http://aleksi.knuutila.net Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:09:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=379 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=372 Where the barren desert begins, and lines of concrete high-rise buildings change into ashen sand, the road leaving Yazd passes two hills. Both are topped with plain, circular walls. These are the towers of silence, the last place of rest for Zoroastrians. The walk up the hills carries me about 100 ... http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=276 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=369 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=366 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=355 If you are behind in your Christmas shopping, this is the perfect intellectual excuse for your shortcomings. In his new book Scroogenomics, Joel Waldfogel claims that Christmas is an economic calamity of the order of the worst natural disasters. The professor from the University of Pennsylvania blames the winter celebrations ... http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=353 (This is unlikely to function in RSS viewers, please follow the link.) Google Earth makes it drastically easier to locate maps and images of the planet and jump between different scales. One of the silly pastimes it allows is to spin the globe wildly and pick some random spot to zoom ... http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=352 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=350 http://aleksi.knuutila.net/?p=345