Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Futureless language

Just watch this interesting TED talk about the link between your propensity to save and the language you speak.  I have never learned a language that didn't have very distinct past, present, and future tenses.  I have always been interested in linguistics, and this is no exception.  If this guy is correct, it will be interesting to see how he would go about helping people think about the future differently, or if it is even possible without completely changing our language.  Really makes you think. . .

Friday, February 15, 2013

Captcha

I have known for quite some time that every time you fill out a captcha you were helping digitize old texts.  I was never sure how this worked, but this TED talk lays it all out.  Also it presents an awesome new way to learn a language.  Can't wait to see this happen.  I love the idea of crowdsourcing and how it can make the world a much better place.  Check it out.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

One Second Every Day

Just watched this and I have to share it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_kuriyama_one_second_every_day.html

I am so inspired right now.  Lately I have been thinking to myself that I need to use Twitter more to document what I do.  I think this is really taking it to the next level.  One second of video sounds like not much at all, but watching it put together it is amazing how powerful it becomes.  I am reminded of the saying: A picture is worth a thousand words.  Standard video is 30 fps (frames per second) so this one second of video is equivalent to 30,000 words.  That is roughly 2,000 tweets per day (30,000 words divided by 15 which is the average number of words per tweet).

I think I need to start recording more video. . .one second at a time.