March 2009
65 posts
2 tags
WatchKary Mullis on The Scientific Method
One of my favorite TED Talks so far. I dig Mullis’s style. His talk is very conversational and the end is not what you’d expect from TED. My friend Nav said, “This is the kind of guy who would be a cool grandfather.” Totally. Old school, inquisitive science.
http://bit.ly/11KIiI
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D’Angelo - Shit, Damn - Live at the Cirkus
...
February 2009
75 posts
3 tags
SMS and IM Deserve More Attention
I realized recently that if I did work, I would not use email. I talk to my friends via SMS, IM, and Facebook, in order of frequency.
“Good ideas are common - what’s uncommon are people who’ll work hard enough to...”
– Ashleigh Brilliant (via affremblequotes)
“The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated...”
– Jens Roland - How To Kill The Music Industry (via artistspaid)
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Be a Humanist
A student of the humanities learns to recognize general principles governing disparate fields of study. He searches for the telos, the end or purpose, of anything he studies, rather than getting caught up in the minutiae. I had a friend who wrote a paper on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (physics), Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem (formal logic / mathematics), and Russian literature...
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WatchJuan Enriquez: Decoding the future with genomics
Enriquez’s recent Ted Talk was one of my favorites, so I searched through the archives to check out some of his other talks. This talk on genomics for some reason made me finally grasp the concept of DNA as software. Think of ATATAAG… as a set of instructions for growing a heart or lungs.
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Poor Dental Health is Directly Correlated to Diet
Dr. Weston Price found a number of non-industrial cultures that had excellent dental and overall health, including a high resistance to tooth decay, perfectly straight teeth, and wisdom teeth that erupted without impacting. These same cultures developed extreme dental problems, including severe dental decay and crooked teeth in the younger generation, upon adopting modern European foods. These...
DJ Shadow - Giving Up the Ghost
Discovered some...
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WatchNew season of Tim and Eric is f-ing hilarious.
If you take the whole universe and put it inside a tube, you’d get a tube that’s 2x the length of the universe
Fine European prices—they’re premium. Look at this discount price—there’s no meat on it. Throw it back.
IgniteNYC slidedeck
rafer:
kortina’s bit: I dug rafer’s presentation because I agree with a lot of what he said. I know this doesn’t not necessarily sound like the best way to evaluate knowledge and learn, but I wil say that that while I have come to some of the same conclusions in discussions with friends, there was also a lot of new stuff I learned here and just happened to immediately...
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Stevie Wonder - Positivity
This song just put a...
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but...”
– Lance Armstrong (via hit-or-miss) (via thecool)
kortina’s bit: Lance Armstrong def ranks “hero”
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John Legend - Refuge
Lovely.
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WatchFeedback loops of creativity, new models of organizing without strict organization, open source / community generated disruptive change—this talk makes me think of Betaworks.
Followup topics I’m going to think on:
When do feedback loops become counterproductive? Do we use data or intuition to respond to feedback loops?
I’m reminded of this talk http://bit.ly/HjN4L about using...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-2-22) →
Bruce Springsteen (89)
The Staple Singers (51)
Youngblood Brass Band (30)
The Byrds (27)
Taj Mahal (25)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Uncertainty, Experience and Intuition
gbattle:
Serial entrepreneurs have a unique capacity for uncertainty. They recognize uncertainty for what it really is – opportunity. Thomas Edison once said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Uncertainty presents us an opportunity to work through something with an unpredictable outcome. The more you embrace these experiences and...
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Facebook Connect Commenting Widget
The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code.
via http://bit.ly/aKt7A
A few friends have sent me links to this article asking my reaction and thoughts re: Disqus vs Facebook Comment Box. I haven’t played with the Comment Box too much yet, but my initial thoughts are:
As a reader of...
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Ben Franklin on Introspection
I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I...
“After I’ve swallowed prophecies of seers,
And trailed Aeneas from the Trojan...”
– Ballad of the Scholar’s Lament, ee cummings (via jacg):
That is precisely how I have been feeling recently: having studied those who have produced, how can I, now, produce? There is something about the process of producing - of being productive - that continues to elude me, I feel.
Einstein was...
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From My Inbox: Infinite Series, Smile
An infinite crowd of mathematicians enters a bar. The first one orders a pint, the second one a half pint, the third one a quarter pint… “I understand”, says the bartender - and pours two pints.
via Vince http://bit.ly/Vincent
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Herbie Hancock - Palm Grease
Mad funky tune,...
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Watchthe arrival of Homo evolutis
Great TED talk via Nav.
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Flux Makes Your Computer's Lighting Adapt to Time...
Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?
Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?
During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.
f.lux
F.lux fixes this: it makes your computer’s lighting...
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How to Measure a Good Day
Ask yourself, “Did I learn something new today?”
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Musings on My Music Consumption of Late
I have been playing a lot recently with some new music tools, spending less time in iTunes. This is partially inspired by the lack of hard disk space left on my laptop, but also out of curiosity to explore what’s going on in the music space. Here are a few buckets or genres of tools I have noticed: Discovery - Hypem I often find myself on the Spy or Popular pages, just checking out tunes...
Highbrid - Keep it Crunk
Getting ready for the...
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BT - The Internal Locus
At ~3min I want to rally...
bit.ly now
johnborthwick:
This exposes intentionality of sharing in its rawest form. People are taking this page and re-distributing it to their friends. The article from the Consumerist is also on Digg — 5800 people found this story interesting enough to Digg it. Yet more than 40,000 people actually shared this story and drove a click through to the item they shared. bit.ly is proving to be an...
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“When a person trains once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a...”
– Emil Zatopek
This came up in a convo today as my response to someone who said to me “I’m tired.”
Make a poster. Scrawl this on your wall or on a note in your wallet. Write it on the ceiling above your bed. Make it your mantra.
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Tumblr SEO Request
When subscribers consume a tumblr blog via RSS, they end up with the SEO unfriendly versions of links to blog posts (so, if they link to you, the links aren’t as juiced as they could be). It’d be an easy SEO win to syndicate the titleized links via RSS.
Dear Tumblr,
Please make the links in tumblr rss the seo friendly versions! Eg, http://blog.kortina.net/rss links to: ...
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Add the Tumblr MP3 Player Asyncronously
dankantor:
Anyone that knows me knows that the first thing I do with new technology is figure out how to make it play music. So it makes sense that a week-or-so in to my Tumblr blog, I would create an mp3 player for it. So here is my first stab at it. You can see it in action at the bottom of this blog.
Love this mp3 player widget but I do not love javascripts that slow down page load. I...
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Fight Patent Trolls
Fred Wilson has an excellent post over on the VC on the costs of patent trolls. I love his proposal:
force the plaintiff to pay the defendant’s legal fees if a patent infringement case is lost. That would force the trolls to actually do some work and make sure they have a really strong case before bringing it. That is clearly not being done now because the trolls can sue anyone they want...
“Off Notes: Online Music's Bad Record of Investor...
Paul Vidich has some good notes on internet music scene over at the betaworks blog
betaworks: It’s important to understand that, for consumers, ‘it’s all about the music.’ Consumers want to listen to, interact with, or own music. Derivative activities, such as information about tours, networking among fans, etc., are secondary drivers of interest.
kortina’s bit: The only derivative...
fred-wilson:
Epilepsy Is Dancing - Antony And...
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Who Is It?
Dangerous is prolly my fav MJ album....
“Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and...”
– Robert G. Ingersoll (via affremblequotes)
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WatchTim Ferris on Learning
This video summarizes most of the key concepts of 4 Hour Workweek. http://bit.ly/4hour
I highly recommend this book if you haven’t read it. If you’re not down for reading a full book, spend 17min watching this vid.
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Creedence Clearwater Revival - Lodi
Reading...
Too Damn Comfortable
alimentary:
Living alone, pursuing the ideas in your head: a life of solitude is self-perpetuating. I’ve done it for nearly two years now, and it’s beginning to lose its thrill. The prospect of living alone with my thoughts was very exciting at first, but I’m beginning to feel that I’m too well-adjusted, too well-situated: too damn comfortable. I’m not being challenged to grow outside of myself....
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From My Inbox: I Want to Go To Here
This just arrived in my inbox from an old instructor:
What Up, I emailed about full contact stick sparring at Penn State a few weeks ago, well the event is tomorrow. The fencing helmets are in my trunk, so if you were serious about going shoot me a note and we’ll work out the ride situation. And if you scroll down there is info about Datu Hartman’s seminar in DC next month. best, ...
navsmusings:
Chester French : She Loves...
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WTF Am I Saying Today? Compulsively Using Slang...
G-BAttle: total proof of concept kinda thing.
me: def novel and would get you cred w the 1337
G-BAttle: imma do it then...on my list.
me: keep the list tight and triage based on cash flow
