All in the telling

The latest technologies, including cloud, social, anything mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have and will continue to transform business, especially the customer experience, which still revolves around the story. Storytelling is still the centerpiece. Nothing new there. Storytelling has been the centerpiece since before anyone could even write….

Tabula Rasa

From Wikipedia: Tabula rasa is the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one’s personality, social and emotional behaviour, and…

Honey, it really works

When I first moved away from Alaska nearly 5 years ago, there was one thing I wasn’t anticipating having to deal with: allergies. For years I was allergy-free living in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. That all changed quickly upon making my new home in the Middle West. I tried over-the-counter remedies, which left me…

Ken Burns on filmmaking

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.

Dakar

View Larger Map As I write this, I am taking meds to fight off malaria. I am leaving for Dakar this morning for a week and the meds are a final, though ongoing, step in a series of vaccines administered to me en masse (The first of two rounds knocked me for a loop for…

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Author Michael Pollan says: The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow…

Humans Swimming

Are you a human? Do you like to swim? How about free-diving? How about static free diving?

Salt

From Wikipedia: Chloride and sodium ions, the two major components of salt, are necessary for the survival of all known living creatures, including humans. Salt is involved in regulating the water content (fluid balance) of the body. = c

Flow = Attention deconcentration?

It comes up around nearly every turn. It’s one of the wobbles of life that leads us into such ideas repeatedly: Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process…

Frankie : 3 weeks

Puppy! This is Frankie, Meta’s little sister. She turned 3 weeks old today. Same mother and father, too. Frankie will be joining us soon. Reposted from metapup.com = c

Overlooked : Slackers in Nature

Earlier this morning, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this research published in the NYT and I am so completely fascinated and thus fixated on it today: Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success….

Here’s the [Beef] Genome

By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 24, 2009 The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to modern civilization. A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries…

Diversity

One of the greatest things about living in a city like Barcelona is the great diversity present in the streets. Not only do we hear Catalán, Spanish and their relatives, but also French, Italian, Turkish, German and occasionally English. So goes the joke: What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual What do…