The most pernicious cliche of our times [Article]

George Orwell pointed out that stale phrases mechanically repeated have dangerous political effects. Judith Shulevitz nominates "Disruptive Innovation", a term coined by Harvard professor Clay Christenson to explain why upstart enterprises drive better-established companies out of business.

Sunlight in a bottle - ingenuity [Article, Video]

In 2002, Brazilian engineer Alfredo Moser invented a simple way to bring the sun’s light indoors: fill a clear plastic 2 liter bottle with water and two capfuls of bleach, then make a hole in the roof and secure it with a waterproof sealant. The result: 40 to 60 watts of free, natural light. Watch the video here.

Adults are put off when youngsters pose questions [Thought]

Martin Varsavsky ruminates

Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? 

If you are not the customer, then you are the product [Link]

[via GigaOm]

Facebook will pay out $9 million to approximately 614,000 users as part of a $20 million legal settlement that is intended to compensate users for the social network’s decision to display their pictures in “sponsored stories” ads without permission.

Is schooling absolutely necessary? [Article]

This will upset the apple-cart for a lot of folks - and that's exactly why it's worth a read:

Think about how we learn as adults: do we need to learn things by a certain time? Maybe, but only if that is tied to something real -- you're applying for a job that requires certain skills, or you're working on a project that requires that you learn certain things. But most of the time, learning goes at your own pace, based on what you're interested in and how much time you have and all kinds of other factors unique to your life situation. 

Then why do we insist that kids MUST learn certain things by the time they reach a certain age?

Does the world need more people? [Article]

Judge Richard Posner answers his own question: "I am dubious."

Maybe children are actually an “inferior” good, valued most by poor people either because the children of the poor work to augment family income or because the family lacks the resources for such child substitutes as expensive cars, clothes, homes, entertainment, and travel. Increasingly in the wealthy countries both spouses work, increasing the opportunity costs to both parents of raising children.  ...

There is no necessary connection between population and economic growth. The sharp decline of Europe’s population because of the Black Death is thought to have increased per capita incomes significantly by reducing the ratio of people to arable land, resulting in improved nutrition.

Viewing humans as economic "goods" is ________ (fill in the blanks with your own answer).

Startup advice for the not-mega-rich folks [Article]

Leo Babauta writes about advising his 13-year old to start her own vegan cupcake business, and how that advice was shaped by his own experience.

Screw the business plan. Planning, like perfection, is useless and stands in your way. Sure, you want to think things through, but planning is based on faulty information (we can’t know the future). Instead, experiment. Get started. Do. Then see what happens, and adjust. Flexibility is much more important than a good plan.

Playing tag for 23 years! [Article]

A story from earlier this year - eight buddies have been playing tag for the last 23 years. They're in their 40's, so the rules are slightly tweaked: the game is played only in the month of February, & has no geographical constraints. Hilariously ingenious!

The game they play is fundamentally the same as the schoolyard version: One player is "It" until he tags someone else. But men in their 40s can't easily chase each other around the playground, at least not without making people nervous, so this tag has a twist. There are no geographic restrictions and the game is live for the entire month of February. The last guy tagged stays "It" for the year.

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs [Article]

David Graeber finds that despite John Maynard Keynes' prediction in 1930 that technological improvements would result in 15-hour work weeks in the Western worlds, that utopia is far from achievable. Instead, he thinks technology has been marshalled to make all of us work more, rather than less, in what he calls "bullshit jobs":

rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

Definitely worth a read

 

Lou Dillon - Devil or Angel [Music]

Another great song from Lou Dillon - Devil or Angel 

Everyone does NOT need to learn to code [Article]

Programmer Chase Felker disagrees with the flavour of our times - the need for everyone to learn to code. He thinks that there is a different, and more pertinent need - the need to think.

 I wonder why people are comfortable with thinking of computers as a scary black box in the first place. Computers do only what people tell them to do, and yet it is absurdly common to hear, “Windows crashed again! Call over the IT guy—it’s so complicated!” So many users do not feel empowered to understand how to use computers well, and I think that the urgency to spread programming is a symptom of this feeling. Perhaps if everyone had some practice telling computers what to do, tech intimidation wouldn’t be so prevalent.

How weird is the English language, really? [Article]

English is terribly confusing to a lot of non-native speakers but how hard is it really? Is the world's most difficult language to learn? For example, guess how "Ghoti" is pronounced? The Economist weighs in and comes up none the wiser:

That doesn’t settle a bar bet along the lines of “Is English hard to learn?” But any topic worthy of a good long argument—"Who's the greatest boxer of all time?" "'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'The Wall'?"—should have that element of taste and subjectivity to keep it fun.

Human Dreamcatcher - An inspirational story [Link, Video]

Watch this video first:

What would become the Dream Model Street School began in 2001, with one blackboard, at home. Humaira taught ten friends of her age, seven of them girls. She started with the alphabet, in Urdu and English, and proceeded to the names of things. She supplied blank pages from her own notebooks, until it got her into trouble with her teachers. Then the friends went round asking people to donate paper, or bought scrap.

Humaira Bachal is in a class of her own

A reminder of what people in Syria are going through [Photo]

A grim reminder. The rest of the world stands by, condemning the attacks, & planning more.

The Human Beard [Video]

If you haven't watched this video yet, you should.
PS: If you have kids, get them to watch it too!

How to delete your web-service accounts, in one place [Link]

http://justdelete.me/ is a great site, in progress, of links to help you delete all those web-services you no longer need, along with the related difficulty level.

Many companies use dark pattern techniques to make it difficult to find how to delete your account. JustDelete.me aims to be a directory of urls to enable you to easily delete your account from web services.

It's not the size of the loss, but the size of the sorrow [Article]

Why do I love the "Occasional Writings of Robert Fulghum" so much? It's because they are not occasional, and they're not stories, but a philosophy. Read this called "It's not the size... " to see what I mean.

An open letter to my son about Microsoft Excel [Article]

Zach Rosenberg takes it public - trying to get his 4 year old to love Microsoft Excel as much as he does - that is! Hilarious!

How to tell love from passion - a timeless litmus test [Article]

Maria Popova pulls out this timeless classic by James Thurber & EB White:

“By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner.”

and another excerpt:

Let us say you have sat down to write a letter to your lady. There has been a normal amount of preparation for the ordeal, such as clearing a space on the desk … and the normal amount of false alarms, such as sitting down and discovering that you have no cigarettes. (Note: if you think you can write the letter without cigarettes, it is not love, it is passion.) Finally you get settled and you write the words; “Anne darling.” If you like commas, you put a comma after “darling”; if you like colons, a colon; if dashes, a dash. If you don’t care what punctuation mark you put after “darling,” the chances are you are in love — although you may just be uneducated, who knows? 

18 Products you've been using wrong [Link]

At least a few of these will be new to you, as they were to me!