Some choice knowledge and wisdom dropped by my friend Dane Howard and people like the VP of experience at Adobe.
These are excerpts from a really valuable online course on intrapreneurship and pitching your ideas to executives on lynda.com. Here's a lynda.com Free Pass to see the full presentation.
Coming from Rockstar Games / Team Bondi -- this tech video just blew me away. Video games have typically relied on motion capture -- but never to this level of detail for facial motion capture.
Remember that first Final Fantasy movie? I loved it, but it looked completely unreal. It was in the abyss of the uncanny valley.
I can't wait to play this game. You can see how this technology will play out over the next 20 years... interactive cinema is BACK!
An international team of primatologists have discovered a new species of monkey in Northern Myanmar (formerly Burma.) The research, published in the American Journal of Primatology, reveals how Rhinopithecus strykeri, a species of snub-nosed monkey, has an upturned nose which causes it to sneeze when it rains.
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While the species is new to science the local people know it well and claim that it is very easy to find when it is raining because the monkeys often get rainwater in their upturned noses causing them to sneeze. To avoid getting rainwater in their noses they spend rainy days sitting with their heads tucked between their knees
Also via 10 weirdest new animals discovered in the past year at National Geographic
It's surprisingly tall.
Probably one of the more fascinating and unusual experiences that someone can go through...
I had an arterial problem for a couple of years, which reduced blood supply to my heart and brain and depleted B vitamins from my nerves (to keep the heart in good repair). Although there is some vagueness as to the mechanisms, this made me forgetful, slow, and easily overwhelmed. In short I felt like I was stupid compared to what I was used to, and I was.It was frightening at first because I knew something wasn't right but didn't know what, and very worrying for my career because I was simply not very good any more.
However, once I got used to it and resigned myself, it was great. Even though I knew I had a worrying illness, I was happy as a pig in mud. I no longer had the arrogance of being frustrated with slow people, I abandoned many projects which reduced a lot of stress, I could enjoy films without knowing what would happen (my nickname before this used to be 'comic book guy' if you get the reference), and I became amazingly laid back and happy go lucky. I got on with people much better. I developed much more respect for one of my friends in particular who I always considered slow - it turned out he is much deeper than I thought, I just never had the patience to notice before. You could say I had more time to look around. The world just made more sense. The only negative, apart from struggling to perform at work, and having to write everything down, was that I no longer found sci-fi interesting - it just didn't seem important. (I'm not joking, although it sounds like a cliché.)
Eventually after more physical and life threatening symptoms developed I got the right tests and they found my arteries where blocked up (2 out of 3 of my main coronary arteries 100% blocked - they couldn't work out why I was alive - it later turned out that I had unusually good peripheral circulation from my intense cycling). I've since had stents to open up the arteries again and made a full recovery.
After a year or so I am almost as 'clever' as I used to be, although I tend to ignore distractions more than I used to and focus on a smaller number of projects. I'm still more laid back than I used to be though, and have more patience with people. Most people still find me more socially competent. I also enjoy sci-fi again.
So an unusual perspective, from a fairly unusual circumstance, but that's what it feels like to be be stupid when you used to be fairly bright. In some ways it was a great learning experience, although obviously in other ways it is a life changing fact I have to live with. Not many people get to walk about in other peoples shoes, and then pick up where they left off. Plus it's obviously nice to still be alive.
In short I would say that the frustration of dealing with slower people is worse than being one of the slower people, even if you know you are slow. Obviously most people who are relatively slow, don't know it, but I think I've glimpsed how they experience the world
As always, you should see more discussion on this at the original quora page. And join Quora, it is the most amazing thing since sliced bread.
You could also follow me on twitter here. =D
The United States currently holds around half of the world’s helium supply and we’re selling it, for cheap.
We’ve known this for a while. We started stockpiling the stuff near Amarillo, Texas in 1925, in part for dirigible use, and stepped up reserves in the 1960s as a Cold War asset. In 1996, Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act mandating that the United States sell the gas at artificially low prices to get rid of the stockpile by 2015. This February, the National Research Council published a report estimating that, given increasing consumption, the world may run out of helium in 40 years. That’s bad news given helium’s current applications in science, technology, and party decorations–and possible future applications in fusion energy.
Now physicist Robert Richardson, who won a 1996 Nobel Prize for work using helium-3 to make superfluids, has come forward to stress the folly of underselling our supply of the natural resource. He suggested in several interviews that the gas’s price should mirror its actual demand and scarcity. He estimates that typical party balloons should cost $100 a pop.
