How to give and own at the same time, or why Facebook is the new Peace Core.

In an ideal world, an invisible hand would be balancing the supply-demand ratio of help for humanity's problems. The world, however, is far from ideal and we're faced with more challenges than help is readily available for. And when help does present itself, it's mostly in the form of donations – which often lack the immediacy of more hands-on approaches that give the help-giver a sense of ownership over the problem, in turn infecting the helpee with this we-can-solve-it resolve and unleashing a chain reaction of empowerment.

That's exactly the kind of thinking that inspired Pencils of Promise – a powerful grassroots movement that seeks to solve the global education crisis from the bottom up and inside out. The nonprofit is 100% volunteer and its primary goal is to build schools and related facilites across the developing world, but it also embodies something we celebrate here at Brain Pickings – the cross-pollination of skills and perspectives – by empowering people to contribute whatever they are best at and cover different facets of the problem, rather than merely making impersonal and distanced donations.

The project began in 2008, when founder Adam Braun, fresh out of college himself, set out to build a single school in Laos. He put $25 into a bank account and asked friends to contribute however much they could. Little did he anticipate that in a little over a year, they would've raised $200,000 through the donations of thousands of individuals and over 150 volunteers would've joined the movement.

Our biggest commitment is to sustainability, which means PoP schools aren't gifted but instead created by the community itself. The entire village helps builds their own school, leading to true ownership and a lasting commitment to their children's educational future. ~ Adam Braun, Founder

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Some Beatles are more equal than others, or why there's no yellow in Yellow Submarine.

We love data visualization. And we love The Beatles. Naturally, we're all over New-York-based designer Michael Deal 's Charting The Beatles project – an infographic exploration of the life and music of the iconic rockers, from sales statistics to personal biographies to songwriting contributions within the band.

Deal envisioned the project as a collaborative one, so there's a Flickr pool where others can contribute their Beatles-charting exploits. There, you can find gems like Kristen E. Long's rather convincing visual argument for The Beatles' superior popularity over Jesus.

Besides the incredibly detailed and scholarly data revealing anything from common Beatles wisdom to little-known factoids (Did you know Ringo Starr only ever collaborated on two songs, "Dig It" and "Flying," and "Octopus's Garden" was the only track he wrote entirely by himself?), the project bespeaks the very richness and expanse of The Beatles' music-turned-movement.

Charting The Beatles is the hipster answer to Christian Swinehart's wonderfully geeky infographic dissection of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And between the richness of factual detail and the universal cultural resonance of the subject matter, it's among the most delightful visualization projects we've come across in quite some time.

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Psychotherapy as theater, or interpreting the imagery of one of history's most famous interpreters.

In Jungian circles, it was as hotly anticipated as the new Dan Brown thriller, and the story of how it came to light reads like one to match. The Red Book – or Liber Novus (Latin for "New Book"), as it's known by his disciples – was created by Swiss psychoanalyst and theorist Carl Jung over a main period of six years beginning in 1913. Like a cross between an illuminated manuscript, personal journal, and a tome of mini Buddhist mandalas, The Red Book provides a singular and extraordinary insight into one of the 20th century's most celebrated minds. What's more, it documents what happened when one of the world's premier psychoanalysts lost his, according to some accounts.

We first heard about The Red Book when we enjoyed an article of epic proportions about its history in The New York Times. Jung, the founder of modern analytical psychology, started the book at a time in his life described alternately (depending on the account) as a mid-life crisis, a psychotic break, or a reflection of the chaos that enveloped Europe during World War I.

Regardless of your position on its origins, it's hard to resist the Book's intrigue, or its illustrations. Within the pages of the original, physical leather-bound red book, Jung practiced with himself what he was doing daily in his patient practice: taking deliberately deep dives into his murky unconscious and recording everything when he emerged.

Intricately painted pages alternate with accounts of his dreams, both sleeping and waking, and the results were bizarre enough that his heirs spent decades treating the tome like samizdat following his death in 1961. (The Jung family drama is reason enough to read the excellent Times piece , which captures the almost absurd sense of secrecy surrounding the book and its embattled history.)

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Five outposts for ongoing learning, or how to master French cuisine, rock music, and sailing at your leisure.

People crave information – you're reading this, aren't you? And the fundamental human drive to seek out more and more knowledge has only grown since ur times. We're still blown away by the recently mentioned 34-gigabytes-of-data-per-day diet of the average American.

One area where we're really excited about the possibilities of on-demand data delivery is education. (Excitement we've voiced in a recent contribution to GOOD Magazine .) Whether it's using online media to organize collective learning in the analog world, or the classes themselves take place online, the Internet enables people to seek out and receive education in ways they never could have before. These opportunities for lifelong learning take advantage of simple supply-and-demand economics – those who want to learn finding those who want to teach – for every conceivable subject, and then some. (Shoe Shining 101, we're looking at you.)

Here, then, are five examples of extension-style schooling that can change the way we think about acquiring knowledge.

UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE

The first tuition-free global education with real academic cred, University of the People was founded by e-learning entrepreneur Shai Reshef with the developing world in mind. It may not have the brick-and-mortar facades of McKim, Mead, and White but that's precisely its point; thanks to open-source courseware and without the need for endowments, the University can focus on delivering degrees at the lowest cost possible. Requirements for attendance include a high school degree, fluency in English, and an admissions fee of $15 to $50 on a sliding scale depending on a student's country of origin.

University of the People's first class of 178 students representing 49 countries enrolled in its grand educational experiment in fall of 2009. While the University's results are as up in the air as its curriculum, we're optimistic about what this virtual institution heralds for the future.

(UN)CLASSES

The product of LaidOffCamp, a BarCamp-style event for unemployed New Yorkers, (un)classes offered its first class in March of 2009. (It was "How to be a digital nomad," a course on sustaining an itinerant lifestyle while still holding jobs.)

To set up an unclass, you register with the site and then create a new course listing, either as a prospective student or as an instructor. Other people in your area interested in the same topic can join in, and since the process is self-organizing, the group determines when and where to meet. Most unclasses are one-off experiences, since the site bills itself as casual learning for people "who have hectic lives and struggle to find fun and interesting ways to satisfy their intellectual curiosity in the limited free time they have. Think of it as educational snacking, a low-touch way to explore topics that interest you."

(un)classes has built a base around major cities in the Americas from Bahru to Vancouver (with a strong skew toward California), offering a range of un-course options from Ayurvedic cooking to Zen meditation.

SKILLSHARES

With its roots in DIY, craft, and hacking culture, Skillsharing has gained adherents during the current recession as a way to acquire new skills without dropping a lot of dough. Volunteers donate their time and talents to organize a weekend of events that share a distinctly makers' faire flavor; many of the offerings involve bartering and tinkering, whether with kombucha or Wii remotes.

At a recent Skillshare event in In addition to Brooklyn , participants chose from a session listing that included hands-on workshops in bicycle repair and screenprinting (above, respectively). Other major Skillshares exist in Austin and Boston, and we bet there are more – let us know in the comments if you've shared your skills elsewhere.

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Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity . And while we've seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature's bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature's own "character design" genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children's natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by "synthetic characters" like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community's contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you're a designer or illustrator, this one if you're a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself – it's important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute – why not?

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