Another moment of minor celebrity!
At Twitter’s first developer conference, Chirp, Brady Forrest ran a special version of Ignite – the conference we ran an instance of in Montreal – Ignite Chirp.
As part of that event they had a special round of Powerpoint Karaoke – the geek sport where you present using slides you’ve never seen before.
Using decks first created by Pete Taylor and I for Bitnorth 09, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and SXSW Battledecks guru Anil Dash gave entertaining freestyle presentations. And I even got a shout out by name from Brady the organizer – woo-hoo! Shame he didn’t mention Pete, who did the bulk of the work. But still – awesome to have Internet celebrities using our decks!
You can download the full 16 decks here.
Read MoreMimas probe sees ‘Pac-man in the moon’
If it was two days later I would think this was an April Fool joke – but apparently not!
How well read are you?
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the top 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Update: Correction – This is not the BBC’s top 100 list, it is in fact the Guardian’s top 100 list from 2007, and the statement about believing most people will have read only 6 was created to try and make this more appealing as an internet meme. More on the meme here. Apologies for not fact-checking this. Thanks to Ben for spotting the error (see comments below). In any case, I’ll leave the post here, it may still be interesting to see how many on the list you’ve read.
Instructions:
Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read, then count how many X’s you have.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
Avril Lavigne, Justin Bieber, Nelly Furtado, Nikki Yanofsky and many more in Canada’s answer to Band Aid
In the same vein as Band Aid’s Do they Know it’s Christmas, a huge number of Canadian singers including Avril Lavigne, Justin Bieber, Nelly Furtado and Olympic star Nikki Yanofsky have come to record a charity single to raise funds for Haiti’s relief efforts.
Support Haiti by buying the single, video or T-shirt at Young Artists For Haiti. And be sure to pass it on so others can help too.
an interesting tale from 18th century France (via @jmatlin)
In this short cartoon you will learn some interesting things about the history of paper money and why you can’t just print more of it.
It’s a great example of why would need to study history and learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes in the future.
Is there a parallel with US subprime lending? You be the judge.
Hopefully the new trend of local banknotes in the UK are backed by equivalent UK legal tender in a bank vault somewhere!