My favorite links from this week:
- Jason Kottke on the state of blogging
- How do you talk to yourself?
- Compassion helps prevent corruption
- Slack is the opposite of organizational memory – I have strong opinions of (mostly) agreement on this one. In my experience managers usually see this much more clearly than non-managers.
- Students prevent a teacher from trying “The Wave” authoritarian experiment (“Could fascism happen in America?” Probably not.)
- In the “duh” category: Most leaders know their strengths and not their weaknesses
- In 1878 the first telephone book was published. It had 21 names.
Videos:
- Sir David Attenborough and Brian Cox discuss Charles Darwin (10m)
- A conversation with Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates (30m)
- Bjark Ingels, the architect, presenting some of his work (56m)
- The Day After Trinity: A documentary about the creation of the atomic bomb (1h:30m)
- A pretty cool narrated walkthrough of what happened during a shuttle launch (45m)
- Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel debate about the future of technology (1h)
- How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio (30m)
Some books I recently finished:
- The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. I liked it a lot. It reminds me a bit of the weirder medical cases from the TV show House (without the character development.) I had a hard time reading it from cover to cover, so I spread it out over many weeks.
- The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehad. An excellent read. It begins with a discussion of the ascension of Czar Nicholas and chronicles his family’s downfall and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the tale of the attempt at democracy in Russian towards the end of WW1.
I abandoned From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, The Whole Earth network, … because, as I should’ve gleamed from the title, the author took what promised to be an interesting subject and made it quite boring. Couldn’t even get halfway.
