Professor Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 2004 and founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, has planted more than 30 million trees in 12 African countries since 1977.  When a corporate group in the United States told Professor Maathai it was planning to plant a million trees, her response was: “That’s great, but what we really need is to plant a billion trees.”

Out of that idea comes the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign with a goal of combating global warming (assuming there really is global warming 🙂 ).

I have to be honest with you, I’m no tree hugger, but I really like this idea!

Working off of Andy’s earlier Halloween Lego submission, I came across this article on OddPeak about the ten best Lego creations they’ve come across.

Being a past Lego enthusiast myself, I find these creations very intuitave and enlightening.  Most of the constructions use or depict current technology, and are most impressive; considering they are built from what are mostly considered children’s toys!

Makes me wish I still had all my Legos from my childhood…

[found via OddPeak]

Have you ever wanted to be a supervillain?  Well look no further, because Suck UK Design has what you’re looking for!

Command your evil minions in style while you pose dramatically in this fine unit.  Comfort and class means everything while you plan to dominate the world!

If you know about Fry’s you probably also know that to take part in the “Costco of the electronics stores”, you had to be lucky enough to live near one because the online presense was basically nill. No more, now Fry’s appears to have their complete store online and joining the ranks of other e-tailers.

My favorite online electronics store for everything from software to building out a new PC from scratch is NewEgg, now i have Fry’s to look to just in time for the holidays.

Check out the ExtremeTech article for details.

NPR has a great audio segment on the randomness of the coin toss. They also interview statistician Persi Diaconis who asked Harvard University engineers to build him a mechanical coin flipper (seen below) that can always make the perfect coin flip. It appears that the randomness in a coin toss is introduced by sloppy humans.

They also bring up the issue of American Football games that are started with a coin flip. Listen to the segment in Real or Windows Media formats.

OmniNerd has a good synopsis and links to a study on the mental processing of color described in Nature.com’s “Even black-and-white bananas look yellow“.

Basically it’s in regards to people perceive color differently from person to person and may be based on how their brain processes the color by sometimes associating it with a common object.

Follow the interesting tale of a U.S. library researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary play detective decades ago in tracking down the antedate and etymology for the word ‘Nachos’.

As the largest city influenced by Tex-Mex trends, San Antonio might possibly yield a clue to nacho…

…how could anyone who has looked at and eaten nachos see any relationship between one of these and the adjective flat-nosed?…

[found via geekpress]

Two scientists, George Smoot and John Mather, have been selected to receive the 2006 Nobel for Physics for their detection and analysis of evidence that gives us a ‘shapshot’ of the universe approx 380,000 years after the big bang. The big bang occurred over 13 Billion years ago.

They leveraged NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite to detect cosmic microwave background that is widely believed to be a remnant of the Big Bang.

Wired has a funny and only vaguely helpful article on how to disarm an atomic bomb. At a high level the steps include:

1. Disconnect the wires
2. Remove the neutron trigger
3. Remove the conventional explosive
4. Seperate the U-235 mass

And if you’re interested, we have ‘How to Make an Atomic Bomb” from The Journal of Irreproducible Results. You know it’s gonna be fun when Step 1 starts with
   “First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier”

Traffic is the bane of all commuters. This article on OmniNerd by Brandon U. Hansen analyzes a year of data to determine if minor tweaks to departure times can significantly impact commute length – or if it is all out of the driver’s control. For a full year he kept track of the departure and arrival times both to and from work & home, the results are very interesting.