Global
TEDGlobal 2012 on the TED Blog Monday June 25 Tuesday June 26 Wednesday June 27 Thursday June 28 Friday June 29 When it comes to time, there is the past, the present and the future. View article » An epidemic hidden in plain view Mararet Heffernan begins her TEDGlobal talk by telling us a story: In Oxford in ... Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Where some people saw a social network too far, Daria Musk saw an opportunity. Architecture writer Andrew Blum has always focused on the physical landscape: our cities, our buildings, the places in which we ... More coverage on the TED Blog »
Top 10 Space-Saving Household Projects
Whether you live in a tiny apartment or just have too much stuff, there's likely a lot of space you aren't using, like your walls, your ceilings, or the nooks and crannies in your furniture. Here's how to use it most efficiently.P 10. Hang Your Bike on the WallP SExpand If you're in an apartment, you probably don't have a lot of great places to store your bike outside, and it can take up a lot of floor space just sitting around. 9. If you've already exhausted the storage nooks under your bed, the ceiling is ripe with unused space. 8. If floor space is at a premium, you can maximize it by moving those bookshelves up onto the wall, freeing up the floor for storing other things (and making it easier to clean). 7. Whether you're trying to pack light for a trip or just fit as many clothes into your dresser as you can, proper folding technique is key. 6. Most animals are pretty small, but it seems like their stuff takes up as much space as yours. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
G20 Influencers
John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative
by Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”) A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video. Creativity is not a talent. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! Thanks, Simon Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence
In addition to Goleman’s lack of sensitivity to the brain-to-mind translation problem, and his failure to acknowledge that we already know much about the mind through its works and constructs, Goleman’s work is often inconsistent and sometimes incoherent. Let us look at some cases. Two Brains Equals Two Minds Because Goleman’s “theory” of mind is based strictly on his interpretations of data from brain research, he comes to some questionable conclusions about the mind. For example, he states, “sensory signals from eye or ear travel first in the brain to the thalamus and then — across a single synapse — to the amygdala; a second signal from the thalamus is routed to the neocortex — the thinking brain. This branching allows the amygdala to begin to respond before the neocortex, which mulls information through several levels of brain circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely tailored response (p. 17).” Otherwise all emotions would be identical. References
Holon (philosophy)
A fractal is close to the idea of holon, as it is a part that represents a whole at the same time.[citation needed] Do seeds contain trees or do trees contain seeds? We could say both are true, because 'trees and seeds' is an example of a holon. Parable of the two watchmakers There once were two watchmakers, named Bios and Mekhos, who made very fine watches. The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. Now, the watchmakers were each disturbed at the same rate of once per hundred assembly operations. Herbert Simon, quoted by Andrew Koestler (1967) A holon is maintained by the throughput of matter–energy and information–entropy, connected to other holons; it is a whole in itself but also, at the same time, it is nested within another holon and is thus a part of something much larger than itself. The work of modern physicists designed to discover the theory of everything (TOE) is reaching deep into the microcosm under the assumption that the macrocosm is eventually made of the microcosm.
Thinking Strategically
