‘God is just what happens when humanity is connected’
Had dinner with some friends tonight, including Jim Gilliam. When I got home, I re-watched his PdF 2011 “The Internet is My Religion” talk. You should, too.
Videos
Inside North Korea
Inside North Korea is an excellent National Geographic documentary that highlights Kim Jong-il’s impact on every day lives of North Koreans, the DMZ, how badly its youth are affected by malnultrition and the workings of its prison camps.
Go to the places that scare you in 2012
Came across this excellent hour-long interview Bill Moyers did with Buddhist nun Pema Chodron. The segment is broken into six videos and includes an overview of the Tibetan concept of shenpa.
‘I can’t do everything, but I am one. I can do something, and I will do the one thing I can do.’
Love the anecdote at the end about a four year-old boy born in a Cambodian prison.
I.O.U.S.A.
I.O.U.S.A. is a must-watch documentary explaining in simple terms the United States government’s financial woes. Seeing the fiscal incompetence of our political leaders will end up depressing or angering you. There’s a great clip of Congressman Ron Paul calling Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to the carpet. The visuals and graphics do an excellent job [...]
Popping the filter bubble
Eli Pariser’s TED Talk, Beware online “filter bubbles”, is an overview of his new book, The Filter Bubble. The comments from his KQED interview highlight much of his and others’ concerns about the way companies like Google and Facebook are personalizing our Web activity. “We really need the Internet to be that thing that we [...]
The feeling of security and the reality of security
Great TED Talk from security expert Bruce Schneier. “We estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. You hear a lot of tiger attacks. There must be a lot of tigers around. You don’t hear about lion attacks. There [...]
Smile more
“Smiling is one of the most basic, biological, uniform expressions of all humans.”
‘Spontaneous compassion’ and how 4th-graders are solving world problems
Favorite quote from this TED Talk with teacher John Hunter: “Spontaneous compassion.” From TED: John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, [...]
9/11, healing and the power of forgiving
If they can, so can we. From TED: Phyllis Rodriguez and Aicha el-Wafi have a powerful friendship born of unthinkable loss. Rodriguez’ son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001; el-Wafi’s son Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted of a role in those attacks and is serving a life sentence. In hoping [...]