Slim Pig

Posted on by in Cartoons

My good friend, James Spector, used to be a child actor. He had lots of minor roles that collectively add up to a fairly impressive, and even more humorous, portfolio. In my opinion, some of his best work was when he was the voice for Slim Pig, the main character of a children’s cartoon show about a two dimensional pig living in a three dimensional world. This was really cutting edge stuff for 1996. James completed the entire first season, and then inconveniently went through puberty before the second season could be recorded. He was replaced by a middle-aged woman. The show seems to be making a comeback in Australia and Europe, and was just re-released on DVD. Unfortunately, James doesn’t have the

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TED X Beats

Posted on by in Links, Music

Someone with far too much free time has remixed a bunch to TED talks to some beats. This one’s my favorite: The rest of them are here. Somewhat related, I stumbled upon this pretty good Dan Ariley talk earlier today: His book, Predictably Irrational, was a quick, interesting read too.

Where Good Ideas Come From

Posted on by in Books

I read a great book about the history of innovation and invention on my flight back from Cambodia. It’s called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, and it’s by Steven Johnson. The book is a synthesis of historical innovative thinking, covering a broad array of topics ranging from theories such as natural selection, to the gradual development of technologies such as GPS. Johnson dispels the common myth that most innovations are thought up behind closed doors by brilliant people who are ahead of their times, and goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the majority of useful ideas throughout history were developed very slowly, building incrementally off of existing ideas, often in collaboration with large groups of

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A Real Babel Fish?

Posted on by in Technology

Via Ezra Klein: Life imitates art. More specifically, it imitates “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: For context, one of my favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide: The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. The practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers

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