Motivation

According to Dan Pink, money just complicates things. All we really want in life is autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

RSA "Animates" play like a perfect storm of Common Craft (In Plain English) and TED talks. I'm hooked.

TED Thyself

I love TED Talks; everybody should. Experts giving lectures in their fields, streamed online for free... what's not to love? I've posted some TED stuff before, so when I saw Dr. Sebastian Wernicke eviscerate the polarities of TED Talk popularity, it was begging to be shared.

"... If you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go!"

Dr. Wernicke illustrates his points so well that you can't help but giggle at all the silly humans, or be inspired to apply his methods. For instance, TED user Claudio Furet commented on the video with a guide to getting "really high votes" on your TED comments.

Get your own tedPAD and start being an expert today.

Scientific Morality

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, presented a TED talk called "Science can answer moral questions" earlier this month. While Harris' disdain for religion is evident and may consequently offend some people, I think his examination of the common themes in human values reaches an important conclusion:

"Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim. This is something we could be right or wrong about. If we've misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience, well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects."

xkcd

Randall Munroe is proof that a simple idea, well loved, can become complicated as all hell.

What does xkcd mean? (44:33)

People act out xkcd strips (7:15): "Cory Doctorow wears a red cape and goggles when he blogs..."; "Richard Stallman... sleeps with a katana..."; "Janeane Garofolo jumping a motorcycle off of the international space station as it crashes over an island with a volcanic eruption and tyrannosaurs..."; "Do you expect me to fly?" (19:15)

Also: Programming while drinking (10:15), "Maybe that's how Cory Doctorow gets to the balloon..." (21:25), lisp book (29:52), "If a raptor were to attack me in this room, how would I escape?" (30:28), River Tam (32:49), "Science. It works, bitches." (33:22), EMP Cannon (38:03), Sudo make me a sandwich (49:01), Braille (49:47), live Google doodle (52:52), and elaborate fight scenes (55:10).

Sherman Alexie

I did a project about Sherman Alexie for a poetry class in college. My favorite poems of his are "Evolution" and "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City." I remember joking about him having a mullet.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to see him on the Colbert Report. It seemed odd to me that, in searching for a video of the interview, I came across this footage of Alexie speaking shortly after 9/11. Maybe because the poetry class that I didn't go to the morning of 9/11 was the same poetry class in which I gave my Alexie presentation. I could gush about how cathartic his words are for me now, but I'll let Alexie speak for himself.

Geekier Than Thou

If you've ever worried about your nerdy hobby or been concerned about your OCD kicking in, just rest in the knowledge that Adam Savage is somewhere out there pushing the envelope. He's also probably attempting to recreate the envelope from pictures in his spare time. But that's only because he destroyed the original envelope on Mythbusters... you know... trying to see if he could make it burn underwater or something.

Future Possibilities

The grandchildren of our grandchildren will think about us in the way we think about Neanderthals.