This couldn’t be much cooler, Josh Silver has come up with an approach to mass-produce glasses for the poor in developing nations, no optician required. Genius.

The folks over at RingTraining.com have unveiled a nice looking tool to help ease into advance ring strength moves, the Elite Strength Trainer. There’s good info there, and this was in the e-mail announcement:

I just wanted to let everyone know that the Elite Strength Trainer is now available. It’s selling at a $40 discount till January 1st. It’s a new tool that helps train for the cross, maltese and other advanced ring strength exercises. It works by adjusting the leverage placed on your arms in 10 increments. As you get stronger, you simply move up to the next level. It brings the direct, linear progressions available to weightlifters into the world of bodyweight exercise.

A few months ago, I took a prototype to the national team training center. I met with Kevin Mazeika, head coach of the US Olympic Team, and Jordan Jovtchev, 5-time Olympian, and they both offered me some feedback on the design. Within 15 minutes of setting them up in the gym, I had almost a dozen national and Olympic caliber gymnasts from the American and Japanese teams try it out. They had all used equipment in the past that worked on the same principle, but unanimously preferred the design of the Elite Strength Trainer. They liked that it had a lot of adjustment points, it was quick to adjust and easy to set up and comfortable to use. This is actually a tool that is quite important in the training of a lot of top-level gymnasts. For some of them, it is just for conditioning. But they already have short arms, so it’s almost like they’re already using it! For others, it’s the safest way to get back strength after an injury or to develop new strength skills. For the rest of us, it is a great way to safely and effectively incorporate advanced ring strength moves into our training.

Sorry not to let you know about the sale earlier (which will probably be over by the time you read this), but I didn’t get the announcement until 12/30.

Wired Magazine, Before the Levees Break: A Plan to Save the Netherlands:

New projections of sea-level rise and other potential consequences of climate change, coupled with the aftershock from Hurricane Katrina, have prompted Dutch officials to ask a very big question: What would it take to climate-proof our country for the next 200 years?

200 year plan?! 100 years?! Right or not, I really admire the long-term thinking. Are we even capable of thinking on that scale in this country?

Veerman talks about Dutch can-do the way generals talk about staying the course in a prolonged military battle. “People say sea-level rise will push us back into the hinterlands,” he says. “We say no, we can manage with 1, 2, even 3 meters. But we have to act.” With a black pen, he inks in an expanded coastline on the map laid out before him. Extending the country westward will be a colossal reclamation effort: Dredging ships, working just offshore, would spend the next century vacuuming up roughly 121 million cubic meters of seafloor sand every year and spraying it toward the shoreline, where wave action would then deposit it at the water’s edge and “naturally” build the beach outward. Over the course of 100 years, the project would add about 400 square miles to the Netherlands—roughly equivalent to 17 Manhattans.

A September report pegs the cost around $1.5 billion a year for the next 100 years.

Sounds like a bargain. Even if the lunatic fringe skeptics turn out to be right and we’re actually in a cooling era, it doesn’t sound so bad when you consider the trillions we’re spending on wars and financial crises. Kinda like an insurance policy you pay for and hope you never need.

In the grocery store having just paid, and as I was picking up my groceries to leave, I heard the cashier say to the person behind me, “I’m going to need to see ID for that wine, ma’am.” I looked back to see a bemused elderly woman stammer, “but I’m 95 years old!”

I reflected for a moment on MA alcohol laws, and how great it was that this woman was still doing her own shopping at 95. Then I hightailed it out of there so I wouldn’t get stuck behind her on the road.

:-)

Beautiful, relaxing fun: Auditorium (via ze)

Mightier has an interesting game play element: you design your character on paper and solve the puzzles on paper, scan ‘em in, and then the world gets built based on that. Watch the video to see what I mean. (via paper bits)

Alobravo has a fun collection of videos up, The 6 Sickest Playground Workouts You Can’t Do (no arguments here). I’d seen the Bartendaz one before, but the rest where new to me. The Hannibal video is unreal. The guy does some exercises I’ve never even imagined before. (via SttB)

Great cover on Carrie Fisher’s memoir, Wishful Drinking:

Alexandra Penney on being financially raped by Madoff (here’s her follow up).

Wow, the comments are truly YouTubesque in their quality and sensitivity. Remind me, if I ever strike it rich, to never tell anyone.

Markus Frind is the CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a dating site. I just read on his blog that his site is #13 in the US (according to hitwise). I wouldn’t necessarily find this noteworthy, except for two things.

First, PoF keeps appearing on my radar. A couple years ago it was when Scoble noted that the site was wildly successful despite being ugly:

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He’s Google’s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

(The design hasn’t improved much since, and is still a poster child, along with craigslist, for the anti-design movement.)

Then, a couple weeks ago, PoF popped up in my aggregator again, this time when Jeff Atwood noted that the site serves up all this traffic on just a handful of servers.

Second, Frind pretty much runs the show himself. From his post above:

I still haven’t hired a tech guy to watch over the servers, that will be the first thing i’ll do in 2009, getting tired of running every aspect of the site except customer service myself!

So if we take the hitwise numbers at face value (and I don’t know anything about them), they put these entities in the upper echelon: MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and… Markus Frind. Impressive.

Australian courts pave the way for Facebook statuses like, “Jim is pissed because he just got served on his goddamn WALL!”

Chris Anderson says, do something new every three years:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo—ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.

He describes believably the feel of each of your three years (exhilaration, competence, cynicism), and ties it nicely into Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” observation.