Acetio | Blogma

Each year Pantone names a color to be the "color of the year" of sorts, anticipating trends in clothing and home decorating.

The color they have selected for 2010 is "Turquoise", nearly identical to the 2005 selection, "Blue Turquoise"

15-5519

HEX: #1A9A94

In 2009 the shade was called "Mimosa", although it looked more like mustard

14-0848

HEX: #EEC050

And in 2008 the color was "Blue Iris"

18-3943

HEX: #2B167B

I don't recall seeing any more blue in the world in 2008 or any more yellow in 2009. Maybe I'm not sensitive enough to have noticed anything but the broadest patterns, but the only color trends I've ever noticed in this country were the early 1990s when mauve seemed to be everywhere, and the past five years when colors in the range of chartreuse/wasabi/avocado became popular.

In Japan, nearly ten years ago, I noticed an inordinate number of women dressed like neopolitan ice cream: tan, white, and pink. I was sure we would see that style in the US, but it hasn't happened.

WalkScore is a site that rates towns and neighborhoods based on how easy it is to get around on foot - The way it works is essentially based on how close a place is to businesses. So in a way, the site is as much a measure of population density and zoning regulations as anything else.

When I think about the places I would want to live, it ultimately comes down to the single issue of how pedestrian-friendly the place is. Living in New York was great for this reason, and Lubbock, TX was terrible. As a kid, we lived across the street from a library, but the street was a 12-lane highway with no place to cross. We had to wait for my dad to come home with the car so that we could drive across the street.

This blew my mind

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

On this page about Modern Human Variation is a link to this page about the Distribution of Blood Types with the following opening line:

"Blood provides an ideal opportunity for the study of human variation without cultural prejudice. It can be easily classified for many different genetically inherited blood typing systems. Also significant is the fact that we rarely take blood types into consideration in selecting mates. In addition, few people know their own type today and no one did a century ago. As a result, differences in blood type frequencies around the world are most likely due to other factors than social discrimination. Contemporary Japan is somewhat of an exception since there are popular Japanese stereotypes about people with different blood types. This could affect choice in marriage partners for some Japanese."

The maps on that page show the distribution of blood types in a way that seems to largely match cultural differences.

The map above is a composite I made of the distribution maps for types 'A', 'B', and 'O' blood. Notice how South America seems to be the most distinctive area in the world.

When hearing or reading the title of the conference, I kept thinking about signs that read "Will work for food" morphing into "Will code games for change"

Over all the conference was not well-organized and was nothing at all like the Serious Games Summit I went to a couple of years ago.
Still, the notion of serious games seems much more accepted than it was back then.

Most of the audience seemed to be middle-aged women who seemed to care about the world, but had no experience with activism or with games.

We will know that we've won the War on Terror once we've begun naming sports teams after terrorists groups.

The Columbus Hamas
The Knoxville Al Qaida
The Cody Hezbollah
The Sacramento Mujahedin
The Birmingham Shining Path
The Portland Al Fatah
etc.