Albert Einstein Quote

“When the solution is simple, God is answering.”

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012

A very well constructed inspirational speech. This is my favorite bit:

When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I’d been given over the years was.

And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were taking seriously. King had liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and his advice was this:

“This is really great. You should enjoy it.”

And I didn’t. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn’t a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn’t writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn’t stop and look around and go, this is really fun. I wish I’d enjoyed it more. It’s been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.

zeFrank on finishing

If you don’t know The zeFrank Show is it’s time to find out. As part of this video zeFrank shares an awesome story about the painting a lily.

Word of today: Pronoia

Pronoia: The simplest definition of Pronoia may be to say that it is the opposite of paranoia. A person suffering from paranoia suspects that persons or entities (e.g. governments/deities) conspire against them. A person enjoying pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. Source

Ye origin: Why you see ‘Ye’ instead of ‘The’ sometime

Truthy

Thought this was an interesting post on “Putting the I in Story” on Mike Daisey embellished his visit to Foxconn. He describes the story as truthy, any story becoming even more interesting when told in the first person.

The easiest way to make a story engaging is to personalize it, to say “this is something that happened to me”. Everyone knows this on some level. Urban legends happen to “a friend of a friend” because, just by adding that phrase, you have made the story twice as interesting as one that happened to someone to whom you have no link at all.

It reminds me of the beginning part of this video from Good Will Hunting:
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Quote: If you want to build a ship

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…” – Antoine de Saint Exupery

In full color

There is a fantastic photo set on flickr of color photographs from the 30′s and 40′s. The photos are from the Library of Congress. Who knew that whole era was in color?

The Most Astounding Fact

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist answers the question “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?”.

What are the most gripping stories in human history?

There’s a really good thread on Quora: what are the most gripping stories in human history?

The top-rated story is about Dashrath Majhi. The nearest town to get treatment for his wife was 70km. She died as a result of her illness and Majhi decided that distance would no longer be the reason that some one that did not get the help they needed:

From Wikipedia:

Dashrath Manjhi’s claim to fame has been the herculean task of single-handedly carving a 360-foot-long (110 m), 25-foot-high (7.6 m) and 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) road by cutting a mountain of Gehlour hills with a hammer, chisel and nails working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982. This passage reduced the distance between Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 70 km to just 7 km.