Einstein said that we’re a civilization of perfected means and confused ends. Take a look at how crowdsourcing via Crowdflower is helping in the dire situation in Pakistan right now. At PakReport.org anyone can help with the translation of text messages send by people in need of help on the ground, so that aid can more effectively be routed to them. Empower individuals who care with the technology to make a difference, and the ‘ends’ become a whole lot clearer.

This is not about digital media, or programming tips, or the latest cool app, but I’m going to point to it anyway. From the Telegraph is this article on Thorium as an energy source. Just when you thought there was no magic bullet, you read that one kilo of Thorium will produce as much energy as 200 kilos of uranium. The downside is that it is clean and safe. Oh sorry, I meant ‘upside’!

Yeah it sounds too good to be true, just like fusion and other things that were gonna let me take a long drive without that sphincter-tightening feeling that I’m eating significantly into the down payment for my first house. But there’s a lot of solid science behind this, and the resistance so far seems to be from the ‘entrenched interests’-remember them?- who really would prefer that we didn’t look into Thorium because of all the money they have spent on potentially grossly inferior methods of producing energy. Shit the money to just determine if this is viable is nada. Maybe Google and Apple should form a joint venture.

Hey: in the spirit of the butterfly who flaps his wings and changes things on the other side of the world (I mean YOU, not me) go read the article, write your congressman, march in the streets, use “Thorium” in your next graffiti masterpiece, or promote it on Reddit because it appears to be hitting a nerve on some level, fast.

With all this media, has the strength of ideas dissolved?

Here’s a tip that you might find helpful when you have a project migrating from Ant to Maven, specifically migrating the monolithic project, using a modular project structure: by Tim O’Brien at Sonatype.

Chad Myers over at Los Techies has a nice article with basic overviews of several web frameworks for .NET, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET Web Forms, Castle MonoRail, OpenRasta, ASP.NET MVC, FubuMVC, covering good and bad points of each, etc.

While it may not offer unlimited music downloads for free, Grooveshark is the simplest way I have found to the question: how do I find free music to just listen to? (I really like the look of the features in Pandora but it doesn’t work for me where I’m living in Asia)

Grooveshark is filesharing with this twist:

Grooveshark has an artists/label program to ensure that any owner of content will be compensated fairly for each time their content is played via Grooveshark.

so presumably artists are getting paid. Grooveshark’s free version is supported by ads apparently; they will charge you US$3/month or $30/year for VIP access which removes the ads, but so far I’m happy just listening to all the music I can think of from their library. I’ve been impressed with the selection, I can listen to some fairly obscure music and it lets me save song titles into a favorites folder to easily find again, even with the free version. Grooveshark VIP gives you access on Android, iPhone, Nokia, Palm, and BlackBerry mobile devices, and they have a desktop app as well.

If you really want to download music they route you easily to iTunes or Amazon. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m connected all the time anyway, at least at home, so ownership of ‘my own library’ seems less relevant than it used to compared to no-hassles music streaming.

Dinesh at beyondrelational.com has a detailed post on creating a basic Silverlight application using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Greg Wilson has a post on the launch of Adobe Air Launchpad, a new tool for the desktop created to help Adobe Flex developers begin building desktop apps deployed on AIR. The ready-to-import Flex project that you can create with it is a starting point for your AIR application. There’s a detailed video also.(h/t JimRutherford)

Chances are you have no intention of tying yourself and your developer repertoire exclusively to the iPhone when building mobile apps in the future. Pete Freitag has a short post on how to install and get the Android Emulator up and running when you want to start getting familiar with the Android development tools.

Okay you need a Monday morning funny; let’s face it, you deserve it and here it is: bless thenextweb.com for showing us one of the funniest posts ever in a forum, from overclockers.com.au. This person knows what they need, they’ve thought it through and who knows: maybe it’s an idea no one ever thought of before…

Digital Media Minute has done many, many pointer posts on where to find icon sets and open source icon libraries over the years, but it’s been way too long. Noupe came out with this great set of 50 gorgeous new icon sets that won’t cost you a dime. If your icon library is getting a little stale give these a look.