Blog – page 10 of 16

Bussinessweek’s Ashlee Vance explores some of the unique aspects of the current tech bubble in her article, This Tech Bubble Is Different. The biggest problem is the vast amount of wasted talent.

[Jeff] Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

Degrees are losing their clout according to the New York Times.

The U.S. produces a large number of workers whose skills aren’t needed.

A degree by itself is not worth what it once was. This means high schoolers planning to go to college need to start thinking more about what they intend to do after graduation so they can put their college years to good use.

Social media brought attention to and was even the force behind several social revolutions in the past 12 months. However, The Economist show that the use of social networks for societal change is nothing new, citing how Luther went viral in the 16th Century.

The rate of technological progress creates a strong urge to believe the world we live in today is unique and different from everything that’s come before, but looking at other periods of technological change in history reveal the similar routes revolutions take when new technological tools become available.

Five musicians sharing a guitar: Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover) (by walkofftheearth)

Oh, the Places You’ll Go, recited by Burning Man goers (by Tedshots)

After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago, my wife and I (Sean Ohlenkamp) decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto.

Quiz yourself. (via 2000s Film Alphabet, Poster That Quizzes Your 2000′s Movie Knowledge)

Get the beauty product used by celebrities everywhere. Look like your favorite magazine starlet!

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

I’m giving a few presentations for work at the end of this month. I’m nervous but hopeful that they’ll turn out better than this:

As much as I enjoyed this video, it was probably because it was a complete (yet well done) rip off of this video by Britanick.

via Mitch Joel

The Planetary Chocolates of the Solar System

How to nap - Boston.com

git - the simple guide

Primary Elections Explained by CGPGrey. This video explains many of the complications and nuances of the U.S. presidential primary process.

This clever Tumblr features album cover art with the dead band members digitally removed.

via Laughing Squid

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.

— Jeff Bezos - from Wired Magazine

foxontherun:

(via graphics / your dreams)

Shake On It – It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports – ESPN Commercial (by ESPN)

milkchugger:

Byrecovering lazyholic

ollymoss:

Star Wars

Batman, Meet Dr. Seuss

via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Is Life Good?

One of my favorite writer’s writers has given a final sign off from his weekly blog. William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well , signed of after several years of writing for The American Scholar, which will not be the same without him.

In his final post he shared a final great piece of advice to aspiring writers:

Give yourself permission to believe in the validity of your own narrative.

Has Hollywood Lost it’s Way? via Short of the Week

The Telegraph has this amazing picture of coffee splashing out of its cup.

Jack Long uses high-speed photography to capture the moment a splash is made in a cup of coffee. The Milwaukee-based photographer has taken a year to perfect his secret technique, but claims the effect is not created by dropping liquid as seen in other splash photography…

via Art of the Title

Jeremiah Warren made this quick history of the modern calendar.

via Laughing Squid

Facebook’s Memology takes a look at the top 10 global topics of 2011.

Memology takes the pulse of this global community by comparing this year’s status updates to last year’s, unearthing the most popular topics and cultural trends - or memes - emerging on Facebook. Whether it’s hmu, lms or tbh, each year brings a new set of three letter acronyms that go viral.

Once a year, my dislike of pop music comes into conflict with my love for well done mashup/remixes thanks to the amazing work of DJ Earworm.

This year’s mix, as always, features the 25 biggest hits of 2011.

This year’s was okay, but doesn’t compare to his best work in 2009:

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. Call it Generation Sell.

— William Dersiewicz: The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com

Below are some highlights from my recent reading of Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”, a collection of some of the better known of Poor Richard’s sayings.

[D]ost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of[.]

…

We degrade God when we attribute our own ideas to Him, out of annoyance that we cannot fathom His ways.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Idiot

Old people dancing is awesome. And the Internet is awesome for setting their classic steps to contemporary music.

via Kottke

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?

Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

via Hans Pieper

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.

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

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.”

What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.

— JAMES TARANTO, Better Late Than Never - WSJ.com

These artifacts are often found outside the city center. - Indexed

via holykaw

Do This

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.

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 The Particular Lies The Universal :: Articles :: The 99 Percent)

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

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.

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)

Don’t use math. (via Dilbert comic strip for 12/19/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.)

Rands has a handy flow chart for solving your own or other people’s computer problems.

You can also download a larger version.

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.

— Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities - 43 Folders

Left brain / Right brain

(via Ads of the World)

Alan Taylor published the winners of the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest

A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (© Anuar Patjane)

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.

Yes, this water based jet pack does let you swim like a dolphin.

via Kottke

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.

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.

— Seth’s Blog: The extraordinary revolution of media choice

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:

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.

— Merlin Mann, Cranking - 43 Folders

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.

— Identifying conflicts in a UI design - (Ryan Singer)

Quick 50 Writing Tools [PDF]

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.

— The Technology of Global Unrest (kk.org)

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.

— Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers

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

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 existed.

Facebook In ‘90s (Seinfeld) (by chageo1185)

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.

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?

It costs a lot to commute everyday. I’m glad to have a reliable bike.

via Lifehacker

People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.

— Easier Is Better Than Better - Smashing Magazine

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 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.

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

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:

21 suggestions for success (via @thecoolhunter)

The Beauty Of A Second

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

— G.K. Chesterton in The Club of Queer Trades (via gkchestertonquote)

The Expert Enough Manifesto (via)

(via xkcd: Citogenesis)

Knowing how to hide your sources.

designoclock:

Tom Garbor

What does it mean?

A painfully accurate airplane seating chart. (via Pleated Jeans)

10 fact about you. All were true for me.

Harvard Sailing Team - Boys Will Be Girls (by HSTSketchComedy)

via Startupquote

It’s not we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas. - Edwin Land

Last week, I got an assignment to write up a bio about myself for the NeoGenomics company news letter. After trying for a while, I discovered that I have a really hard time talking about myself. That’s when I asked Gabi to write my bio for me.

She came up with this awesome write-up:

Jonathan started working at NeoGenomics at the beginning of October as the Digital Marketing Specialist. He is very excited to be working for Neo, putting his skills to work during this exciting time of company growth.

Figure this one out… (via Best statistics question ever)

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

— Robert Frost, “A Time to Talk” - (37signals)

Sid’s Fate (via Super Punch)

Always make sure you get the email address right. (via xkcd: The Important Field)

Japan cleans up quick. (via Before and After Photos of 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Destruction Show 6 Months of Speedy Cleanup)

How to Break Down a Door: An Illustrated Guide - The Art of Manliness

“It Always Seems Impossible Until It Is Done” via Lifehacker

What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth? (by yesterday2221)

Math Puns (via Pizza – Boing Boing)

Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o’clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o’clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution.

G.K. Chesterton (What’s Wrong with the World)