Rick Warren: Living a life of purpose

What’s in your hand?

YouTube – Rick Warren: Living a life of purpose.

Do schools today kill creativity? (Ken Robinson, TEDTalks)

Do schools today kill creativity? by Ken Robinson at TED

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Forget TV, there is now enough material online to spend intelligent evenings with outstanding people.

YouTube – Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The (recent) origin of consumerism

It all boiled down to a vision elaborated after World War II and most clearly expressed by a retail analyst of the era, Victor Lebow:

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”

For more details and ressources on the subject, go see the very good 20 minutes cartoon by Annie Leonard.

Of Web 2.0 experts and the written medium

On september 17th, 2007 took place the Techcrunch 40 conference, allowing the newest and smartest web startups to show off their ideas and projects.

While browsing the presentations I noticed a funny thing. Below is a picture of a panel of experts asserting the merits of the projects showed up that day. Can you tell what caught my eye?

Where are the laptops and other ultra slim pda? The members of the panel still use pen and paper to take notes.

Writing 1.0 is not dead.

Whose side are you on?

Nature? Or the people?

I rarely see these two together.

Complaints choirs

The Helsinki Complaints choir, who would have thought?

And there are plenty more.
It is funny how you cannot help to notice the recurring patterns.

Care to change the world?

Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

Amen to that.