Open Thinkering

Things I learned this week - #3

• 7 min read • Things I Learned / academic / Education / infographics / inspiration / Productivity / Technology

CC BY-NC-SA Jeezny

I know I said that these posts would be called ‘Sunday Scientia’ but that, erm, isn’t very snappy. Or descriptive. :-p

Top 3

  • From the wow-as-a-History-teacher-this-rocks-my-world department, it turns out that the Egyptian pyramids weren’t built by slaves after all! 😮
  • Matt Mullenweg (he of the WordPress-coding fame) turned 26 this week. He made some resolutions for the coming year (much as I did) and on the list was ‘learn more about Captology’. It turns out that Captology is ‘the study of computers as persuasive technologies’. Interesting!
  • Nathan Yau from FlowingData has created a great infographic from UNdata called Graphical World Progress Report. It’s fascinating and obtainable as a print. All proceeds go towards the UNICEF relief effort in Haiti.

Tech.

  • Need to send and receive anonymous questions? Try formspring.me (via @burntsugar)
  • I’m sure that Graffiti markup is going to be extremely useful, but for me it just looks extremely cool…
  • I was reminded of Jott for voice to text transcription on-the-go via a post on dy/dan
  • Google offer some very competitive pricing for extra GMail/Picasa storage. I thought this could be used for off-site backup using gDisk (Mac OSX only), but it didn’t seem to be compatible with Snow Leopard…
  • The wireless networks at my house have fairly boring names. I like these ones better (via @swissmiss)

  • David Pogue reckons that the iPhone is for sheep, whereas Android is for geeks. Baa baa. (via Smarterware.org)
  • Reed’s law on social networking sounds very grand and scientific, but is saying that they scale because they can have sub-groups very profound? (via @ewanmcintosh)
  • There’s lots and lots of free ebooks out there – especially useful if you’ve got an Amazon Kindle – ebooksearchr caught my eye in particular (via @coolcatteacher)
  • Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, reckons that privacy is ‘no longer a social norm’. I’d contend that he’s correct about a certain kind of privacy but it would take me a full blog post to explain…
  • Aza Raskin wonders whether we need a Creative Commons for Privacy? (via @chrismessina)
  • It turns out selling ebooks DRM-free doesn’t hurt sales. In fact, despite rampant piracy, it was found that sales actually went up!
  • Tuper Tario Tros is a mashup of Tetris and Super Mario. Play Tetris (kind of) as usual, then play Super Mario on the landscape you’ve created!
  • From the oh-my-goodness-this-is-unbelievable department, RCA Airnergy apparently charges gadgets using wifi signals. Which kind of makes me worry about what they’re doing to my body… (via @timlauer)
  • You can now upload any type of file to Google Docs (with resumable uploads). Handy!
  • Ever need to edit a PDF? Me too. Try this! (via @maggiev)
  • I won’t be buying an e-reader, and especially not after reading 2010: the only year of the e-reader. They’re stop-gap devices.
  • Need some Creative Commons-licensed media? Try looking here. (via @russeltarr)
  • If you need some guidance on how to use Creative Commons-licensed media in presentations, you could do worse than checking this out. (via @downes)
  • Alan Levine wondered what happens when a CC-licensed photo vanishes? (hint: it’s still CC-licensed)
  • Are you still, as I was, wondering “why use Google Wave?” Try this FAQ. I especially like the definition of it as a multimedia wikichat.
  • Need to schedule some tweets? Twuffer is a Twitter ‘buffer’. (via @cwebbtech)
  • You can crop & remove ads/offensive content from YouTube videos using safeshare.tv (via @kiwicarol)
  • Although I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, if you’ve been crying out for a way to use up to 24 cursors on one screen you can now with this Microsoft tool. (via @tobywilson)
  • There’s a bewildering number of iPhone apps, which is why I was pleased to come across app.itize.us, a site dedicated to ‘the best produced and designed iPhone apps’ (via BoingBoing)

Productivity & Inspiration

  • I was delighted to come across this ‘How I work’ series again from a few years back, including how Marissa Meyer at Google deals with the amount of information she has to process. (via dy/dan)
  • If you’re not great at making decisions, Hunch might help. Or not. :-p
  • Happiness, it would seem, spreads like a virus. Are you infectious?
  • Almost everyone I know uses an online calendar, usually Google Calendar. But what about if you need something slightly different? This online calendar roundup mentioned Cozi.com which looks especially useful for families.
  • Zen Habits looks like it’s turning into a list blog, but when Leo delivers posts like 20-plus amazing fitness blogs to inspire you, I don’t mind too much.
  • Kathy Sierra (@KathySierra) recommended a book about the link between exercise and brain performance. That’s recommendation enough for me – I just bought it! If you don’t follow Kathy on Twitter already, do so now.
  • Google have reorganized their Become a GMail Ninja help section to be more useful:  (via @mortenoddvik)

Education & Academic

Data, Design & Infographics

  • You’ve probably noticed from this site that I like minimalism. Swissmiss links to some great ones.
  • Macbooks cost different amounts around the world, which makes for an interesting infographic.
  • I found this infographic showing what covers the surface of the earth. Have a look below – I was surprised that there’s as much land covered by snow as good farming land):

Misc.

Quotations

It’s better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly. (via @igorkheifets)

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was before you came in. – James Baldwin (via @heatherdenton)

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great – Machiavelli (via @dahara)

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough. – John Christian Bovee (via @dahara)

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (via @IsabelLambert)

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them – Benjamin Franklin (via @lynnegordon)

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. – Theodore Levitt (via @TheArtMan)