Blog – page 44 of 75

Gathering opinions from everyone in the room is still in vogue, but creative work is still best done in solitude. Susan Cain of The New York times explores the role of Groupthink in the workplace and how best to combat its negative effects.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

Dilbert Creator Scott Adams talks about what works for his success in an essay on his blog called The Yoke of Credibility.

I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the strongest to evolve and make a difference. The worst case scenario is that my ideas cause the eventual best ideas to compete harder and evolve to even better forms. When you use a process that makes sense, even the unanticipated outcomes are good.

This Princess Bride themed wine from the Alamo Draft House will be available for Valentine’s Day.

Nothing says “I Love You” like a possibly poisoned wine.

If you don’t like growing older, don’t worry about it. You may not be growing older much longer.

— Thomas Sowell

Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse.

— Joseph Conrad, Victory

oliphillips:

It takes considerable energy to plan your own future, but if you don’t figure out what you want to become, someone else will define it for you.

— Jason Theodor, M.A.P.S.: The Four Pillars of Creative Job Fulfillment

driving on mountain top ORIGINAL! (by 87mcmahan87)

Movies reimagined for another time & place via Behance.

I love e-books, especially on my Kindle, but Nicholas Carr or the Wall Street Journal has some interesting ideas on the danger of e-books.

[A]s is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today. Movable text makes a lousy preservative.

I don’t have any clear preferences in chess. I do what I think circumstances require of me – I attack, defend or go into the endgame. Having preferences means having weaknesses.

— Magnus Carlsen, chess master (via Chess News)

The real egalitarians are not the people who want to redistribute wealth to the poor, but those who want to extend to the poor the ability to create their own wealth, to lift themselves up, instead of trying to tear others down. Earning respect, including self-respect, is better than being a parasite.

— Thomas Sowell

“A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. “

See the full 64 Megapixel version.

Tom Standage argues that writing is the greatest invention.

The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.

Wired has a collection of portraits by Tim Mantoani of photographers holding prints of their most famous works.

Photographer Jeff Widener with his iconic photo of the man in Tienanmen Square from 1989. Photo by: Tim Mantoani

Kevin Kelley points out the value of the public domain.

It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.

imgfave:

★ discovered on imgfave.com (social image bookmarking)

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.