Josh Eastburn.com

Friends from college, Matt and Shannon McNeil, found out this past year that both of their kids have a terminal disease called MPS III or Sanfilippo Syndrome. Consider donating to help them purchase and modify a home for their kids’ needs at ahundredforahome.com.

My friend, James, just launched his new online store, Red Lantern. Lots of cool products and best of all, 20% of all purchases go to help those in need. Take a look.

Google’s new “My Maps” feature now lets me do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: map out every place I’ve ever visited. To make the task more manageable, the map is limited to places I’ve been for 12 or more hours and multiple visits to a city have been consolidated to a single point. Red markers indicate places I’ve lived for 3 or more months and blue markers show places I’ve visited.

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Here is a great collection of maps based on pronunciation of words and phrases. When I moved to the Midwest after growing up in the Northeast, I was often made fun of for saying “hoagie” instead of “sub,” “soda” instead of “pop,” and “crown” instead of “crayon.” (OK, that last one is a bit weird, I admit).

Update: The link no longer works (probably from the huge increase in traffic from this site. . .). I’ll update again if the site comes back.

Update: I asked Dr. Bert Vaux, the creator of the survey, why the results were taken down. He is now working on a new study at Cambridge. The site is in a pilot phase and requires registration to view the results.

A recent post on the Freakonomics Blog (thx, James) discusses the challenges and changes that lie ahead for the 1.2 million Realtors in the country. The Internet is slowly starting to loosen the grip brokers have had on real estate sales for decades.

We recently sold our home in the Chicago area by using a flat-fee MLS service from Flatland Homes and we couldn’t have been happier with the decision. Rather than pay close to $20,000 to sell our home with a broker, we paid a total of $300 (no zeros are missing in that number). Using a flat-fee service isn’t for everyone, but if you are willing to put in a little extra effort to hold your own open house and print your own listing sheets, the payoff can be tremendous. Next week we close on a new house in Charlotte that was for sale by owner. Without having a broker involved, we were able to get a great price on a house and the sellers can put more money in their pocket as well.

I don’t intend to criticize the career choice of thousands of real estate professionals, but it seems like some much-needed adjustment is starting to take place in the real estate market.

Half-skiing, half-parachuting down Mount Eiger, Francois Bon and Antoine Montant recorded footage of their extreme sport, dubbed “speedflying.” Watching these videos makes my palms sweat.

I have always gotten a kick out of misused quotation marks. For example, at lunch the other day, the back of the menu read: The “best” pizza in Lake County!
Here is a great collection of unnecessary quotation marks. Link

This page is 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall. Thus it contains a large number of pixels: 8,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 otherwise known as 8.1 nonillion.

Futhermore, at 77 pixels to the inch, this page takes up 3.4e18 square miles and is 1.844 billion miles on a side– an area roughly equivalent to a section of the plane of our Solar System with the sun at the center and the orbit of Saturn on the outside edge (a square 22 AU on a side).

FutureLab has a free service that lets you remove people and other moving objects from your photos. It compares multiple pictures and leaves you with empty cityscapes and tourist-free vacation photos. Link

Netflix is hosting a nationwide screening of classic American movies at locations made famous by the films. Watch Jaws on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard or see Escape from Alcatraz on Alcatraz Island. Link