On the eve of Chinese New Year, Year of the Dragon, the legendary spring festival, fireworks are already going off all day.
To celebrate this rich and highly complex culture, I am sharing everything you need to know but probably don’t about China in 10 minutes:

Since childhood, the fireworks were always a big deal to me, I remember paying $10 for a pack of 100…
Yesterday I went to the seasonal fireworks shop in the land of origin, and they come in cakes of 5000 for $40!
But that’s not the biggest, see below:

10,000 Firecracker cake, China

The fireworks here are some of the loudest you will ever hear. It’s like a war zone here for 2 weeks!
The Chinese believe that if you make enough noise, any bad things will be frightened off and your new year will start out with only greatness.

Fireworks shop, Beijing

祝願你們也有個好年！吃得好，睡得好，身體好，過年好！
– Wish you have a good year! Eat well, sleep well, good health, Happy New Year!

Check out this highly interactive book:

How cool that it’s a follow up to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth!
If only the education of children in our society was important enough to do this for schools….

Playing For Change: Song Around the World “One Love”:

“The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens. So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.”
— Bahá’u’lláh

Check out this amazing video about human progress and change through technology:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o9nmUB2qls

Finally had a chance to watch the latest Depeche Mode video from their upcoming album, “Sounds Of The Universe” Released April 20th.

I love how it eludes to the direction so many lives have taken particularly in North America that are on a path that is completely the opposite of where they should be, and it’s gotten to a point where they can’t turn things around no matter how much they may want to…

Did my own mash up of a Depeche Mode remix last year…

As a follow up to my previous post about a song Elika released, ‘Persecution’ about oppression of the Baha’is in Iran, I wanted to post some videos about the issues that more clearly expose Iran’s practices:

Other great videos exist that I wanted to share but they have been removed from Youtube.

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Here is also a commentary on CNN.com by actor from ‘The Office’ Rainn Wilson:

cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/02/17/wilson.faith/?iref=mpstoryview

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Something incredible happened yesterday that barely made news (cause no one died…), A new $10 billion Particle Accelerator near Geneva on the Swiss/Franch border went live, firing it’s first protons.

Here’s a bit more about it:

Large Hadron Collidor – Wikipedia

It’s the largest particle accelerator ever built and took 3 decades to create. By colliding opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy at the speed of light, scientists intend to amongst other things, prove how the universe was created, and the existence of God!
And as if that isn’t cool enough, many scientists and the media believe that the LHC is so powerful that it is too dangerous because it’s experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth!

Now that is what I call exciting news.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm