Nathan Myhrvold - Pretty Badass

I just watched this video about Nathan who is quite an incredible guy who spends 18 minutes describing what he does. It’s a lot of very scientific stuff like:

Archeology - digitizing Easter Island statues and the pyramids
Inventing new nuclear reactors - which are more efficient and better than the current designs
Inventing meta-reactors which are [...]

Building Participation & Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky has a great speech about cognitive surplus. A phrase that refers to the free time we have away from our jobs or studies to do stuff. Over the past 30-50 years, what everyone did with this cognitive surplus is watch TV. Sitcoms were the big universal thing everyone did. [...]

Now THIS is a Company

The United States Beer Drinking Team!
What is it? From the website:
The U.S. Beer Drinking Team™ ( USBDT ® ) is the first team dedicated to the millions of passionate beer drinkers in the United States. The USBDT’s goal is to promote the “sister and brotherhood of beer” while promoting responsible drinking.
This is a [...]

It’s not all technology - the arts matter too (Dana Gioia)

Below is a great speech by the poet Dana Gioia to the Stanford graduating class of 2007….
Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (June 17, 2007)
Good morning.
It is a [...]

Technology and Genetics - When Should We Stop? When is it Enough?

A couple of years ago i read Bill Mckibben’s book Enough. It’s a great read. In the book he discusses what it means to be human. There are 3 subjects he focuses on in the book: genetic research, nanotechnology and robotics. In each one he explores that ever shrinking moral and spiritual [...]

What I Would do to Fix AOL

I saw the annoucement last week (and news stories) of the new AOL CEO, Randy Falco, and got to wondering, if I’m in charge of running AOL which is now in the business of monetizing traffic to AOL.com and other pages, how would i do it? A few thoughts came to mind….
First, i would [...]

Quote: Strong Opinions - Weakly Held

I read this here from Bob Sutton:
A couple years ago I was talking the Institute’s (Palo Alto Institue of the Future) Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – he advises people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.”
Charteuse continues on [...]

Treadputer

I usually try not to simply repost items that are already on the internet, but every now and again something comes around that is so awesome, it deserves a major shoutout.  Today, this is the treadputer - that is: a computer and treadmill mashed together.  A guy who's training for a bunch of marathons has [...]

Ideas, Observations & Questions

Just some things i’ve noticed over the past few months:

Why is NY the only city that’s implemented the cascading street lights? One light turns green, then when you get to the next - guess what? It turns green. Genius. I can’t stand waiting at a stoplight for 5 minutes, only to go [...]