I just found out about the Khan Academy in the news earlier this week and I think it’s one of the most inspirational projects I’ve seen in a while.

Salman Khan is a former hedge fund manager who single handedly created a whole library of YouTube videos to explain all manner of mathematical and scientific topics to kids in a way that’s easy to understand. He started doing them as a way to tutor his nieces and nephews. Now

…his 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he’s helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can’t afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.

I watched a few of them and I’m totally hooked! When I was in school I always learned just enough math to do well on tests, but then I’d promptly forget what I learned after a test was over. I wished I had someone like Salman Khan as a teacher…someone who made math relevant and interesting beyond a test and who spoke in plain english instead of abstractions.

He’s also got a series on economics and the financial system that I totally plan on watching since I know so pathetically little about how it all works.

There’s more about his project over here.

Filed under: education, inspiration, math, science, video, videos · 2 Comments

Blinky lights and vibra motors plus clothing and makeup equals I Heart Switch.  Linked from this article in the NYT.

Update: second link fixed.

Filed under: gadgets, inspiration · 0 Comments

Another lovely thing made with a sharp blade and something inexpensive. Betsabee Romero carved these intricate rubber stamps out of old tires.

Filed under: crafty, inspiration, whattodowitholdtires · 0 Comments

Look what can be done with some paper, an xacto knife, and glue! By Helen Musselwhite

Filed under: crafty, inspiration, papercraft · 3 Comments

I went to bed at 2am last night. The alarm went off at 6am this morning . It was waaaay too early to do much other than check the internets, so that’s what I did, and found inbflat.net. This site is magic.

Eventually I realized I had to stop playing with it and do some work, but I wanted to keep listening. So I made the Bb Buddha Machine.

It probably doesn’t work in IE. It brings linux machines to their knees. But I listened to it for at least eight hours today. Enjoy!

Filed under: beats, Bflat, Buddha Machine, inspiration, video · 0 Comments

My new favorite little book. It’s got all kinds of helpful funny things. One of the ideas is to map letters to numbers, then make up nonsense sentences to remember strings of numbers (combination lock?). Of course I used a unix command to come up with the most frequent initial letters in the english language. Then I massaged the results a little.

cut -c1 /usr/share/dict/words | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | uniq -c | sort -nr

Here is the resulting map … let’s go memorize some long strings of numbers!!! oh wait … we have cell phones, nobody needs to remember anything any more :-)

0 s ero
1 u on
2 t wo
3 r ee
4 d oor
5 a live
6 m ix
7 h eaven
8 b ait
9 p ine

93 68 59 79 45 47
please remember milk, bread, and please help piggy drain all drinks hai!

Author Steven Saunders has an eccentric little consulting company but I found this paper ABOUT EMERGENCE an interesting Sunday read.

Filed under: all talk, books, inspiration, lifehacking · 1 Comment

finally.

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This is a great video that a Kiva volunteer made to document the path that a $25 microfinance loan made in London took to reach a rice farmer in Cambodia. The $25 loan is paid back in 12 monthly installments of $2.08, and one of the repayments is captured in the video. It’s awesome to see the connection between the people in London who made the loan, the Kiva employees in SF who brokers the loan, the microfinance institution in Cambodia who processes the loan, and the farmer who receives it. Yay Kiva! Our next Amazon check should go towards a microloan!

A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.

Filed under: cambodia, inspiration, kiva, microfinance, video · 0 Comments

Filed under: inspiration, obama, vote · 0 Comments

C215 stencil art in New Delhi:

via Wooster

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Elsa Mora’s flower girls are so pretty, they make me wish I had a garden (or want to raid my neighbor’s garden :)

Filed under: cuuuuute, design, flowers, inspiration · 1 Comment

Ulrich Schnauss at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado on July 8, 2008, with A Shoreline Dream, Cacheflowe, and Ian Cooke.  A remarkable show, one of the best.  Music was great, crowd was appreciative, and the musicians had much love for each other. Multiple encores.

Audio sample one; audio sample two.

If anyone happened to record this show, please post a comment below, I’d love to get a copy. Same lineup is playing July 9 evening in Denver at the Falcon.

Filed under: beats, inspiration, photos, via phone · 0 Comments

After a long hiatus, George made an appearance at Mike’s 35th bday bbq!

Saz made George back in 2003 to preside over the TikiCrawler. Max made the tronix for the fire, and foo did the welding for the frame.

The TikiCrawler was an awesome group project.. We need a new project this year! Also, I need a TikiCrawler to drive around the city. Even hammocks are faster than muni :)

Photo credits: mike and catweasel!

Filed under: inspiration, mike, saz, tiki lifestyle, tikicrawler, tronix · 1 Comment

Aryana made this mosaic for Awaken Cafe. Beautiful!

Filed under: aryana, inspiration, mandala, mosaic · 1 Comment

I love this video. Jimmy Wales announces at the iCommons party that Wikipedia will become licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. The crowd, who has not been paying attention until now, goes nuts. Lawrence Lessig gets on the mic and and announces the third greatest thing to ever happen in his life.

(via)

Filed under: CreativeCommons, iCommons, inspiration, JimmyWales, lessig, ShareAlike, video, wikipedia · 0 Comments

Today I was thinking about Fray, the old-school story-telling website from back in the day. Unfortunately, they went on hiatus a couple days ago, and and have definitely been missed. It’s odd that the same day that I decided to check up on Fray is the same day that they announce the return of Fray, as a printed quarterly publication! Submissions are being accepted until October 1, so get busy!

I hope they resurrect the Fray Day events as well. We went to Fray Day 7 in SF and got to hear Armistead Maupin read and Noe Venable sing. It was magic.

Update: OK, it’s not odd that Fray picked today to relaunch; today is their 11th anniversary. But it is weird that I picked today to randomly start think about Fray.. hmm…

Filed under: all talk, books, fray, inspiration, recommended, san francisco · 0 Comments

The world would be an infinitely better place if we shared more of our peelings. (more at Happy Slip)

Filed under: inspiration, video · 1 Comment

What Teachers Make by teacher and poet Taylor Mali. For Jess and Mitch:

via MeFi

Filed under: education, inspiration, video · 1 Comment

Via MeFi, a documentary by Howard Brookner called Burroughs, starring Burroughs, Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and many more of his friends and family. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before:

Also, even though I’ve heard it a thousand times, I didn’t realize Bug Powder Dust was Burroughs-inspired, and I had never the video of the original Bomb The Bass version either:

The William S Burroughs wiki entry is quite thorough!

Filed under: beats, inspiration, video, wtf??? · 1 Comment

You should watch this episode of Democracy Now.

Thirty-five years ago this weekend, Beacon Press lost a Supreme Court case brought against it by the US government for publishing the first full edition of the Pentagon Papers. It is now well known how the New York Times first published excerpts of the top-secret documents in June 1971. But less well known is how the Beacon Press – a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association – came to publish the complete 7,000 pages that exposed the true history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Their publication led the Press into a spiral of two and a half years of harassment, intimidation, near-bankruptcy, and the possibility of criminal prosecution.

Today, we hear the story from three men at the center of the storm: Former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst, famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Mike Gravel – the former Alaska Senator who is now a Democratic Presidential candidate – who tells the dramatic story of how he entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional record and got them to the Beacon Press. And Robert West, the former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association which owned the Press and agreed to risk publication of the Pentagon Papers. [includes rush transcript]

This is a story that has rarely been told in its entirety. Last weekend I moderated an event at the Unitarian Universalist conference in Portland, Oregon commemorating the publication of the Pentagon Papers and its relevance today.

• Link to Democracy Now page and transcript
• Link to hi-res video
  

Filed under: archive, inspiration, prison4life · 0 Comments

Here’s an interview with Craig Newmark from earlier this month. Some interesting things about craigslist (according to their CEO Jim Buckmaster)

1. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers
2. All 24 employees work at a Victorian house in San Francisco
3. The company has never had a tech quit in 12 years
4. Craigslist never holds meetings.

(via svn)

Filed under: inspiration, podcasts · 1 Comment

why is an interesting animal. He’s a hacker who works on open source projects, including the amazing Hackety Hack, a tool for teaching programming to kids. He wrote the Poignant Guide to Ruby, he draws comics, he plays in a band, he posts funny pictures. He can make code look pretty, even javascript. Just who is this why? He’s got his own wiki page, which provides no answers.

Filed under: inspiration, ruby, why are we here?, WhyTheLuckyStiff · 1 Comment

For the last 10 years, Lawrence Lessig has been at the forefront of the Free Culture movement. At the iCommons summit, Lessig announced that he will stop working on Free Culture issues, and shift his work to fighting corruption:

I don’t want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don’t want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We’ve all been whining about the “corruption” of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I’ve come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

Best of luck, Professor Lessig! You make the world a better place, and we are all thankful! (via brewster)

Filed under: archive, corruption, FreeCulture, iCommons, inspiration, lessig · 0 Comments

This story has a bit of everything I love about the Internet: craigslist, blogs, YouTube, LiveJournal, MetaFilter, Canada, and of course AccordianGuy!

Filed under: inspiration · 2 Comments

Bob, Shag, and I made this SkyMaul-inspired remix of this Attribution2.0-licensed image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nantaskart/61707032/

Hang it in your office!

Filed under: bobslobster, inspiration, lifehacking, why are we here? · 2 Comments