December 2011
Granpa Shuffelin'
Old people dancing is awesome. And the Internet is awesome for setting their classic steps to contemporary music.
via Kottke
What do teachers know when they're not doers?
Bret Victor questions the effectiveness of educators that do not actively participate in the subjects they teach in his essay Some Thoughts on Teaching.
Can you trust a teacher who doesn’t use what he teaches? Who has never used what he teaches?
Can you trust a teacher whose only connection to a subject is teaching it?
What Are You Doing New Years Eve?
Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
via Hans Pieper
Why I Prefer Pro
I’m not a big sports enthusiast, but I’ve always been more interested in professional sports. I was never sure why I had that preference, but Taylor Branch’s article, The Shame of College Sports expresses why I prefer pro.
For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.
–Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
— –Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via
City Math
Author Jonah Lehrer reports on Geoffrey West’s attempt to understand how cities work.
[C]ities are valuale because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
JAMES TARANTO, Better Late Than Never - WSJ.com
What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.
These artifacts are often found outside the city center. - Indexed
Design like nobody’s watching [comic]
via holykaw
Do This
31 Step Financial Tuneup
This is old but still useful. The New York Times has a personal finance check list with tons of useful links, calculators, videos, and other tools and media.
Taking time out to put your personal finances in gear can reap both immediate and long-term benefits, from cashing gift cards to reallocating investments. This checklist can help you formulate a strategy, providing tips, the time needed to achieve them, and links to additional resources. For each category, Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist, offers his insights on video. You can customize your list by removing items to suit your strategy, and then print a personalized list of the items you plan on tackling today.
from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! ‘The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!’ groans some solitary thinker. ‘Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,’ replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
As James Joyce said, “In the particular lies the universal.” (via Op-Ed: In…
As James Joyce said, “In the particular lies the universal.” (via Op-Ed: In The Particular Lies The Universal :: Articles :: The 99 Percent)
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
A good graphic designer understands how to arrange information on the page so the reader can ask and answer questions, make comparisons, and draw conclusions. When the software designer defines the visual representation of her program, when she describes the pictures that the user will interpret, she is doing graphic design, whether she realizes this or not.
— Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
Done is best...
It is better than “thinking about.” It is better than “started.” It is better than “perfect.”
“Done is better than perfect,” but that doesn’t mean that to never look back at what you did. Finish something and push it out the door, show it to the world.
The Psychology of Social Commerce
Tab Juice, a social e-commerce platform, has an interesting infographic on some of the psychological influences that go on in the minds of online shoppers.
When you combine the power of the mind and the force of social shopping, you have a mighty confabulation of social rules and subconscious needs. Together, these things play into the psychology of social commerce. Psychologists have defined six universal heuristics or learning methods that have been seen in shoppers and are now being seen in social commerce.
Branding is easier than it appears (via xkcd: Brand Identity )
Branding is easier than it appears (via xkcd: Brand Identity)
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Don’t use math. (via Dilbert comic strip for 12/19/2011 from the official…
Don’t use math. (via Dilbert comic strip for 12/19/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.)
Computer Triage
Rands has a handy flow chart for solving your own or other people’s computer problems.
You can also download a larger version.
Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities - 43 Folders
A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority. Got that? You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something. An item is either unique or it is not. A woman is either pregnant or she is not. An item is either the priority or it is not. One-bit. Mutually exclusive. One ring to rule them all.
Left brain / Right brain (via Ads of the World )
2011 Winners of the National Geographic Photo Contest
Alan Taylor published the winners of the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest
A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (© Anuar Patjane)
The Future of Science
The Institute for the Future has an exploration of ideas for what they see as the future of science.
Invisibility cloaks. Space hacking. Quantum consciousness. Opensource biology. Empowered with new tools, processes, and skills, scientists will gain new insight into the mysteries surrounding our brains, biology, and the strange matter that makes up our reality. We will develop powerful new instruments for gazing at the farthest reaches of space and descending into the deepest oceans, further illuminating our place in the universe.
Dolphin Jet Pack
Yes, this water based jet pack does let you swim like a dolphin.
via Kottke
GTD Advice Made Easy
David Allen, author of the often cited book Getting Things Done, broke down his system into very simple sections to make it easier to adopt.
He said the key points to GTD are to:
I have not read Getting Things Done yet, but I come across so many of its quotes, maxims, and applications on the web that I expect reading it would feel more like a review session than getting something for the first time.
Seth’s Blog: The extraordinary revolution of media choice
In a world of surfers, all you can do is work to make the best wave you can. The real revolution is that you get to make waves, not just ride them.
Social business planning
Organizations and individuals face a new field on which to compete. Planning the social aspects of business is now a critical factor for success.
via slideshare
msg : arig : Albert Einstein - I have no special talents. I am only…
Merlin Mann, Cranking - 43 Folders
Threats–like hurricanes and rectal exams–are only scary until they arrive. Once they’re over, they’re just the basis for funny stories. But, you do nearly always survive them. And, if you didn’t survive? It wasn’t because of a lack of fear. Like I say, the universe doesn’t particularly care whether you’re scared.
Identifying conflicts in a UI design - (Ryan Singer)
These three areas — the domain, the eye/brain, and the implementation — intertwine with each other. A single element may have conflicts in one area or all three at the same time. Much of the work designing interfaces involves teasing apart these conflicts in order to solve the right problem. Is the action correct, but it’s too hard to find? That’s a conflict with the eye/brain. Is the screen clear and simple but it doesn’t show the right information? That’s a conflict with the domain. Does it take too long to get feedback from a common action? That might be an implementation problem.
Quick 50 Writing Tools [PDF]
The Technology of Global Unrest (kk.org)
You can’t spend all day in an open-sourced, all-sharing, peer-to-peer network and not begin to think that the rest of your world should also operate in the same way.
Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers
Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.
The Cult of Done
I posted something on this before, but I found a pictoral version of the message as well as the text the image is based on.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
The Supercut
Kevin Kelly has some insights on how the new genre of supercuts will work behind the scenes to keep movies and videos fresh by pointing out the absurdity of repeated phrases, camera shots, and situations.
As super cuts become more common – and become part of the cultural vocabulary – I think they will help keep cliches from getting old, and will help creators and the audience perceive recurring patterns in rapid turnaround. They will act as keen proofreaders and critics.
Jerry Seinfeld explains the appeal of Facebook, long before the site…
Jerry Seinfeld explains the appeal of Facebook, long before the site existed.
Facebook In ‘90s (Seinfeld) (by chageo1185)
James Taranto, from Sexual Harassment Stories .
The fallen nature of man is gender-neutral. Some men are pigs, and some women are liars. Current sexual harassment law deals justly and effectively with the former at the cost of allowing the latter to do great harm to innocent men. The presence of both sexes in the workplace makes necessary some combination of laws, policies and customs to regulate sexual behavior on the job. But the principle of heads-she-wins-tails-he-loses does violence to both justice and equality.
— James Taranto, from Sexual Harassment Stories.
Tool-Makers
The world is full of great tools. With them anything is possible. But the paint brush does not make the painter. The pen does not make the poet.
Tools are inanimate object and are completely useless unless there is someone to use them, to animate them.
And who makes those world-changing tools?
Commuting is Expensive
Easier Is Better Than Better - Smashing Magazine
People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.
Types of Online Engagement
Are we paying attention less or just paying attention to more things at once?
Data Points: A Nation of Multitaskers More than ever we’re likely to surf the Web as we sample fall programming
The Personalized Web
The internet is a vast ocean of knowledge, spread wide and deep with facts and opinion.
This is good.
It gives us access to everything and anything we could ever want to find. It makes the information that once set experts apart from the rest of us accessible to everyone, leveling the field and removing the advantage of being in the know.
What do you think about books?
A simple questionair on What the Book can help you determine the kind of reader you are as you answer questions like this:
I silently judge others by their bookshelves.
this
Today
Every idea needs space to breathe. That is how you sort out the good ideas from the mediocre ones. That is how you decide what is important to work on next, what should go on the back burner, and what you should abandon entirely.
There is too little time to do everything, so focus and discernment are critical for getting the right jobs done. Writing doable lists and clearly defining next actions can help make the actual doing automatic. The real work, though, comes first, when you answer this question:
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21 suggestions for success (via @thecoolhunter )
21 suggestions for success (via @thecoolhunter)
