This book provides interesting insight into the value of interacting casually with people we never intend to get to know. People like the grocery clerk, the bus driver or mailman, each provide us with a sense of emotional stability, physical health and random information that is often valuable and difficult for us to obtain.
Interesting tidbit: future employment is more likely to come from someone who knows someone you know than from someone you know.
Robinson discusses the need to rebuild the underlying paradigm regarding our education system (he is English, but I think his views are still very applicable to USA). He proposes that we need to rebuild the system (a revolution) as opposed to progressing the system (an evolution). This is a call to start fresh.
Sir Ken Robinson – Changing Paradigms (RSA)
Changing Education Paradigms (RSA Animate)
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! (TED)
This book was an interesting exploration into the lives of everyone’s favorite white bears. It was fairly comprehensive and included some interesting facts about species connected to the polar bear as well (i.e. seals, birds and other bears).
Interest tidbit: Polar bear fur heat retention, when dry, is about 90% of that of the grizzly bear. Polar bear rely more on their fat storage than their fur coats for warmth.
This lecture could also be called, “How coffee drinking changed the world.” Johnson starts by talking about how the introduction of coffee drinking revolutionized the world of thought. This is mostly because before there was coffee people generally drank alcohol of different sorts because the water was bad.
Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from (TED)
Where Do Good Ideas Come From? (RSA)
Where Good Ideas Come from, Steven Johnson (RSA Animate)
I recently completed an image creation project using Adobe Flash and Adobe Air. After spending many hours on the project I was exciting to find that I could get Adobe Air to work with the device’s built-in image saving mechanism (called the “CameraRoll”). That excited quickly disappeared as I found out that images saved with the CameraRoll were really lousy quality, small but lousy. After brainstorming on how to fix the issue, I discovered that if I changed the resolution of the project from 480×320 to 1440×960 (a threefold increase) that the quality issue became a moot point and the image size was still small.
Enter problem two: I adjusted the stage to the new resolution easily enough, but I had to figure out how to increase all the assets threefold. This project has a large number of assets and the thought of scaling them all up was overwhelmingly daunting. Then I realized that I could just scale up the root object and, because everything but the stage is part of root, everything that mattered would also be scaled up.
So, in an effort to share information with the world, if you find that your Adobe Flash project needs to be a higher resolution than when you first built it, and you want to avoid rescaling every element in your project, simply increase the stage size and add in some Action Script to scale up root (root.scaleX = 2; root.scaleY = 2;).