Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL (by growingleadersinc)
Historians read, and when we look up at the world around us we see dead people.
— Scott Reynolds Nelson in Steel Drivin’ Man
For the sake of those workers, engineers, and ourselves, we should resist any attempt to think of human-built technologies as magical. It’s imperative that we demystify complex information technologies so we remember that they are collections of circuits and machines built by fallible and talented humans.
How The South Was Lost - Anniversary Edition (by Ramsey Bros. Pictures)
It’s nice when music can eclipse the reality outside the door or the everyday hubbub of our lives and that’s one power we have as musicians. But it’s also important that this music comes from a lineage of resistance. Basically [jazz] is a music that survives in spite of its origins… It’s music from a marginalized community of color that dreamed something into existence against all odds and against forces that were conspiring for it not to happen. It’s part of the language and aesthetic of the music. It’s that defiance and that strength in spite of it all. That’s an animating force. It’s not something that we should try to forget.
… the historical study of what often amounts to perennial human problems does have compensations. It can provide hope in time of trouble, and a measure of humility in time of hubris, and these are not minor virtues.
So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others.
Civil War Sources, Behind the Scenes with UNC-Chapel Hill Archivists (via UNC Spotlight)
(Source: youtube.com)
Shaving Made Easy: What the Man Who Shaves Ought to Know →
A 1905 manual dedicated “to those men who have difficulties in shaving, in hope that its contents will of assistance in remedying their troubles.”
My formula has always been I’m big on preparing. Prepare like crazy. But then just as you’re heading out, half an hour beforehand, forget all of it. It’s there. It’s in your reptile brain. Go out but feel loose enough to grab opportunities as they come up. Don’t just stick to the plan if you see an opportunity. Now sometimes you go out there and the energy is such that you just stick to the plan and you do fine. But when you get out there and the energy is particularly good, I’m the first one to throw out things left and right and just go for it. The show is always best when it’s just play. When you’re playing, there’s a tension, yin-yang tension between think beforehand and then just get out there, between preparation and improvisation. And that’s been a lot of my career, finding the balance between those two.
— Conan O’Brien (also relevant to teaching)
Dr. Seuss’s note is one of about one hundred letters from famous people who responded to a 1971 request from the public librarian in Troy, Michigan, to write a letter to the children of Troy about the wonders of libraries. More here and here (via @jondresner).
