Random

• The picture to the left is actually a diagram mapping all of the cross references in the Bible. ~ link

• Just when you thought that you couldn't afford a place in Hawaii -- "The median price of a single-family home on Kauai last month was $525,000, a 22% drop from September 2007, when it was $672,500." ~ link

• Gmail Labs is offering a new feature which stalls email that you might later regret sending. "Mail Goggles" does this by asking you "to solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind." I thought this was a late April 1st post but the feature does exist in the Gmail Labs section. ~ link

• Quotable:

Marketers spend a lot of time describing a future and making it real. The more general you are in describing it, the farther away people imagine it is. "We're going to launch a new product next year" sounds a lot more distant than handing someone a prototype and saying, "this launches on January 3rd at 2 pm at CES."

Short version: If you want people to embrace your version of the future, talk about it like it's right around the corner, not on another planet. ~ Seth Godin

• Leaders of the Yanomami, one of South America’s largest forest-dwelling tribes, claim that 50 of their people have died because Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez expelled American missionaries from the Amazon three years ago. Since then there has been a shortage of medicine, fuel, and reliable transportation out of the jungle to medical facilities. ~ link

• Time to get the post office back into the banking business? It's not a bad idea -- really -- and as soon as the USPS catches up on the postal operations we should look at this creative idea. ~ link

• The parent company of our bank (First Hawaiian) has been taking over some troubled European banks. (Guam is 4,000 miles from Hawaii but Hawaii is the closest state to Guam. So, lots of services on Guam, including banking, are centered in Hawaii.) ~ link

• There is a major exodus out of the Netherlands -- mostly younger people -- moving to Belgium, Germany, France, US, UK... ~ link