Courage in the Face of Pi

“Leaders are fascinated by the future. You are a leader if, and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress, and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. As a leader, you are never satisfied with the present, because in your head you can see a better future, and the difference between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you forward. This is leadership.”

- Marcus Buckingham, Gallup

Vi Hart is a leader. You can tell that math class burns her and she’s doing something about it. From Infinite Elephants: 

So you’re me and you’re in math class yet again, because they make you go, like, every single day, and they make you learn about, I don’t know, the sums of infinite series. That’s a high school topic, right? Which is odd because it’s a cool topic but they manage to ruin it anyway so I guess that’s why they allow infinite series in the curriculum.”

She has 26 videos at the time of this writing and you can bet I’m going to watch every single one of them.

Wrappin’ with Passion

You can reward someone for participation in several ways. Social scientists group these rewards into two buckets: intrinsic and extrinsic. Monetary payment is considered extrinsic and is probably not responsible for Rajnikanth’s skill at packaging. This is mastery at work, the intrinsic motivation to become better at what you do.

You can’t pay for that kind of dedication. He does it for the joy and the glory. A raise would just cheapen the experience.

A Traffic Jam with No Emissions is Still a Traffic Jam

Henry Ford’s great-grandson, Bill Ford, presents an excellent case for a new transportation model beyond the zero-emission automobile. 

“Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. But with more people and greater prosperity worldwide, that number is going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock the world has never seen before…

Today, the average driver in Beijing has a five hour commute. Last summer there was a 100 mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China…

The mobility model that we have today simply won’t work tomorrow. Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.”

CTV Should Try Bootleg Fireworks

The Roommate and I reopened a pandora’s box called Canadian network television today. We haven’t had cable for years, but Plex has a CTVGlobeMedia plugin that lets us watch The Colbert Report over the Internet, with commercials. As the Cylons used to say: “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.”

Except this time, it’s a real pain in the ass to fast forward through the ads. Although we were safely within the Internet’s bossom of choice, we were also sitting on the couch and the keyboard was waaay over there. We had to sit patiently, all 80s-like.

Shell kind of ruined the fun during the breaks and the Caramilk Key campaign wasn’t much better, but at least the Stampede reminded us we were being geo-targeted and that choice was only a click awaaay over there.

Do you know what would have been an awesome break between Colbert’s SuperPac and Formidable Opponent? Yup; one minute of bootleg fireworks.

Video Of Asteroid Discoveries from 1980 - 2011

If there’s an asteroid out there with our name on it, I’m convinced they’ll find it within my lifetime. Earth crossers are red, Earth approachers are yellow and the rest are green.

The video was created by Sott Manley. He explains some of the patterns:

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You’ll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990’s we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you’ll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that’s tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

It’s only a matter of time before we find an Earth-killer shaped like a throwing star.

(originally via Boing Boing)