Free Rice

Just a quick post today. I decided to approach my thesis in a similar way to my National Novel Writing Month novel, and told myself that I had to increase my page count by six pages today, set myself a strict target. On five pages, and just started the sixth. Would be even more but I just don't feel like drawing diagrams today, so am stuck with working on text and maths.

(note: of course, the obvious distinction with the challenge of National Novel Writing Month is that I am trying to keep the quality of my writing high with writing my thesis)

Today all I want to publicise is a website called FreeRice, where rice is donated based on your knowledge of vocabulary (in this case, your knowledge of the meaning of a word). For every word you get right they donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program. Doesn't sound like much, right? In ten minutes I had "earned" nearly 2000 grains of rice, which according to a quick Google by my officemate is between 52 and 56 grams. That still doesn't sound like much...

The site does a daily combined total, tracking how much has been donated. The total for yesterday was close to 400 million grains of rice. If my sums are right, then even if 52 grams for 2000 grains is correct the total donated for yesterday is in the region of 10 thousand kilograms (or 22 thousand pounds for you non-metrics).

Much more is needed to help defeat the problem of hunger around the world, but this is something.

Sharing "Sharing Ideas"

Every day David Morgan-Mar produces a comic for Irregular Webcomic, and nearly every day there is an annotation for that strip. Occasionally it becomes something of an essay, and sometimes it has nothing really to do with the strip, but is incredibly insightful.

I think the annotation for today's comic (click here, and scroll past the comic to the text) is really, really interesting, and I think "Dare to be stupid" is going to join "Don't Suck" on my computer at home as I write (and on my PC in uni as I write up my thesis).

So share your ideas, espcially your bad ones, and dare to ask questions - especially if you think they're stupid.