To Seeing the Invisible

I have to say Rachel, living in Berkeley--and I guess Silicon Valley in general--means I have the very unique opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Smart, not as in winning the trivia competitions, but brilliant people who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field. The Bay is packed with Nobel Laureates, famous researchers, and leading political figures. Just yesterday, I had the opportunity to hold open the door for Richard Karp who has received the Turing Award. Just to make things clear: I am not one of these smart people. This is perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned after three years here. But to be honest, I'm pretty okay with that--there's a difference between being smart and being knowledgeable. What that does mean, though, is that I would be doing a disservice to the ever-so-generous Financial Aid Office if I didn’t learn here. I don’t mean learning in a lecture hall, but I refer to a more personal sense of learning. What is it that s...

Shortest TED talk but one of my favorites. The reason I enjoy TED so much is because I obsess over these questions and quite a few of my own like them. TED is my link to sanity...it's nice to see that I'm not some crazy person but that there are plenty of highly intelligent people that have similar thoughts/questions. You have done such amazing work with TED. I would LOVE to talk to you for just 15 minutes Chris.

Absolutely not. Why the fuck do I have to "Like" your page before I get to see what you're about? To even see the contents of your page? This is the fucking problem with the internet these days -- people completely overestimate social media as a growth mechanism. They see an example of a certain site getting massive growth because it's retweeted 5000 times a second, so they think that Twitter & Facebook is some magical "get my site views" solution. In reality, all they're doing is contributing to the bullshit spam that makes social media such a poor mechanism for growing readership. The signal to noise ratio is so low that the few people who might genuinely be interested in your website never get exposed to it because they're forced to constantly sort through tonnes and tonnes of bullshit spam put out by unoriginal, talentless "PR" agencies who apply the same blanket social media spam strategy to everything they try to promote. Serio...