Sometimes when somebody tells you that something is easy to do, you think, yeah, it’s easy for you, but it may not be so easy for me. When it comes to blogging, it truly is easy for anyone who regularly uses a computer, and the basics can be taught in a couple of minutes. This video demonstrates in the simplest possible terms just how effortless it is to create a blog using Blogger, and these days everyone should consider blogging. Aside from providing a forum for you to share your thoughts with anyone who may happen by, it is also a place where your friends and family can visit to see that is going on in your life if you choose to maintain a general, personal or family blog.

Check out the video and head over to Blogger and get started sharing your brilliant insights with the rest of us here in cyberspace!

This extends beyond the Google search engine and includes YouTube and other Google web properties. Google operates in about 100 different nations so the disclosure is broken down by country. The governments of Brazil and the United States made the most requests for user data over the six-month period that is being reported. You can read more about this Google disclosure by clicking the link below.

Google Disclosure Tool

A site called Chitka, a user targeted advertising network, is monitoring ongoing sales of the iPad and they have a stats page that is devoted to this endeavor. If you are all about watching iPad sales figures change in real time like so many of us (lol), simply click the link below to keep yourself informed.

iPad Sales Statistics

(Photo courtesy of Matt Buchanan)

“While our politics has remained entrenched along worn divides, the ground has shifted beneath our feet. Around the world, countries are seeking an edge in the global marketplace by investing in new ways of producing and saving energy,” said Obama.

This approach to energy would not be possible under a so-called Republican president, because the Democrats in Congress would have to resist to provide the illusion of a two-party system. There is in fact just one force calling the shots behind both parties, and actions such as these prove it, whether you are in favor of drilling or not. Obama wouldn’t be president today if he told the voters in no uncertain terms that he intended to keep the same Secretary of Defense that Bush had, follow the same military course that Bush did, force people to buy health care, and approve of an energy strategy that has Dick Cheney smiling ear to ear.

You can read more about the drilling here:

Obama to reverse ban on offshore oil drilling

People who try to conduct Google searches in China are being redirected to the company’s uncensored Hong Kong based site, google.com.hk. The government has firewalls in place that will still prevent users from seeing the censored sites. The question concerning whether or not the Chinese government will allow Google to do business in the country outside of the realm of providing a censored version of its search engine. Bill Bishop is a Beijing-based pundit who offered this analysis of the move:

“The Chinese are very serious about pushing their soft-power agenda. Google just put a big hole in that sales pitch, and I think they know that. So the idea that Google can take out its search business and leave everything else, and China will just forgive and forget — that’s very much not how the Chinese government works.”

To read more on this story, click here:

Google Chinese exit leaves questions behind

John Hoopes is an anthropologist from the University of Kansas, and he’s spent a lot of time investigating these unique and intriguing artifacts.

“The earliest reports of the stones come from the late 19th century, but they weren’t really reported scientifically until the 1930s — so they’re a relatively recent discovery. They remained unknown until the United Fruit Company began clearing land for banana plantations in southern Costa Rica,” said Hoopes.

Many people have speculated that these stone spheres may have had their origins on the “lost continent” of Atlantis that Plato describes in his writings, and others speculate about some extraterrestrial connection.

Hoopes had more to say:

“We really don’t know why they were made. The people who made them didn’t leave any written records. We’re left to archeological data to try to reconstruct the context. The culture of the people who made them became extinct shortly after the Spanish conquest. So, there are no myths or legends or other stories that are told by the indigenous people of Costa Rica about why they made these spheres.”

You can read more about these intriguing artifacts here:

Starnge spherical stones of Costa Rica

“An eruption in and close to this glacier can be dangerous due to possible flooding if the fissure forms under the glacier,” he said. “That is why we initiated our disaster response plan,” said Agust Gunnar Gylfason of the Civil Protection Department.

This volcano has erupted since all the way back in the 1820s. Flights from the United States to Iceland were turned back, and air travel to the country has been suspended until more is known about the severity of the situation. You can read more about the story here:

Iceland volcano erupts

Many of us are into using social networking sites for business as well as pleasure. A brief post on a social network every now and then can keep your family and friends up to date on the day-to-day news that you want to share. Using these networks is also a way to get to know people who are relevant to the business that you are in. You can market your goods or services and learn about what others have to offer. All in all, social networking is fun and useful in a number of different ways.

The whole idea of social networking is to provide transparency. You are saying to your contacts that you are a real, genuine human being and a slice of your life with them. When you have a business and your customers can read what you are up to as a person as well as a company, it can and does enhance customer loyalty. Many very successful businesses are using social networking sites like Twitter to make this personal connection with their customers, and the phenomena is expanding by the day.

Here is the rub: if you tell your social network that you are going away on a vacation for a couple of weeks, and you don’t know everyone who is, say, following you on Twitter (and few of us do), you are giving away a very useful piece of information for anyone who robs houses for a living. It is true that they may not know where you live, but if your profile has your full name, depending on what it is and where you live, they may be able to put two and two together.

This happened to a Twitter user who lives in Arizona was recently robbed while he was out of town, and he is convinced that it is because he alerted his 2,000 or so followers that he was gone. He uses Twitter to promote his video business, and the thieves took his video gear but left all of his other valuables behind. It seemed to him that they knew he was gone and they knew that he owned a lot of valuable video equipment by reading his Twitter tweets, and that was all it took.

Personally I think that transparency is good for the most part, and one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch. But, incidents like these do demonstrate the need to use common sense when you are releasing personal information to your social networks. You can keep it real, but don’t give out so much information that you are putting yourself at risk.

Hannah Devlin: What has SETI learnt over the past 50 years?

Frank Drake: In our search for extraterrestrial life we are guided by our own experience of technology. At the same time, our knowledge of technology in some ways limits us. We might be ignoring technologies that are not appreciated or understood by us. Optical searches are the new thing. We’ve just started in the past few years and we’re using our own lasers as a model. Very powerful lasers have been developed for use in fusion reactors — these petawatt pulses create a flash of light that could outshine a star for one billionth of a second.

HD: According to the Drake equation, how many civilizations could we expect to be within observable distance?

FD: Without being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic 10,000 is the working number for the number of detectable civilizations. That corresponds to only one in 10 million stars, with the nearest about 1,000 light years away. We’ve not even come close to searching the necessary number of stars — we’ve searched several thousand, not several million and only searched a small part of the spectrum. That we’ve not found anything yet doesn’t tell us anything apart from that our estimates are not wrong beyond our wildest dreams.

For the full interview, click here.

Problems can’t be solved at the level of consciousness that created them.

–Albert Einstein

So there are two prongs to this equation. One is that we have the same people who created the problems, the one world government via the central banks, charged with the providing us with the solution to the problems that they have caused. This is clearly not going to work.

But the other part of it concerns the rest of us who are seeking earnest solutions to the problems that they have caused. We can be practical and suggest this or that, but we need to make sure that our ideas are originating from a level of consciousness that is higher than the consciousness that created the problems.

This would mean that it takes a new world view to implement solutions to problems that were created at a lesser level of consciousness. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest atom smasher, and you can read about in great detail here. It has been shut down for the last few months, but it has now been restarted. Very generally speaking, this particle accelerator is expected to tell us more about how matter itself comes into existence.

If we knew that things work in a way that is different from what we thought previously, that in itself would catapult us to a level of consciousness that is more evolved than it had been previously. We would then be equipped to solve the problems that were created at that inferior level of consciousness.

Keep an eye on the Large Hadron Collider as the researchers using it become more adept at understanding how to get the most out of it. What they discover may have a significant impact on global consciousness.