Posts

Impressive Effie-award winning campaign to save the Troy Library by Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide even if using slightly questionable deception and the application of reverse psychology to achieve the goal against a very well-organized and very vocal opposition. Great idea though.

I do wonder at how many times people can use this same idea of whipping up public outrage on a fake campaign and then using psych jujitsu to transfer it over to the actual campaign. Definitely a great strategy in this case, but duplicable in other cases? Trying to think of where else I could apply it in some of the campaigning that’s been done. Definitely a workable strategy on low turnout/care issues where apathy might be an issue.

I already tweeted this, but it was such an amazingly interesting video, I’m posting it on the blog.

PBS Idea Channel on the phenomenon of My Little Pony lovers in the young, male demographic and changing ideas about masculinity. Have to admit to never having run across PBS Idea Channel before, but being super impressed with this as an intellectual inquiry.

Being a non-traditional kind of guy (yeah, not so into the watching sports on tv, fast cars, and playing XBox till my fingers fall off.) I find this interesting because, at least growing up, there was definite pressure on conforming into accepted “male” roles if not outright sterotypes. Not doing so reflected upon not just your social status, but also implied sexuality. It made me a very socially awkward teen, an overly competitive and achievement obsessed young adult and it was a long time before I was comfortable with the fact that I just didn’t fit into the “normal” guy mode (in fact, I’d still say it’s a problem in terms of dating where women influence these gender biases as much as men.).

Kinda great four minute video explaining the cosmic background radiation and the origins of the Big Bang.

Oh, and more cosmically awesome learning materials available over at the Big Bang Registry.

Dare Mighty Things.

Is there anyone else who watched this video and had the feeling that when the EDL team explained this to whoever calls the shots on these things at NASA they must’ve exclaimed, “My God! It’s just crazy enough that it might actually work!”

In any case, on 5 Aug 2012 Curiosity will try to land on Mars. Not a trivial feat as this attests.

Godspeed Curiosity. Fair winds and calm seas.

I absolutely agree with xkcd on this one.

It is a really, really exciting time:

I am so glad ZeFrank is back on air (ok, yeah… disclaimer: I backed his Kickstarter for “A Show” so evened the odds a little… Ahem…).

Still, it leads to awesomeness like this so worth all the pennies. Enjoy.

Make yours a good self.

Cool little short about office life and the powers that rule it. Very accurate in my experience.

Even more impressively, all effects done on camera, no post sfx! And they won the Reed film competition Grand Prix.

via Geeks Are Sexy

Sure, they make it cutesy, but you have no idea how often this actually happens. Disaster recovery in most orgs is not given anywhere near the attention it deserves. If it can happen to Pixar, it can happen to you.

So, um… do your backups kids. And make sure you have offsite backups as well! I use Crashplan myself (which works on Win, Mac and Linux) though was using Haystack’s Arq on my Mac until very recently as well. Seriously, the minimal cost is nothing compared to losing photos or critical docs. Believe me.

Presented without comment.

After getting a handle on it, I was really surprised that Twitter’s excellent Bootstrap UI framework didn’t have functionality to cover tabs on other pages of the site. Much like the slick ScrollSpy, where various menu items are highlighted when you scroll to their div id on the page, I was expecting a “PageSpy” type functionality to do the same with navigation tabs, and set a tab to active if the target url matched the URL the browser was on (especially since bootstrap does the more difficult in-page tab functionality. In fact, I was so surprised, I actually asked around and took a look at the js source code as I thought I was missing something obvious.