Converge

I’m on vacation, people. I won’t be blogging about work stuff until I’m back at my desk on Tuesday.
1. The new self-sorting security lines at airports.
Louisville and about 50 other airports currently have them, allowing passengers to choose Expert, Casual or Family security lanes. Security has always been a relatively painless process at SDF, but [...]

Content is primary, obviously, and more important than platform. But when a platform is new, you spend a lot of time thinking about the platform or even promoting it: The following program is in living color; this interview is via satellite. Or “I’m going to go online to find it.”
There’s nothing wrong with that - [...]

I’ve been meaning to post this for more than a week, but you may already have encountered it on any number of web sites. Randy Pausch passed away on July 25th, after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

He gave his now famous “Last Lecture” as a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University on September [...]

I saw this talk earlier this week and found it so enjoyable, that I could hardly wait to share it. From the 2003 TED Conference, Freeman Dyson makes the case that we should be take the trouble to look for life in the outer solar system. He speculates about the possibility that life might exist [...]

The latest addition to what I call Personal Public Television - the universe of public media content that you can create and curate yourself:
If you’re afflicted with the disease which has no name - the periodic, intense craving for documentary films - then you’ll love SnagFilms. I just discovered this site and after spending some [...]

Here’s a talk that Richard Preston gave recently, talking about his latest book “Panic in Level 4: Tales of Intrigue from the World of Science.” Most of the talk is devoted to his own experience donning a spacesuit and going into an ebola “hot zone” in a laboratory. I won’t give the story away but [...]

The annual TED Conference is amazing. I say that as someone who has never attended because I’ve never been able to afford the $6,000 cost. But the virtual experience of TED is worth almost as much, and the best part is, it’s FREE.
Why would you charge people $6,000 a head to attend and then give [...]

Remember this? If you do, you must have a long memory. “The Machine that Changed the World” is probably the most complete documentary created about the history of the computer; it aired on PBS in 1992 and it’s been nearly impossible to find since then. What’s more, the documentary features interviews with the pioneers of [...]

In keeping with my recent obsession interest in long-form video, here’s a weekend video pick that may take a few weekends to consume. CUNY Professor David Harvey is making all 26 hours of his lectures on Marx’s Capital available online. They’re on iTunes, too.
This is a guy who has been teaching Marx for 40 years, [...]

“Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.”
I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time. Clay Shirky gets at the impact of the architecture of participation and (sometimes) traditional media’s lack of understanding of the change we’re now experiencing. It’s less than 20 minutes, it’s [...]