(This item is my entry for Blog Action Day October 16, 2011. This year's topic is "Food". My past contributions to Blog Action Day can be read here.)

Global franchises. Here's an example:

Report from Al Jazeera English on 14 October 2011.

The official PSA for World Food Day 2011. See the FAO website for more information on the official observance of World Food Day. In Australia, I recommend visiting Oxfam Australia for information about WFD activities.

"RIP Steve Jobs. You left your mark on our desks, on our ears & in our hands."
- Darren Rovell, CNBC sports business reporter, Twitter, 5.10.11

I loathe Apple Inc. Never owned an Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad (let alone Lisa or Newton). Uninstalled iTunes after a few months because I considered it malware. I loathe Apple's monopolistic practices, their aggressive litigiousness, their Chinese labour exploitations. But for all that, there is no doubt that Steve Jobs was a truly great man whose influence will be missed following his death, following multiple battles with cancer, on Wednesday aged 56.

In short, Facebook has become, for me, a glorified RSS reader, and little else.

This updates my previous position statement on Facebook posted in June 2010. All the insidious tinkering since then by the House of Zuckerburg makes little difference to the fact that I regard a Facebook profile as a necessary evil to maintain a reluctant frontier.

Will Goog le plus take over its mantle? Don't be evil.

Things have been a glorious blend of quiet and shambolic on my website these past couple of months.

Quiet because Twitter has become my primary means of short on-line communication; quiet because I have not had the energy to compose longer on-line communications with any lucidity; and quiet because my upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has not gone as well as I would have liked.

Here, from March this year at no less than the 3rd Annual Shorty Awards, is Amanda Palmer's ukelele medley of the Most Amusing Tweets of the year

Overfishing or warming sea levels? There seem to be more jellyfish in the oceans and while they've been annoying summer beachgoers since time immemorial they are also capable of interfering with electricity generation outlets.

Al Jazeera English picks up some of the story:

The Daily Mail reported on July 6 how jellyfish forced the shutdown of the Orot Rabin power station in Israel.

A week earlier, both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station on the Scottish coast were shut down because of a sudden influx of jellyfish.

That was far from the first time that nuclear reactors have been shut down because of marauding jellyfish, as this analysis from Discovery News explains.

But there is also evidence that jellyfish are able to thrive in ocean Dead Zones where other marine life cannot, hence a disproportionate increase in their presence. Here is a presentation from the US National Science Foundation which paints a vivid picture on the rising presence of jellyfish in our oceans.

Point six of their presentation: "Four hundred vast Dead Zones in world oceans are too polluted for almost all life except jellyfish."