1.18.2009

Google, YouTube, Fonts, & Influencing People

Reflections

How Google Is Making Us Smarter - Discover Magazine

"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?" Most people might answer, "At the skull." But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept. One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained.

At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool - New York Times

Faced with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn't use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

The explosion of all types of video content on YouTube and other sites is quickly transforming online video from a medium strictly for entertainment and news into one that is also a reference tool.

Free Fonts - Fonts Squirrel

Quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. Works on both Windows and Mac OS X. See Help for installing.

A Tale of Three Cities

City One

Tim Walker writes in this post, "someone asked me if How to Win Friends and Influence People isn't too old-school for 21st century business. My reply: People haven't changed that much since HTWFAIP came out in 1936. The technology is much different, but people are much the same.

City Two

Some people want to say that the technology is SO different that it makes sense to distinguish between Twitter (or other social media) and real life. This is why the acronym IRL - "in real life" - is used online. But in fact Twitter is mostly just people talking to people. That makes it a part of real life.

City Three

However, Ira Glass, in This American Life, interviews Paul Feig, who as a sixth-grader and with the urging of his father, actually read the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. What he found was that afterwards, he had a bleaker understanding of human nature - and even fewer friends than when he started. Listen to the podcast.

Why Google Employees Quit - TechCrunch

Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can't be happy there how will you ever be happy? It's supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can't be productive there how will you ever be productive?

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