Todd Mundt

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If you want a good, 20 minute explanation of the concept of Flow, here’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to provide it. It’s great if you’ve not been exposed to this idea about states of intense, sustained creativity. But even if you have a basic working knowledge of Flow, there are still nice tidbits here.
One of my takeaways [...]

I watched Torturing Democracy last night and it’s stunning - meticulously researched, utterly amazing, devastating. I don’t feel like getting into the whole discussion about PBS’s inability to schedule the documentary before January 21, 2009: it’s perfectly understandable, given more pressing considerations, like Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns.
But a number of public television [...]

Chow.com is offering several cool video series for foodies, or the people who love food and don’t want to be called foodies. The video here shows the segments of the coffee episode, featuring Arno Holschuh from Blue Bottle in San Francisco. (The podcast version knits all of these segments together.) “Full length” episodes average around [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Robert Scoble interviews Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of twitter, about the recent problems with the service. It’s a good view inside the service and the architecture and scaling problems that twitter has faced. It is notable that twitter doubled in size in March and April (I saw a graph the other day [...]

“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 [...]