Archive for June, 2009

Loads of free reading

read

The most fascinating thing about the internet, well one of the many fascinating things about it, is that there’s plenty of hidden treasure just waiting to be found. You feel a little bit like those archeologists and adventurers in the 19th century must have felt when they had all those ancient ruins of glorious past civilizations just waiting to be stumbled upon.
This is what has just happened to me, just by chance I’ve come across this site where we can find over 8,000 books by over 3,500 authors absolutely free, you don’t even have to register, just drop in, choose a book and start reading. You won’t find the latest bestseller but for instance i’ve found a few books by P G Wodehouse, one of my favourite authors that have been out of print for ever and were impossible to find!

I think it is well worth having a look!

Obama reaches out to the muslim world

He is good, very good.  His speech in Cairo was brave: he addressed all the issues that lie unsolved between  Islamic and Western worlds, he didn’t mince his words, in his calm conciliatory voice he spoke frankly of Afganistan, Irak, Guantanamo, the Israel and Palestine conflict, violent extremists, democracy, nuclear weapons, women equality and technological progress …  he pointed out the mistakes made on both sides but urged everyone to forget about our differences and focus on what we have in common, to move forward, to re-imagine our world …

You can watch the speech here, it’s nearly an hour long but I think it is worth it:

YouTube Preview Image

You can also read the transcript

Living without electricity

Probably, electricity is one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity. It has meant not only  an improvement in  our quality of  life but also the development of new technologies.

Our current society is totally dependent on electricity, for example, you only have to think about the things that almost everyone has in their house: fridge, washing machine, microwave, TV…etc, that make our life easier.

But the development of electricity and its applications go beyond the household gadgets: communications, medical services, education….

Bearing all this in mind and in my opinion, our daily lives would be more difficult without electricity. In fact, I can not imagine my life without this “fantastic discovery” because all things that surround us, from the moment we wake up in the morning and take a hot shower, go shopping or watch the news on TV until  we finish work and return home, our “day to day” is powered by electricity.

For this reason, I think that without electricity our life would be like back to our past. People would probably live in a similar way to ancient civilizations like Egyptians or Roman lived which would be a step backwards in the evolution  of mankind.

From my point of view, it is better to  preserve energy and try to find other ways to produce electricity with less damage to the environment to give us the possibility to live with the benefits of this energy  for  a a very long time