What Defines a Meme? What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. Ideas.
Parsing Grammar: Diagramming sentences as a way to teach school children about syntax began in the 1800s. What tools does a grammarian need? A brain helps, and so does a computer, but surely one of our most essential tools is some kind of diagramming system. How can we think about a sentence's structure, after all, without displaying it visually? It wasn't always so. Just 30 years later, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, possessing typical American marketing skills, created a more appealing version using lines instead of bubbles, like this one generated by an online parser: For a long time, sentence diagramming flourished throughout the American school system, and, despite being condemned as a useless waste of time in the 1970s, it still persists in many schools. In Europe, some linguists saw an opportunity to make the diagrams even better. This diagram was also generated by an online parser (which, like most parsers, makes mistakes—what happened to the first word, Our?). As we struggle to rebound from the effects of that disaster, it's worth honoring Stephen Watkins Clark and his bubbles!
lifehack Books have the power to help people realize their dreams and maximize their potential. A good reading experience can be life-changing. Here are 10 books recommended by global entrepreneurs. 1. “It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world.” – Og Mandino This book topped number one on Wall Street, New York Times and USA Today, so it is bound to be a good read. The book is described as an “excellent read for not only your business but any goal you are trying to achieve in life”. With the amount of distractions in this day and age from emails, text messages, and phone calls, it is hard to not get side tracked from what does matter. As the book quotes “Extraordinary results require focused attention and time. Figure out what the one thing is in your life that you want and achieve it. 2. “Believe you can succeed and you will” If you want to do more and achieve more, then you need to learn how to think properly. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Set a Goal For Yourself
What Work Is Really For The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Is work good or bad? A fatuous question, it may seem, with unemployment such a pressing national concern. (Apart from the names of the two candidates, “jobs” was the politically relevant word most used by speakers at the Republican and Democratic conventions.) But there’s an underlying ambivalence: we celebrate Labor Day by not working, the Book of Genesis says work is punishment for Adam’s sin, and many of us count the days to the next vacation and see a contented retirement as the only reason for working. We’re ambivalent about work because in our capitalist system it means work-for-pay (wage-labor), not for its own sake. Everything depends on how we understand leisure. We can pass by for now the question of just what activities are truly enjoyable for their own sake — perhaps eating and drinking, sports, love, adventure, art, contemplation? Leif Parsons
50 Creative, Cheap Ways to Have Fun “Never let lack of money interfere with having fun.” ~Unknown Back when we were young, we may have asked our parents for money to do things, but more often than not, we found creative ways to have fun without spending a dime. At least I know I did. My cousins and I turned their bulkhead cellar doors into a slide—and the main attraction of our DIY amusement park. We turned cardboard paper towel rolls and rice-filled soda bottles into instruments, and entertained ourselves for hours on end. We didn’t wait for overtime or vacation weeks to have fun. I highly doubt I’d spend one of my adult Saturdays banging on a homemade coffee can drum, but there’s something to said for getting a little creative with your downtime. If you’re looking for some cheap, creative ways to enjoy the weekend—or perhaps an upcoming weekday you’ve chosen to liberate—I recommend: Have Fun Outside 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Have Fun with Food 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Have Fun with Entertainment 21. 22.
Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways To Learn Faster, Deeper, & Better If someone granted you one wish, what do you imagine you would want out of life that you haven’t gotten yet? For many people, it would be self-improvement and knowledge. Newcounter knowledge is the backbone of society’s progress. Great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and others’ quests for knowledge have led society to many of the marvels we enjoy today. Your quest for knowledge doesn’t have to be as Earth-changing as Einstein’s, but it can be an important part of your life, leading to a new job, better pay, a new hobby, or simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake — whatever is important to you as an end goal. Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. Health Shake a leg. Balance Sleep on it. Perspective and Focus Change your focus, part 2. Recall Techniques Listen to music. Visual Aids Every picture tells a story. Verbal and Auditory Techniques Stimulate ideas. Kinesthetic Techniques Write, don’t type.
When Your Calling Seems Vague and Unclear, You’re on the Right Track When Your Calling Seems Vague and Unclear, You’re on the Right Track Most people don’t know what to do with their lives. And that’s okay. “We see in order to move; we move in order to see.” —William Gibson These days, there’s a lot of talk about discovering your dream. More and more people are unwilling to exchange their ideals for a paycheck. I’m sure there are people who know exactly what they were born to do, who have had a vision of their life since they were six years old. So where do you go from there, if all you’ve got is an itch, a vague premonition of an un-lived life? That was the question I sought to answer in my book, The Art of Work. Lesson 1: Don’t wait for clarity “I have never had clarity. The other day, I was on a call with a young woman who was passionate about getting involved in social work — she just didn’t know where to start. As the discussion continued, she confessed that she didn’t know what her calling was. Takeaway: Clarity comes with action. So where do you start?
Aristotle's Ethics Bk. X, Chapter 7, 1177a11-1177a18 to Bk. X, Chapter 8, 1178b33-1179a33. Translated by W. The Complete Works Of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton U. Chapter 7 If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us. Now this would seem to be in agreement both with what we said before and with the truth. But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of excellence. Chapter 8 But in a secondary degree the life in accordance with the other kind of excellence is happy; for the activities in accordance with this befit our human estate.
The New Information Age LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman said, recently, “that if Web 1.0 involved go search, get data and some limited interactivity, and if Web 2.0 involves real identities and real relationships, then Web 3.0 will be real identities generating massive amounts of data.” Reid is a visionary and certainly had this right. But the information that Reid described is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m going to explain why I believe this. Over the centuries, we gathered a lot of data on things such as climate, demographics, and business and government transactions. This rapidly evolved into Web 2.0. With the advent of LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and the many other social-media tools, the Web became “social” and “the powers that be” began to learn all about our work history, social and business contacts, and what we like—our food, entertainment, sexual preferences, etc. But there is much, much more happening in the Web 3.0 world. And then there is the human genome. It’s not all wine and roses.