December 2011
47 posts
2 tags
Granpa Shuffelin'
Old people dancing is awesome. And the Internet is awesome for setting their classic steps to contemporary music.
via Kottke
1 tag
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?
How can such a teacher know if what he’s teaching is...
3 tags
What Are You Doing New Years Eve?
Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
via Hans Pieper
3 tags
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...
1 tag
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and...”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via
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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...
“What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half...”
– JAMES TARANTO, Better Late Than Never - WSJ.com
Design like nobody’s watching [comic]
via holykaw
Do This →
NowDoThis is an awesome one-thing-at-a time to-do list manager. [Note: it only works for the very organized.]
3 tags
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...
1 tag
“We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! ‘The world is...”
– from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A good graphic designer understands how to arrange information on the page so...”
– Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface
1 tag
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.
After that you have choices: stop, iterate, or start something new.
Photo credit:...
4 tags
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...
3 tags
2 tags
Computer Triage
Rands in Repose 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...”
– Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders
1 tag
2011 Winners of the National Geographic Photo...
Alan Taylor published the winners of the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest
A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (© Anuar Patjane)
2 tags
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...
2 tags
Dolphin Jet Pack
Yes, this water based jet pack does let you swim like a dolphin.
via Kottke
2 tags
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:
Keep meaningful stuff out of your head
Make action and outcome decisions about the stuff sooner than later
Organize reminders of those items in easy to view places
Review it all and keep it current
I have not read...
“In a world of surfers, all you can do is work to make the best wave you can. The...”
– Seth’s Blog: The extraordinary revolution of media choice
2 tags
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
“Threats—like hurricanes and rectal exams—are only scary until they...”
– Merlin Mann, Cranking | 43 Folders
“These three areas — the domain, the eye/brain, and the implementation —...”
– Identifying conflicts in a UI design - (Ryan Singer)
Quick 50 Writing Tools [PDF] →
This list of writing tools is a great help. You can also get it in text form here.
“You can’t spend all day in an open-sourced, all-sharing, peer-to-peer...”
– The Technology of Global Unrest (kk.org)
“Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.”
– Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers
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
There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you...
1 tag
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...
“The fallen nature of man is gender-neutral. Some men are pigs, and some women...”
– Sexual Harassment Stories (online.wsj.com)
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?
Those who make tools have a high calling. The work they do enables the rest of us to create. The...
Commuting is Expensive
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...”
– Easier Is Better Than Better - Smashing Magazine
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
via Ad Week
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.
However, now that everyone can “know” following a few...
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
A book has made me so angry that I’ve thrown it against a wall.
and this
Decorating with books is perverse.
The site also lets you know how you stack up against other readers.
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...
