dazed by porn dreams

by Antonio Martínez, under a cc-by-nc-nd-2.0 license

About 10 million people in some parts of the Horn of Africa are being affected by the worst drought in the last 60 years. This has started a food crisis in several countries, some of them, like Ethiopia and Somalia, with famine problems for decades.

Help might be coming soon, by the hand of the U.N. World Food Program. The organization is planing to deliver food aid to 6 of the 9 million people affected. Let's hope they do it fast.

More info at The Guardian

Swedish designer Viktor Hertz decided to bring some honesty to logotypes from some companies. The results are brilliant and funny as hell.

via Planet Oddity

Members of the American Congress and their staff got the green light to use Skype. According to the Skype blog, "Skype's engineers worked closely with the Congressional network security team to ensure that Skype is used safely for official business". How they did that, I don't know, but I assume they promised they wouldn't use the "recording agents" patented by Microsoft, Skype's newest owner.

If you want, you can know more about the FreedomBox at freedomboxfoudation.org.

In the current government, Portugal doesn't have a Ministry of Culture. Instead, it has a Secretary of State in charge of culture, something that didn't happened for a few years.

One of the measures by the Secretary of State for Culture is to base the financial support to portuguese cinema in the number of tickets sold and the number of viewers. They will, however, reserve part of the financial support to emerging artists and producers "which by their artistic and cultural particularity, may not find the necessary sources of funding in the market". How big will the cut will be, I still don't know.

Another measure is the decrease of the period of gratuity of the museums. If the other sounds fairly good, although I don't know much details about it to be sure, this one screams fail. We're already having problems convincing people to go to museums; if we decrease the gratuity period, we definitely won't bring more people to them.

The first measure seems relatively fair. If a director or producer makes more money than the others, it seems logical that he receives a lower subsidy because he can generate more profit from his work. This, hopefully, will mean that Manoel de Oliveira won't be the biggest beneficiary in the cinema funding made by the Portuguese Government anymore. It was about time!

The purpose of the second measure is to decrease the gratuity period of the portuguese museums. How this will benefit them, I can't figure out. We're having less and less people in the museums as it is. How can this be any helpful? Unless fewer people means less expenses for them...

Link (in portuguese)

"Splitscreen: A Love Story" is an amazing short movie, by JW Griffiths, entirely recorded on a Nokia N8 phone and winner of the Nokia Shorts competition 2011.

Ben Milne, a Scottish baker from Fisher & Donaldson, created an edible and fully playable vinyl record from chocolate. This was made for the release of a very limited record for FOUND, a Scottish band Ben is friend of.

via The Laughing Squid

University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist, Francis Thackeray, believes Shakespeare smoked weed. That's because him and some collegues of his found traces of marijuana, cocaine and other substances in a pipe found at his garden. Now, he wants to dig the body and test it to prove his theory.

From The Raw Story:

Pipes uncovered in the garden of Shakespeare's home in 2001 showed evidence of cannabis and cocaine.

"There were very low concentrations of cannabis, but the signature was there," according to Inspector Tommy van der Merwe, who tested the pipes at South Africa's Forensic Science Laboratory.

The evidence of cocaine was also very strong.

"The pipes we tested still had dirt in them which preserved the residues inside the stem and bowl," Van der Merwe said. "The readings we got were the same as if it had tested a modern-day crack pipe."

Camphor, myristic acid, and quinoline were among other substances detected in the pipes.

"Myristic acid, which is found in nutmeg, has hallucinogenic properties, and camphor, perhaps, was used to hide the smell of tobacco or other substances," Thackeray noted in 2001.

Stonner or not a stonner, that is the question.

via Boing Boing

A equipa Ubuntu-PT está a oferecer CDs do Ubuntu 11.04, a última versão da distribuição de GNU/Linux mantida pela Canonical. Estes CDs são os originais enviados pela própria empresa para este e outros grupos. Disponíveis, estão 250 CDs do Ubuntu, 50 do Kubuntu e 50 da edição Server. Se quiserem um ou mais para distribuir no vosso estabelecimento de ensino, fazer uma "install party" ou qualquer outro evento relacionado com Ubuntu e/ou Software Livre, basta fazerem o pedido para o email locoteam {arroba} ubuntu-pt {ponto} org, escrevendo "CDS NATTY" no assunto e indicando a quantidade na mensagem. Caso não possam fazer o levantamento em Lisboa, podem combinar a forma de envio no email em que fazem o pedido.

A equipa Ubuntu-PT está a oferecer CDs do Ubuntu 11.04, a última versão da distribuição de GNU/Linux mantida pela Canonical. Estes CDs são os originais enviados pela própria empresa para este e outros grupos. Disponíveis, estão 250 CDs do Ubuntu, 50 do Kubuntu e 50 da edição Server. Se quiserem um ou mais para distribuir no vosso estabelecimento de ensino, fazer uma "install party" ou qualquer outro evento relacionado com Ubuntu e/ou Software Livre, basta fazerem o pedido para o email locoteam {arroba} ubuntu-pt {ponto} org, escrevendo "CDS NATTY" no assunto e indicando a quantidade na mensagem. Caso não possam fazer o levantamento em Lisboa, podem combinar a forma de envio no email em que fazem o pedido.