Interesting and important stuff:
Which single intervention would do the most to improve the health of those living on less than $1 per day?
Frontline's "On Our Watch" looks at the ongoing tragedy in Darfur.
Drug War Facts
The religions of the most influential people of all time (a good effort, although I disagree with a few).
A visual guide to how your tax dollars are spent.

(This post was inspired by a comment from a reader named Chris in response to my Thanksgiving post.)
Does our universe's creator (if one exists) deserve praise? Or more generally, for what types of universes would their creators deserve praise? This may be impossible to answer without knowing the circumstances that led to the creation. For example, how much choice did the creator have in the types of universes that could be created? (Einstein: "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.") Obviously there is both good and bad on our planet, and assuming that evolution is as fundamental as it appears to be, there is likely to be both good and bad elsewhere in our universe. Should a creator be praised only if its universe has only good and no bad? What if it were impossible to create such a universe? Maybe a universe with a lot of good and a little bad is better than no universe at all? (Negative utilitarians might disagree.) If so, then we can praise the creator in proportion to the relative quantities of the two. On our planet there is currently a lot of both, but maybe elsewhere in the universe there is more good than bad, or maybe suffering is temporary in our universe and eventually intelligent life escapes from it. (Combine the concepts of Biocosm and Nonzero for an idea of what I'm suggesting here.) Also, everything above assumes that humans are qualified to judge what constitutes good and bad. It's hard to make the case that suffering is anything but bad, but the difference between a creator's intelligence and a human's could be vastly greater than that between a human's and an ant's, and maybe we're simply not equipped to understand why a creator would allow suffering. I'm not prepared to completely withhold judgment and assume that the creator (if there is one) has created the "best" world, but I do have a great deal of respect for the creator of a universe which has enabled the progression, at least on one planet, from matter to life to intelligence to consciousness to something approaching free will, and I think the best may be still to come.

Another batch of my favorite quotes:
"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself." - Chinese proverb
"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - Sir Isaac Newton
"It is a real puzzle for the science of mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us - we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of bear into our lap - the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion." - Steven Pinker
"The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?" - Carl Sagan

With Thanksgiving approaching, it seems like a good time for me to give some thanks...
To all previous me's: Thanks for acting in a way that increased the quality of life for subsequent me's such as the current one, and for not doing anything irreversibly destructive to (y)ourselves.
To all my hundreds of millions (or possibly billions) of my direct ancestors: Thanks for meeting your mate and performing the necessary act (and for the countless decisions and actions you each made that led up to those acts). I'm sure that some of you later regretted your couplings, but I wouldn't be here today without every one of them.
And most importantly, to whatever entity, process or circumstance caused our universe to exist and to be so well-suited to the rise of conscious life: I cannot possibly thank you enough, but on this site and in the way I live my life I will try.

Wake up and get moving! <800 hours in a month, ~800 months in a life, that's all you get. Are you living the same day over and over? Then break free. Don't let inertia dominate you. And don't let your friends, family, society, or anything else external dictate what you think and how you act. Don't just find yourself, reinvent yourself. Do something different today, something big. Be bold. Step out of your comfort zone. Now go make it happen!
P.S. This post was written from me, to me. I hope I take myself seriously.

Today's Tips:
- Happiness can be found where pleasure and purpose meet.
- The old adage "time is money" is wrong, because it's easy to convert time into money but hard to do the reverse.
- The waitress isn't flirting with you, it's her job to be friendly.
- If you're just getting started with cross-country skiing, I recommend Chile.
- "More" is a poor choice for a safe word.

What do you respect? One way to answer this question is to simply make a list of the personality traits and characteristics that you find worthy of respect. A less direct but possibly more instructive way to answer the question is to make a list of people that you respect, and once you're done with your list, to think about each person and determine why you respect them. You may find some traits appearing repeatedly. Once you've narrowed down your list to just the traits that appeared most often, examine each one and decide whether it's elective; that is, a trait that a person can choose to have. You may find that the traits you most admire in others are ones that you could have if you simply chose to have them and wanted them badly enough that you were willing to do what's necessary to cultivate them in yourself.