Booking Travel for Less
Useful NYTimes article about how to travel more cheaply in 2010 – good tips to know.
Tech & Entertainment for a New gen
Further to my earlier post about Apple’s cool ads, I got hooked on the songs in there and tried to find the original videos. For Chairlift-Bruises I came across the video immediately below and was struck by it. It seemed so cutting edge and professional, yet so casual and young (uncomfortably so for my wife - and I can understand why as a parent I’d also be concerned). Was it possible that kids did this on their own? Or was the video director so sophisticated as to make it look so down-to-earth? It turns out it was all done by an 8th grader who is quickly building a following. And it’s actually far better than the official video! You factor in these considerations and you understand why we are just in the beginning of what will be a revolution in content generation, with repercussions for business, culture and society that we cannot begin to comprehend.
Father-and-son Video
This is a great little vignette…
Questioning your predispositions and biases
Harvard has a pretty neat site - www.implicit.Harvard.edu - that offers people the opportunity to take tests that may surprise us with insights into subconscious biases we all have…
Elephant Giving Birth
This video is so remarkable. Elephants are such noble and wise creatures. And nature is the wisest of all.
The Akashic Record
In reply to my post, Mapping Your Life’s Journey, I got a really interesting email from my friend Jonathan Harris, the cool artist whose work is as fascinating as this note:
There is a centuries-old idea coming from the Hindu tradition, of "The Akashic Record", which is said to be metaphysical plane where all information is stored — every thought, action, interaction, and idea that has ever occurred. A kind of cosmic filing system.
There is debate over whether The Akashic Record is already completely written (and we simply follow it, like actors following a script), or whether it gets updated every instant with new information (and free will exists).
It is believed that when we dream, we access the Akashic Record, and that this is why dreams often contain either future prophecies, or seemingly random events from long ago that haven’t been thought of for years (because in the Akashic Record, all things are equally simple to access, like searching on Google, or, perhaps more appropriately to dreams, clicking "random page").
It is also believed that tapping into the Akashic Record is our source of energy, and that this is why our bodies need REM sleep to function (REM sleep being the time we access this record).
Whether you believe in this stuff or not, I agree with Daniel that we are fast approaching a time when our technology will essentially create the Akashic Record for us. You could say that this will happen in "another dimension", as the meta-layer of aggregate online information could be considered as such.
I am very interested in seeing this happen, and believe that it will (if the world doesn’t end first, that is).
Jonathan
P.S. Apologies to any purely deductive rationalists on this list
Miracle Fruit
Here is an article about a neat re-discovery of a "Miracle Fruit" that makes sour things sweet, and alters the taste buds to make things seem far sweeter. It could have applications for cancer patients to regain appetite, for dieting, or just for fun.
Mapping Your Life’s Journey
Often in life I am sure you wonder if you had met a person before. Have our lives crossed paths before a more recent episode? When was the first time we met? Where we together in a particular place – whether at school, or at a conference, or talk, or during our childhoods? Could you even rewind a part of your brain and see what you said to that person when you first met them? I daydreamed about a sci-fi future where the “grid” could keep all your information about every place you’ve been, and what your thoughts and experiences and interactions were like.
Then I realized that a lot of this could already be done rather easily NOW.
All you need is a GPS mapping device with a time-mapping database. Your iphone or blackberry could have an application that every 5 minutes or every hour or every day (depending on your preferred settings and subscription/storage capacity) could store your GPS location at that particular time.
Three or thirty years later, you could wonder openly with your date, or an employee or a colleague if you had met before, or where your lives had intersected before, and you’d just sync your databases to find the crossing points, if any, that exist. You could make some pieces private or public, open or closed. But you’d have the ability to trace back steps at important points, quite simply.
At a formative moment, you could even connect a blog journal or video entry to your geo-time-map.
This would not only be fun and functional, but also existentially transformative.
We always are “surprised” at how small this world is, and how enormous a coincidence it is that you find a friend in a far away random place.
In fact, I have always thought that the laws of numbers make these encounters quite probable, and most likely there are many more opportunities for interactions among people you know, whose paths you cross by milliseconds without knowing it. If you could look at your grid and compare it with a friend’s, or with all your universe of friends, how many amazing “coincidences” wouldn’t you find – when you opted to?
Perhaps Doppler or GoogleMaps or Facebook or a new web/business platform you have could take advantage of this idea.
Mesmerizing Art Collage
This may be one of the most entrancingly beautiful compilations I have ever seen: Women in Art (also available here and below):
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Progressive Business Ventures
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Enterpreneurial Social Ventures
