Neat new blog community

Salon.com has unveiled it's new user-driven content website / online community: Open Salon. (Get it?)

For the past few months I've been participating in the beta test of Open Salon. It has had its issues and problems but has already become a go-to spot for good writing on politics, current events, society, family, art, etc etc. Healthy debates have ensued in a mostly respectful and constructive manner. There's some great stuff there that I will hope to highlight here in the coming days. One of the best things: People write in complete sentences and without rampant abbreviation and text speak.

For now, I'll invite you to check out the Open Salon home page, as well as my own blog under the nom de plume Skeptic Turtle.

Democracy on the move

Democracy is on the move, but in which direction exactly?

The Maps of War website created the below dynamic map showing the history of democracy and where and when it has spread. Of course, it's a bit simplified and skips some smaller examples of democracy in the middle. Democracy, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder. The most interesting thing is what the map creators judge to be democracies in today's world. They take a pass on some countries.

Your Ecological Footprint

I just tried out a new online project designed to calculate your personal ecological footprint. Basically since the world has finite renewable and nonrenewable resources in the near future, how much is our personal consumption overshooting the available resources?

They calculate that the world's population is over-consuming at a rate in which we would need another half of the Earth to sustain it.

I took the quiz and had some bad news. First, on the good side, my ecological footprint was slightly less than the national average. Still, apparently we'd need a total of 5.33 Earths if everyone was to consume at my level. The national average is a shocking 6.35 Earths!

They explain some of the methodology and also provide resources on how one could reduce their ecological footprint in the different categories.

Try it out at Redefining Progress's Ecological Footprint Quiz.

Urgent update on lefties

• The dangers of left handedness

Idea via MNSpeak.

In other news:

• Television kills
• Sushi is unsafe
• New research uncovers the dirt on bellybutton lint
  
• Polka music popularity remains steady
  
• Disease in the wolf population
  
• Be wary of French people
• Passive aggressiveness is on the rise
• Fundamentalists increase their flock
• Drink beer every day
• Be nice to your mother
• Celebrity-driven news ever more popular
• Conspiracy theorists assail skeptics
  
• The Internet is your friend
  
• Hummers are dangerous
• New species of worm discovered
  
• The downside of safe sex [adult content warning]
• Comprehensive sex ed saves lives
  
• Time marches on
• Americans urged to get better sleep
• Weekly World News will be back on newsstands
  
• Public service announcement on itchy pants

• And finally, new disturbing intelligence is partially declassified! [You heard it here first!]
  

Keepin' track of your family

About a year ago I signed up for a free account at Geni.com. Geni is an easy way for just about anyone to construct a family tree. You can quickly type in names and relationships and it creates a visual family tree representation.

Originally, I wanted to use this as a tool to explain to my daughter how various family members are related to each other. (I remember as a kid being confused about who the heck all the relatives were.) As I added more distant relations, it has become a helpful tool for myself.

You can invite other family members to join too and enable them to add people and information to your shared family tree. If you don't know where or when your great aunt was born, perhaps your mom can type that in, and it will remain on your tree for posterity.

If you're really into genealogy or keeping detailed information, the service lets you put in all sorts of info on each person besides birth/death/children/spouse. You can put all sorts of biographical info, such as where they went to school, where they worked, religion, hobbies, quotes, etc. You name it. It also allows you to upload pictures.

Other features I haven't used include laying out people from your tree on a Google map or sending yourself automatic family birthday reminders.

The best part of all this, it's all free. This is not one of those sites like Classmates.com, that aggressively seeks to entice you to sign up for their paid subscription the moment someone somewhere views your profile so that you can find out who.

Here's an example of what my tree looks like. On my account, more information on each person shows, but I've set some higher privacy protections for the general blog readership. Go ahead and click and drag on the below image to navigate around the tree.

Get your own family tree at Geni.com

Overheard

The great site, Overheard in Minneapolis, has a doozy here, with a customer weighing the benefits of how to apply a 10% discount.

Website of the day

If you're looking to order some beautiful notecards, check out this site. It's a college friend of mine who does wonderfully-detailed, nature inspired work. It's different from anything else I've seen. Contact her accordingly to order the cards.

• Abigail Woods Anderson

Her site is under construction. You can see more of her work at MNArtists.org.