Sir Ken Robinson: “Do schools kill creativity?” Still the best TED talk ever.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: education · Ken Robinson · TED talks · video
Sir Ken Robinson: “Do schools kill creativity?” Still the best TED talk ever.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: education · Ken Robinson · TED talks · video
“Deep down, we believe this world is essentially just, which is why we look away when it’s not.”
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Jonah Lehrer · justice
Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone (1803-1881)
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: children · Defending Jacob · parents · quotes
Steve Jobs introduces the “Think Different” campaign in 1997. To put this video in perspective, remember where Apple was in 1997. In terms of market share, the company had only about 3% of the personal computer market, bottoming out at 2.8% in July 1997. Its stock traded at around $4 or $5 a share, also bottoming in July 1997 when it sank below $3.50 a share. In its previous fiscal year the company had lost $1 billion.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: advertising · Apple · Steve Jobs · Think Different · video
San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906 (via Shorpy).
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: earthquake · history · San Francisco · Shorpy
The Flatiron Building under construction, ca. 1902. (Via Library of Congress.)
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: architecture · history · New York
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: history · San Francisco
The human mind is simply terrible at politics. Although we think we make political decisions based upon the facts, the reality is much more sordid. We are affiliation machines, editing the world to confirm our partisan ideologies.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Jonah Lehrer · links · politics
A helpful if unsurprising explanation of a question that vexes liberals: why do ordinary working people consistently seem to vote against their own economic interests by voting for Republicans? At the Edge, psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains:
… the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer.
Check out the discussion of Haidt’s ideas as well.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: links · politics
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
Dr. Seuss (possibly a misattribution, but a great quote whoever said it) (via Garr Reynolds)
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Dr. Seuss · quotes · wisdom
“For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced.”
— Seth Godin, The Triumph of Coal Marketing
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: energy · infographics · Seth Godin
Nigel Marsh: How to Balance Work and Family
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: TED talks · video
Earth — the tiny blue dot about halfway down the shaft of light on the right — as seen from the Voyager 1 in 1990, at a distance of nearly 4 billion miles. Via.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Carl Sagan · space
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
Albert Einstein (via)
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Einstein · inspiration · quotes
Mannahatta, 1609, as Henry Hudson found it. Reminds me of this:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
More about The Mannahatta Project here and here.
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald · history · landscapes · New York · The Great Gatsby
A short documentary about what it takes to give a TED Talk.
“The thing is not to get self-conscious. It’s just like playing the piano. If you play the piano and suddenly start looking at your fingers … the music will stop.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
Categories: Odds & Ends Tags: Ken Robinson · presentations · TED talks · video