Kareem Mayan's Tumbling...

"I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that..."

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:34:05 -0400

“

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

”

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.
Stop Rationalizing and Make Hard Decisions: Learning from Dr. King - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

An even-handed look at how Twitter, Facebook, etc are changing our relationships with each other

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:06:42 -0400

An even-handed look at how Twitter, Facebook, etc are changing our relationships with each other: It’s written by Clive Thompson, who writes wonderfully about the social impact of science and technology.

How Improv Teaches You to Build a Better Product

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:05:00 -0400

How Improv Teaches You to Build a Better Product

Do you have Noobitis?

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:25:56 -0400

Do you have Noobitis?

"I believe that the biggest advantage a startup has over a big competitor is intellectual..."

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:43:28 -0400

“I believe that the biggest advantage a startup has over a big competitor is intellectual honesty… This is particularly true of technical professionals who view intellectual honesty as core to their job. How often to you hear business people poke holes in their own arguments the way engineers do?”

- Laserlike via ericds

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to..."

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:39:26 -0400

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

- Steve Jobs (via ThinkSimpleNow, (via gregnews)

Obama's story is wonderful, but that’s not all [FatMixx]

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:27:53 -0400

Obama's story is wonderful, but that’s not all [FatMixx]:

Well said:

I’m actually going to get to vote for someone this time. That [Obama] is a regular guy, who started with no privileged position, whose family built their successes on the backs of sound American policies like the GI Bill and student loans and home ownership stands as a testament to what we can do when government provides people with opportunities and hope. His candidacy is about more than race, it’s about everything that makes this country work. And that, folks, makes me proud to be an American.

Tim Ferriss interview with Derek Sivers

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:34:42 -0400

Tim Ferriss interview with Derek Sivers: Excellent life hacks here and good stuff on marketing and promoting online.

Traffic engineer Hans Monderman is proving fewer signs make for safer intersections

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:03:32 -0400

Traffic engineer Hans Monderman is proving fewer signs make for safer intersections:

My interest in traffic continues.

Traffic signs, for Monderman, were an invitation to stop thinking, to stop acting on one’s own volition.

So….

At the town center of Drachten, in a crowded four- way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout… marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law. As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic. A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection— buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example— but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals— of the electronic or hand variety— more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he “would have changed it immediately.”

He’s designing for human-scale interactions:

There was the “traffic world” of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the “social world,” where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds. The reason he didn’t want traffic infrastructure in the center of Drachten or any number of other places was simple: “I don’t want traffic behavior, I want social behavior.”

if my mom was on facebook, this would be her profile picture...

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:44:42 -0400

if my mom was on facebook, this would be her profile picture (via reemer)

Kids don't "go out and play" anymore

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:13:37 -0400

Kids don't "go out and play" anymore: I used to spend hours a day “riding bikes”, climbing the trees in the neighborhood, and just generally hanging out w/ friends. And it was all good as long as I was home by dark.

Brazilian Gutter Art

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:29:42 -0400

Brazilian Gutter Art

gah… amazing. Death Star over San Francisco // Current

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:08:18 -0400

gah… amazing. Death Star over San Francisco // Current

6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:03:33 -0400

6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:04:52 -0400

“Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.”

- Zappos.com CEO -Tony Hsieh: Passing on best quote I heard today…

Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:21:00 -0400

Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road :

Holy shit, this is a brilliant and unique vision to organize personal transportation. I love these quotes:

“Once you have a mission,” Agassi told me over dinner one night last winter, “you can’t go back to having a job.”

and

After a career spent thinking exclusively about business software, Agassi now thrills to the idea that he’s changing the world. “I get to shift multiple markets,” he says. “I get to shift economies. It’s extremely liberating. I breathe differently.”

and

The entire staff is trying to write a mission statement with help from a moderator. He flips through slides on a screen: “Our mission is to transform personal mobility.” “Our mission is to break the world’s oil addiction (before it breaks us).” Agassi, in a black leather jacket, a stiff blue-and-white button-down, and faded jeans, stops the moderator. “We still think we’re selling to them,” he says, after one of his long, drawn-out pauses. “We’re not. It’s not us to them. It’s them to us. You see, people want this to happen; we just happen to be in the way of their getting what they want. We can’t give them the car fast enough. That’s something we need to capture: ‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to sell to you.’ We’re a facilitator, not the creator. This is going to be a community. We just need to get out of their way. They’re going to push for policy, they’re going to sell the cars, they’re going to be zealots.”

Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:29:20 -0400

Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup

Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:06:44 -0400

Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality : “When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes dose to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.” (article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:19:41 -0400

Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio: Good advice on marketing a new product.

Seven writers on how they have learnt to live in the moment

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:47:56 -0400

Seven writers on how they have learnt to live in the moment