Richard Dawkins, echoing the famous words of Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan, in this great BBC 4 Radio interview.
Also see Dawkins’s The Magic of Reality, a children’s book debunking religious mythology with the awe of science.
(via explore-blog)
(via explore-blog)
How to Be an Explorer of the World by Maria Popova
It all began with this simple list, which Smith scribbled on a piece of paper in the middle a sleepless night in 2007:
Taken from illustrator Keri Smith’s Wreck This Box set of interactive journals, Maria Popova finds delight and inspiration in the creativity of being simple. WE LIKE THIS APPROACH and the 13 points above are definitely words to live by.
- In the ketchup: Operating at a deficit
- John Hollowlegs: A hungry man [hobo use]
- Lobbygow: One who loafs around an opium den in hopes of being offered a free pipe
- Happy cabbage: A sizable amount of money to be spent on self-satisfying things
- Zib: A nondescript nincompoop
- Give someone the wind: To jilt a suitor with great suddenness
- The zings: A hangover
- Butter and egg man: A wealthy, unsophisticated, small-town businessman who tries to become a playboy, especially when visiting a large city
- Cluck and grunt: Eggs and ham
- Off the cob: Corny
- Dog robber: A baseball umpire
- Happies: Arch supporters [shoe salesman use]
- High-wine: A mixture of grain alcohol and Coca-Cola [hobo use]
- Flub the dub: To evade one’s duty
- Donkey’s breakfast: A straw mattress
- George Eddy: A customer who does not tip
- Wet sock: A limp, flaccid handshake
- Gazoozle: To cheat
- On a toot: On a drunken spree
:)
“Shouldn’t everybody be on the internet? YESSS.”
Kids in adorable 90s haircuts predict the future of the internet (“by the time we’re in college, the internet will be our telephone, television, shopping center, and workplace”; “…and I even found a recipe for catfood cupcakes”) in an oddly prophetic PSA from 1995.
Then, see Arthur C. Clarke predict it way back in 1964.
The Scientific Power of Music
AsapSCIENCE analyzes music as humanity’s drug of choice. Listening to music can cause the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, in the same pleasure or reward circuits that cause cocaine addiction.
Do melodies, harmonies and rhythms tap into the same kind of brain reward systems that drive our desires for food, sex and other basic behaviors? What do you think the evolutionary basis behind it could be? Does it predate humans being social or is this a just a random byproduct of our brain wiring?
(via poptech)
I find the pics fascinating and exciting. To think of all the possibilities…
[T]he problem with unforeseen delays is you can’t foresee them, no matter how finely detailed your planning… [T]he unlikely trick is to plan in less detail: avoid considering the specifics and simply ask yourself how long it’s taken to do roughly similar things before.
[…]
Better yet, where possible, avoid planning altogether. Use the “ready, fire, aim” approach, and correct course as you go along.
”Oliver Burkeman on the psychology of why everything takes longer than you think.
Also see Frank Partnoy on the art of delay.
(via explore-blog)
Jonathan Harris makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other.
In this talk, appropriately given during CreativeMornings’ Arts + Tech themed month done in partnership with RISD, Jonathan revisits different phases of his life and the medium that marked them in his work as an artist. Starting with paint, Jonathan speaks on data, life, himself, and tool(s) — addressing both the positives and negatives of each medium as well as what he hopes for the future of arts + tech.
Digital media is exploding. Half of us now read news on tablets, virtually all music tracks are bought electronically, and nearly a tenth of Americans are ditching cable for internet TV.
I know I am!
But what does it take to make money from these fast-growing industries, and which companies are leading the way? Welcome to our second annual paidContent 50 list — our attempt to answer those questions.
The paidContent 50 ranks digital-media companies based not on whether we like their products or are on a first-name basis with their CEOs. We use a very simple and objective metric: the revenue they earn from digital content, or from the adverting around that content. After all, companies ultimately need to earn revenue to survive and thrive — the more of it, the better.
Last year’s paidContent 50 focused on U.S. companies. This year, we’ve gone global, in an effort to better reflect changes in the industry itself. A growing number of content companies — Netflix, Sina and Spotify, among them — are aggressively pushing into overseas markets ater dominating at home. As that becomes a bigger focus for these companies, you can’t gauge their success without factoring in their track record internationally.
Creating this list wasn’t easy. We wanted digital revenue from the last full year, either calendar or fiscal, depending on the company. To get those numbers, we combed through public filings, read an ungodly number of news stories, and worked our network of contacts and analysts for data and background. Some media companies break out digital sales for everyone to see, but other companies (and not just startups) make it extremely difficult to discern. With some of those companies, our digital sales numbers are educated estimates based on our research, and in those cases, we list our sources and explain our math. (Read more about our methodology here.)
That Google tops our paidContent 50 list again this year may not come as a shocker. But there are definitely some surprises in this year’s crop of most-successful companies. How much do you know about South African publisher Naspers? Well, it dwarfs many U.S. household media brands when it comes to digital revenue. Twitter is hugely important media company, but it didn’t crack our list (and neither did The New York Times, for that matter). Amazon, on the other hand, is going gangbusters with content sales, as our writeup shows. And as with so many industries, China is becoming a power in media, too.
We’ve tried to be as scientific as possible with this list — the numbers are rooted in raw numbers, not emotions. But no such list is ever perfect. This is a work-in-progress; it’s aimed at starting the conversation about digital success. Please give us your feedback so we can make next year’s list even better.
Additional reporting by Jeff Roberts,
Staci D. Kramer, Laura Owen and Dan Frankel.
(via explore-blog)
Maira Kalman — the remarkable artist, prolific author, and unmatched storyteller — shares some wisdom on identity, happiness, and existence.
You gotta check out the works of Bulgarian born artist Mladen Penev. Back in 2005, he created a series of photographs titled “The Power of Books” about how much we can get pulled into the worlds inside books. The visual is quite interesting.
(via imprecise)
