The mantis shrimp is the only animal on Earth that can see circular polarized light. Their eyes contain all sorts of weird structures that let them perceive over 100,000 colors - 10 times more than humans can see. According to a researcher, "They're enchantingly violent. They catch other animals by either spearing it through the heart or smashing it to pieces. Unlike most predators that grab prey, these pummel it and destroy it. When they interact with each other over a burrow, they use their armored front appendages and smash each other on the face. Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around."

I've always had a soft spot for products and stores with ridiculous names. Lame puns, nonsensical word choice - the absurder the better! So I wish I hadn't seen this list of Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry, because now I feel compelled to visit them all.

Some time ago a nearby sushi restaurant was rechristened "Chocolate Chocolate Sushi." Recently, the name changed again to "Tofu House and Chocolate Chocolate Sushi," with the "sushi" written so small as to be nearly invisible from the street. It's certainly memorable, but that particular combination of words doesn't seem like the product of a sane mind.

A surprisingly large number of celebrities turn out to answer the age-old question: Who would win in a fight - a minotaur with a trident or a centaur with a crossbow?

Prince Rupert's Drops are raindrop-shaped pieces of glass that can withstand hammer blows on the fat end but explode when the tail is even slightly damaged.

Posts from the International Association of Time Travelers forum (via Kottke).

Find out what happens when George Clooney Googles George Clooney. Also, some deleted scenes here. A while back, the cast of Ocean's Thirteen gave an entertaining interview in Time.

I don't actively follow celebrity news (never watching TV helps), but George Clooney always comes across as a pretty well-adjusted guy, especially considering his positive involvement in politics.. Natalie Portman is another celebrity who handles her position well, and she gets some great coverage in a recent NY Times article about stars promoting various causes. It's indescribably cool to read that Portman is an avid supporter of microfinance (maybe even cooler than the fact that she wrote a paper titled "Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy"). The same issue has several other articles worth reading about philanthropy and organizations working for social change.

Speaking of microfinance, Kiva is the first organization that's ever gotten it right. The idea is that our economy works because of loans. Loans enable us to start businesses, buy property, and basically build a functioning society. But HALF OF THE WORLD live on less than $2 a day and have no borrowing power whatsoever. These people are born into extreme poverty and live day to day. That's why in most of the world, people who are poor stay poor. And since the poor are unable to create new businesses and the infrastructure for a healthy economy, countries that are poor stay poor as well. Kiva fixes this by putting money directly into the hands of those who need it - entrepreneurs in the Third World. The organization has a list of people asking for a specific amount for a specific reason (i.e. woman in Ecuador wants $800 to start a music shop). Any visitor to Kiva's website can then lend money to these people. The loans are gradually paid back, and the lenders receive news about the borrower's business. A few hundred dollars isn't much, but it lets even the poorest people bootstrap themselves out of poverty and stay that way.

Kiva is part of a new wave of social entrepreneurs who are making huge innovations in helping the poor. Philanthropists have been throwing money at Africa for years with very little effect. Most of it disappears down a black hole of corrupted officials. Some of it might actually reach those who need it, but it's like giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. These countries need to develop infrastructures that are sustainable - economies that can grow without constant cash infusions from richer nations. And to do that, we need to start getting smart about how we approach social change.

Kiva hits on two major ideas. The first is that the poor should not be treated as beggars. By receiving loans rather than donations, borrowers maintain their dignity and gain a huge sense of empowerment. They realize that they can actively improve their lives, which just doesn't happen with free handouts. And just because these people are poor doesn't mean they're not trustworthy or economically savvy. In fact, Kiva loans are just as (if not more) likely to be paid back than any other loan you can think of.

The other idea is that the key to eliminating poverty is giving the poor a way to generate wealth. Providing health care and education (two focuses of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) only aims to alleviate the symptoms of poverty. If you give the poor a way to make money, that money will go straight to improving health and education. These people are just as rational as you or I. It's been shown time and time again that once the poor are making enough to survive comfortably, they will start using their additional income to send their kids to school and buy better food. And when enough people reach this level, you can easily imagine how a formerly impoverished country starts to turn itself around as a whole.

But it's not like we have this whole poverty thing solved. It is exciting, though, that we're starting to apply our creativity and resources to the problem in new and better ways. We sent ourselves to the moon and created the internet and make amazing advancements on a daily basis. There's no reason why we can't apply our skills toward solving the problems of the Third World. Paul Polak, founder of IDE, points out that "a billion customers in the world are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.” What could an army of engineers do about that? And not just engineers. Kiva, after all, was started by a business major. What could we do if we brought our economics and business and other knowhow to bear?

Of course, it's never that simple. Many smart people have been tackling the issues for years. I fully agree with Polak that we need nothing less than a revolution in education. We need to learn how to design products and services and solutions that will make lasting changes. And that means designing for the true needs of the end users, rather than what we think they want. Polak, with his background as a psychiatrist, is a pioneer in this way. He understands that to design a water pump you have to go out to the fields and talk to ten, a hundred, five hundred farmers before figuring out what that pump needs to be. A traditional engineer would design a super-strong machine that lasts a decade and pumps a massive amount of water. But it will cost a thousand times more than any $1 a day farmer could ever afford. Polak's pump breaks down and moves far less water, but it's ultra-cheap. A farmer on the lowest rung of the economic ladder could buy this pump, double or triple his income for the year before it disintegrates, then use the money to buy two new pumps while expanding his field. Designing for a customer like this is worlds apart from designing for, say, the U.S. market. In Burma, the price of a few screws could make or break a product, and such radically different priorities require a radically new approach to the way we design.

The other major hurdle is sustainability. Polak often says that that "the world's cleverest designers... cater to the globe's richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture, and Maseratis." Much of that is simply because you can only make a tiny fraction of a traditional salary when doing development work. The answer for this goes back to treating the people we're trying to help as customers, rather than beggars. IDE Bangladesh and Myanmar, for example, sell water pumps for a profit and spend money on marketing, even commissioning locally-produced movies to help sell their products. While this may seem counter-intuitive, having a sustainable business model is the right way to effect lasting change. There's no way to pump enough money into an impoverished country to lift it out of poverty. Instead, we need to stoke the country's economic engine, and it'll do the rest of the work itself. Economic principles work the same way over there as they do here - people spend money, it goes back to fuel more growth, and so on. While the margins are obviously different there than they are in the First World, Myanmar alone is a market of over 55 million, and that's a huge number to multiply with. Unfortunately, the numbers don't work out to be high enough to attract the amount of talent that the industry could use -- yet.

Things are still pretty bleak in far too much of the world. But we're moving in the right direction. I'm sure there's a much better future in store.