Bhutan's happiness formula

The BBC has a photo survey on Bhutan's quest for happiness, both amazing images and amazing facts about Bhutan's quest for happiness. Bhutan takes happiness so seriously its part of its government policy, they even measure GNH, Gross National Happiness.

Know the world

How much do you know about the world outside of your country?

Well Icaro Doria, a 25 year old Brazilian working for the Portugese "Grande Reportagem", a magazine similar to "Time", wants to open your eyes. His brief was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today. The resulting campaign has been a huge sucess with his flag adverts spreading all round the world in chain emails. extra word here.

Here are his flag adverts:
* Brazil
* United States
* Colombia
* Angola
* China
* Europe
* Somalia
* Burkina Faso

Harry Beck and the tube map

Carrying on my tube theme from yesterday. How do you get around the labyrinth officially known as the London Underground? Well that's also an interesting story. I remember learning about the London Underground map at university in one of my Visual Design History lectures. The map we all know and love today was originally designed by an Underground electrical draughtsman, Harry Beck.

The original map that his replaced was geographically correct but becoming harder and harder to read as more lines were introduced to the Underground. Beck based the map on electrical circuit diagrams and stripped the map back to its fundamental elements. Beck's map is not too different from the map we have today.

Smoking on the tube

I have been living in London for just over two weeks now. In my first week I was catching the tube around quite a bit. To be honest I think the tube is a bloody amazing piece of public transport. There are over 900 million journeys on the tube a year, that's more than all the other train services in Britain combined. Now for a more disconcerting fact about the tube. 40 mins in the tube is the equivalent of smoking 2 cigarettes. Luckily I take the bus to work so I don't really use the tube much. But for someone who takes the tube to work and back everyday they are doing the equivalent of smoking a pack of 20 cigarettes a week. Check this site out for more amazing facts about the tube.

Alive

My blog is finally alive. And it's inside my one pager site thanks to a little php. Big thanks to Dan Taylor for telling me what crazy PHP function I needed to extract part of an HTML page. Ok time for lunch.