The three H's

Great design should have
Head (it should be thoughtful)
Heart (it should have meaning and passion)
Hand (it must be well executed)

Octopus

My favourite marine animal, except that I am fascinated by all the other ones. Clippings come from Deep Intellect, by Sy Montgomery (Orion Magazine)

Octopus intelligence evolved when they abandoned their shell, enabling novel hunting and sheltering strategies.

Contrast with human intelligence, which is supposed to be driven by social needs.

He also offers a great description of the beasts:
"No alien is so startlingly strange. ... an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, squirt ink"

He later mentions that they can see (at least colors) with their skin

Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold

Morgan Spurlock

This guy is great fun! The talk is on the making of his movie on product placement/branding-- the one where he had companies pay to have their products placed in a documentary about product placement.

Embrace you fear-- that could be his credo, and the lesson from the film. The people who bought in saw huge returns. The *big name* companies all turned him down. Too risky, not enough "control". I also got the feeling (he shows some of his presentations) that they viewed him with total contempt, as if his very existance was an insult to their sanctity.

Bruce Aylward: How we'll stop polio for good

Bruce Aylward

A great man, with a great quest. We do have the little bastard on the run, and I agree, we MUST finish it off.

Polio took my father's brother at age 16.

Honor Harger: A history of the universe in sound

Honor Harger

Some great clips, if you ever want to make a mix tape "This is the sound of Saturn"...

Mencken quote

To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

from Wikiquote page on
H L Mencken. 1920

Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock

Bill Ford

Good talk, but he does have a bad vocal tick

Will smart, networked cars save us?

Fords original vision was to give everyone personal mobility. Pre car, most people lived their entire life in a 25 mile radius circle.