7. Beit Ibra
8. Darat Al-funun
9. Habiba in Downtown Amman
10. The Internet

This is so cool, from Carl Pyrdum’s 2010 essay on the internal logic of Gothic manuscript illuminations using illustrations from Super Mario Brothers.

[via the always-awesome Boing Boing]

I cringe every single freakin’ time I get an email addressed to “Dears,”.

Sweetie, you can’t say that. It just sounds stupid.

What you can use instead:

Hello,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Friends,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Dear bloggers,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Ladies and gentlemen,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Hi everyone,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Dear team,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Dear participants,

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

-

Avast!

I hope you are well. Here are some guidelines you might need.

Thanks,
Person

See? It’s simple enough. There are a hundred million options that can help you avoid “Dears”.

Thank you.

These are such simple words, yet they are so profound. 

A beautiful excerpt from the 11th episode Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”:

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

[Via Brain Pickings]

Via Arabzy