Mexico’s wine country – Valle de Guadalupe – is on the rise

Baja California seems like the perfect place to recreate that Italian sense of wine. Both are peninsulas with rolling hills of heat and fresh ocean breezes, perfect for a multitude of grape varieties. Food is central to the culture, like it is in Italy, with most Mexicans in the area practicing some sort of agriculture, …

Is there prize money given with olympic medals?

There’s no pay from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) when they win a medal. But many countries Olympic committees pay their athletes for winning medals. Among them, The U.S., Russia, Canada, China & Italy and many more countries. $20K-$50K per gold medal is typical in bigger countries. The smaller countries actually tend to pay more, …

Discover the Welsh language

Closely related to Cornish, the native language of the English county Cornwall, and to Breton, the native language of Brittany, north western France, Welsh – or Cymraeg to its speakers – dates back to the 6th century, making it one of Europe’s oldest living languages. It evolved from the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Britons and …

Twitter now has more than half a billion accounts worldwide

A milestone for Twitter today, according to the Paris-based analyst group Semiocast. The social network has now passed the half-billion account mark — specifically 517 million accounts as of July 1, 2012, with 141.8 million of those users in the U.S., still about half as many users as Facebook has but positioning it as the second-biggest …

8 clean energy predictions from a decade ago…that were way wrong

From the Fresh Energy blog and a good reminder that most experts have trouble thinking exponentially.   WIND In 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its World Energy Outlook, predicting that non-hydro renewable energy would comprise 3 percent of global energy by 2020. That benchmark was reached in 2008. In 2000, IEA projected that there would …

The Unites States of Pie – yum!

We hold this truth to be self-evident: America loves pie. Food writer Adrienne Kane celebrates that right. She has gathered those regional pie recipes into a new cookbook, United States of Pie. Some excerpts from the interview: Bakewell Pie: “is adapted from the very common English dessert, Bakewell Tart. I found the Bakewell Pie recipe …

World map of social networks

The most dominant social network for each country:     Facebook clearly dominates, but a few countries have other favorites: – VKontakte and Odnoklassniki remain strong in Russian-speaking countries – Tencent’s QZone is still king of the hill in China – Vietnam’s most popular social network is Zing – People in Iran seemingly prefer Cloob over Facebook – Drauglem is the top dog in Latvia   …

Stereotypes in Europe – hardest working, most corrupt

Among the usual questions about attitudes to the euro and the European Union, people in eight nations (Britain, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain) were asked which country in the European Union is the hardest-working. The Greeks ignored the obvious answer (Germany) and instead nominated themselves. (The other seven nations all …

United Nations has gone mobile – so many apps for world peace and development

The United Nations has gone mobile…in a big way. In just a few clicks I found more than 10 iPhone apps covering everything from news to statistics to global photos. Plus, a very cool short video about the apps from Jess3:   I’ve just downloaded all these apps and haven’t yet played with them, so …