Thursday Potpourri

::: Cities Where People Walk the Fastest

1. Singapore; 10.55s
2. Copenhagen (Denmark); 10.82s
3. Madrid (Spain); 10.89s
4. Guangzhou (China): 10.94s
5. Dublin (Ireland); 11.03s
6. Curitiba (Brazil); 11.13s
7. Berlin (Germany); 11.16s
8. New York (USA); 12.00s
9. Utrecht (Holland); 12.04s
10. Vienna (Austria); 12.06s
Time in seconds to cover 60ft (0.02km)

link via kottke.org



::: Rick Warren on giving back

PDL money scared him to death, so in 2002 he and his wife made 5 decisions: 1) Don't change lifestyle at all. 2) Stopped taking salary from church. 3) Gave the church everything back that it ever paid in salary. 4) Set up three foundations. Acts of Mercy (funds AIDS ministry because AIDS is leprosy of 21st century); Equipping Leaders; Global PEACE Fund. 5) Became reverse tithers: give 90% and live off 10%. Why? Every time we give it breaks the back of materialism over our lives. God made PDL a success because God knew what Rick would do with the money.

link via Jeremy Del Rio


::: The new new careers

It's a new twist on a very old concept. When cholera and yellow fever spread during the 18th century, "medical geographers" drew maps to show infected areas but had no way of knowing where an epidemic would strike next. Tatem [the mapper] pulls data from NASA satellites to plot a picture of rainfall, temperature, vegetation, and other variables in regions where malaria has struck. He correlates it with infection rates and hospital reports to create a map of the disease and its projected spread.

Description of a disease mapper. Link via Dan Pink.