A Year in 12 Posts

While I have my doubts and myths, as everyone (was the world created by playing dice?), they are private questions. Politically, I'm an atheist and laic. Yet I think that Pope Francis made a great debut. His positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, his openness to atheists, Muslims and Jews are to be praised.

If only the great leaders of this world could use their power to nurture tolerance and peace...

Maps of the religions of the world:

• a comprehensive version
• a simplified version

Age and number of followers, by order of appearance:

• Hinduism           4000      800 million
• Judaism             4000     14 million
• Taoism, etc        2600     800 million
• Zoroastrism       2600     <1 million
• Shintoism           2600     3 millions
• Buddhism           2500     400 million
• Christianity         2014      2 billion
• Islam                  1392      1.2 billion

(Sure, Zoroastrism is not a major religion in terms of adherents. But it intrigued me since I saw "2001: a Space Odyssey" and heard Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra". I had to know who that was!)

It's interesting to see that all major religions were born in Asia. And how their histories and inspirations and so often closely related.

Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Youtube, AOL, Facebook, Skype, Verizon, ...: the NSA is spying on US (and perhaps not only US) citizen with a data mining program called PRISM, revealed in June.

Edward Snowden gave this interview. Getting closer and closer to 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell. Blurred boundaries between democracy, freedom and security... How afraid are you? I'm impressed by the power of the program... I'm also very impressed by Snowden's position. Must watch.

Meanwhile, China reclaimed top spot in the TOP500 list (most powerful supercomputers). [geek alert] Tianhe-2: 33.86 petaflop/s, more than 3 million cores. 30 times more powerful than the most powerul supercompters from 5 years ago. That's lots of power for data mining... 

Died in December 2013. His courage, vision, tenacity and wisdom changed his country and made him an admirable leader of unique dimension.

Nelson Mandela inspires leaders beyond Africa and beyond politic.

Other people, famous and infamous, said goodbye in 2013 : Hugo Chavez (March),  Margaret Thatcher (April),  Henri Dutilleux (May),  Tom Clancy, Vo Nguyen Giap (October), Peter O'Toole, Mikhail Kalashnikov (December)...

__________

2013 for Scoop.it

___________

In 2013, Scoop.it entered the era of meritoc[u]racy, aka #curatethecurators: peer organization of the best topics in interests. We have also more millionaires, our most succesful curators having even passed the 3 million bar views!

Scoop.it also further proved its values to professionals and businesses. Read what the web says and checkout a few business topics.

We are also always eager to share, learn and progress! Please join the conversation on our blog, on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Thanks a lot to all of you, our users and our community, for a great 2013. It was tough, exciting and rewarding at the same time.

Peace, success and fun to all, for a greater 2014! 

With armed conflicts in so many countries, it's almost impossible to catch the good news. Well, things are going better in Myanmar! D. Cameron, British P.M., called for suspension of sanctions; the European Union does it and Japan will write off the debt.

April also saw the mega acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for $1B! Instagram was a 2-year old, 12-people, no revenue company. Its founder, Kevin Systrom, 27-y old, pockets $400M.

Mark Zuckerberg then claimed "Not much will change with the service". I wonder if Instragram's users would agree with this statement today.

On Nov 6, Barack Obama was elected to a second presidential term, defeating Republican Mitt Romney (332 - 206. Full results: here).

Web perspective: Beyond the political stake, this post links to Obama's FB page. Super classy pics of a super classy man. Also, his "four more years" tweet broke the record of most RT ever (800k+).

On Nov 18, one of my heros (this is a personal curation) died. Patrick Edlinger was a free climber and a free man. Here is a beautiful video of him climbing (dancing? levitating?) bare hands, bare feet, no rope. Music by Bach. Enjoy, dream, remember.

Irony? Same month, a diamond planet is discovered! More good news from the stars.

Ok, it's summer time. Let's relax and forget the bad news. Everybody should have watched these two wonderful time lapse videos (1 & 2). Full screen, breath, and travel. Life is good :)

Beautiful ending for 2011.

And a last message of hope - or dream -, Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the habitable zone.

Drones have been in the news since the gulf wars. They became a hot topic on 2013. Military, police, entertainment, delivery (well, not quite yet, Amazon, but PrimeAir certainly was a communication hit), they are everywhere. In April, the Scientific American review started to warn against the impact of drones on our privacy. To be read in the perspective of PRISM and other scary initiatives. Democracy, beware.

And insect drones are coming! (from Miguel Prazeres's beautiful Biomimicry topic).

Moving further to a connected world, 2013 was also the year of the Internet of Things (IoT). Its impact will be felt in the economy, health care, media, energy, transport... in all our life, hopefully for the better. Major stake. Special praise to rising stars Arduino (a topic on the Italy-born open source popular platform) and Sigfox, the first IoT dedicated network.

Prism, Drones, IoT, Big Data, Robots... seems like 2013 heralds a new era where the Internet as we know it was just a humble start to immense control and power given to machines and computers. I think it's time to watch Terminator again! And to be careful.

Not so long ago the world celebrated the Arab Spring. But things are complicated and painful. After having fought against Hosni Moubarak, Egyptians democratically elected Mohammed Morsi. But he gave lots of power to the Muslim Brotherhood and opponents said he betrayed the revolution. And now the army takes him done in a coup and the country is back in a deadly civil war... Messy and sad.

Since the hope of early 2011, unrests, fights, civil wars have continued to spread in Egypt, Syria (60,000 people killed), Mali, Somalia, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan. Scary world. We should never forget how lucky we are, us who live in peace today.

Moebius reach was so wide: US comics, Japanese mangas and even movies (Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element). A creator of universes, a rare artist.

Also in March, Putin's come back. Back to the cold war days, Russia was the bad soviet guy. Now it's more complex: Russia embrassed capitalism but embarasses with its positions on Iran, Syria, democracy.

And if your software crashed with no good reason, you might have an excuse: the biggest solar storm in 5 years. Stronger storms expected in 2013!