Test Your Awareness : Whodunnit? And Look Out for Bikers!

Summer is here, and those of us who are sick of driving and public transportation, or just environmentally or health conscious, are ditching conventional means of commuting and resorting to biking instead.

And as the number of bikers is increasing, tension between drivers, pedestrians and bikers seems to be on the rise, so the first thing I would recommend is that we all chill down a little and become more considerate of all our fellow commuters, no matter how they commute.

And especially for those who drive cars (aka, metal death machines), please be aware that, as human beings, you have physical and cognitive blind spots, and that no matter how good a driver you are, any sudden maneuver may result in a collision that may seriously hurt (or possibly even kill) those of us who are trying to reduce our CO2 footprint by riding bikes.

Don't believe that you might miss something that's right in front of your eyes? Well, you could always check out the invisible gorilla test to see how fallible human attention is, or you could try to solve the crime below, and see how your own observational skills stack up:

Did you pass with flying colors? I didn't think so. So, please, drive with caution, respect traffic rules, be courteous and remember that getting to your destination a minute later is totally worth not living with the guilt of having killed someone because you got impatient and rushed into a thoughtless decision.

In other words, I'm concerned for my life. Don't run me over!!! :)

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Kony and the Invisible Kidnapped Children

This blog, this little one-man operation, is motivated by the desire to educate those curious minds who want to be exposed to awesome, fascinating ideas and learn from them, and by the belief that a single individual can make some sort of positive difference in the world, no matter how small. I think of this blog as my small contribution to a world I love and want to help improve. Today's entry is particularly apropos of that theme because your individual involvement could help create a revolution such that the world has never seen.

As you may nor may not know, poor, destitute families in the regions in and around Uganda and Sudan, have been terrorized for decades by the unimaginable brutality of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a fundamentalist Christian group so violent and corrupt that only loudmouths such as Rush Limbaugh would defend it (I kid you not). The psychopathic leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, resorts to kidnapping, torturing and exploiting children who are consequently forced to kill their own parents, mutilate other children and commit all kinds of unimaginable atrocities against others, including their own families.

Unfortunately, because this geographical area doesn't represent any practical military or economic interests for us, our government has long ignored these violations of human rights and turned a blind eye to the suffering of the disenfranchised victims of this violence. But our representatives depend on us for votes and offices, and if we put enough pressure on them, then at least out of self-interest, they might finally decide to do the right thing. So let's make Kony so famous that he can no longer be ignored, and we can finally bring the bastard to justice and let some light shine on this dark corner of the world.

I want to live in a world in which this is an everyday occurrence:

Get involved and do your part to create a better world.

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