The Week's Links: December 23, 2012

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All the links posted on social networks this week:

  • 6 Simple Rituals To Reach Your Potential Every Day ➞
  • lorempixel - placeholder images for every case ➞
  • Writers’ Houses Gives You a Virtual Tour of Famous Authors’ Homes ➞
  • 6 Simple Yoga Stretches for Daily De-Stressing ➞
  • Random Mornings: A random serving of a Creative Morning from around the world. So great. ➞
  • Responsive Web Design Patterns ➞
  • Is The Internet Awake? ➞
  • The 10 best podcasts for designers ➞
  • Rebranding Santa Claus ➞
  • Nobody Knows What Intelligence Is, Because Intelligence and IQ Are Not the Same Thing ➞
  • The Web We Lost - Anil Dash ➞
  • 17 Things I Learned From Reading Every Last Word of The Economist's "The World in 2013" Issue ➞
  • George Yu's Node Gadget Can Measure Anything ➞
  • How fake images change our memory and behaviour ➞
  • Beautiful: Vibrant Skies ➞
  • Will This Be the Museum of the Future? ➞
  • Tadao Cern’s wind-in-the-face series: What 186 MPH of Wind in the Face Looks Like ➞
  • 55555, or, How to Laugh Online in Other Languages ➞
  • Journalism & Web done right: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com ➞
  • Describing Colors To Blind People ➞
  • The Long, Strange History of Christmas Carols ➞
  • 12 Mind Blowing Number Systems From Other Languages ➞
  • Do We Want the World to End? Is Santa Like Wrestling? & Other Relevant Questions ◉
  • 8 logo revisions that had people howling ➞
  • What is Motion Design ? ( A Primer ) ◉
  • From Virgil to Beyoncé: 5 Great Moments of Artistic Patronage ➞
  • Why Did Humans Start Eating Cheese in the First Place? ➞
  • The Associated Press: New-found tale could be Hans Christian Andersen's ➞
  • Book Patrol: America's 100 largest libraries are getting larger ➞
  • Hey, Look At These Beautiful Glass Sculptures! Wait, Those Are Snowflakes ➞
  • Never Brainstorm with a "Blank Slate" ➞
  • The Power of Concentration & Mindfulness ◉
  • Saul Bass Poster Sketches for Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ ➞
  • Fantastic: Natural History Museum: Treasures posters ➞
  • 12 English Letters That Didn’t Make the Alphabet ➞
  • Khoi Vinh: It All Started With Comic Books ◉
  • Why does The Nutcracker cause such enduring fascination. ➞
  • Start Hoarding Your Beans, Thanks to Climate Change, $7 Coffee May Be the Norm ➞
  • Flower Power, Redefined by Andrew Zuckerman ➞
  • Before the Civil War, There Were 8,000 Different Kinds of Money in the U.S. ➞
  • Useful Media vs. Entertaining Media ◉
  • Boredom Didn’t Exist as an Emotion in Darwin’s Days ➞
  • Gamers Are Better at Robotic Surgery Than Med Students ➞
  • After Nearly 70 Years, How Do Stealth Planes Stay Stealthy? ➞
  • The Opposite of the Cloud ◉
  • Which Best Practice Is Ruining Your Business? - Freek Vermeulen ➞
  • Workplace Distractions: Here's Why You Won't Finish This Article ➞
  • Cultivating design thinking in kids ➞
  • Frost Flowers Blooming in the Arctic Ocean are Found to be Teeming with Life ➞
  • 7 Young Entrepreneurs Changing The World With Their Businesses ➞
  • Neil Gaiman Gives Sage Advice to Aspiring Artists ➞
  • The Thinking Mindset vs. The Doing Mindset: Pick One (And Only One) ➞
  • The Neuropsychology of Persuasion: 6 Shortcuts to Winning Someone Over ➞
  • 185+ Very Useful and Categorized CSS Tools, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets ➞
  • Creativity Top 5: December 18, 2012 ◉
  • Just in case you missed it: Gift Ideas For Smarter Creativity ➞
  • Burberry's Christopher Bailey: Where Marketing, Dreams and Digital Meet ➞
  • Pentagram’s William Russell: Ten Years with Alexander McQueen ➞ Also: ◉
  • How old are you? (In Internet Years) ◉
  • The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders ➞
  • An office with “library rules” by Jason Fried of 37signals ➞
  • The Accidental Birth of Wrapping Paper ➞
  • Storytelling software learns how to tell a good tale ➞
  • Check out Small Demons, a kind of imdb for books. ➞
  • The Science Of Productivity ◉
  • The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore - Scott Hanselman ➞
  • What to Do When You Fall Back Into Your Old, Less Productive Ways ➞
  • U.S. patent office considers ending hidden patent ownership ➞
  • A Defense of Social Media : The New Yorker ➞
  • PBS Arts: Off Book - Episode 9: Fashion of Artists ◉
  • 19 handy Google tricks that you weren’t aware of ➞
  • Michael Dirda on Sherlock Holmes ➞
  • How to be a creative director ➞
  • Want To Make Your Environment More Creative? Kill Some Rules. ➞
  • Worth a revisit: Colours In Cultures ➞
  • Companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits. ➞
  • Videogames Do Belong in the Museum of Modern Art ➞
  • This Is Your Brain On Holiday Shopping ➞

Recommended This Week: 

 
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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Do We Want the World to End? Is Santa Like Wrestling? & Other Relevant Questions

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Some questions from PBS Idea Channel to contemplate as the world doesn't really end.

The 2012 Mayan Apocalypse is… today and there are a lot of people wondering if it's going to happen. Sorry to burst your bubble, but (Spoiler Alert) nothing's going to change. The so-called Mayan long count calendar predication of the apocalypse is based a fundamental misunderstanding of Mayan calendars and society. It's so far off base that scientific and anthropological experts can dismiss it with laugh. Yet, if it's so fundamentally wrong, why do we keep hearing about it? Why are there movies and news casts and websites dedicated to this non-event?
 
Does Santa have more in common with Hulk Hogan than St. Nick? People love Santa. Christmas is the largest holiday in western culture, and Santa Claus is the centerpiece of that holiday (sorry baby Jesus). But even though our understanding of Santa changes as we mature, we still maintain and cultivate our culture's love of him. And to understand why this is, we had to ask: Is our relationship with Santa similar to wrestling? Though (SPOILER) wrestling is more entertainment than sport, we still enjoy watching it. So it begs the question are Santa, Hulk Hogan and the Rock more similar than different?
 
Can you live without your phone? We've all become pretty attached to our cellular devices: it's a GPS, a camera, a game console, a social media portal... and half a million other things, all in our pocket! From concerts to meals to our pets, we process and experience the world through our phone. But as we see in so many mobile phone ads, the representations of these moments (whether its instagrams, foursquare check ins or Facebook shares) seem to be taking over and replacing the experience itself. In this brave new world is the mobile phone a tool, or a filter through which we experience a new reality?
 
You know how chain restaurants always sing some weird unknown birthday tune, instead of the actual Happy Birthday song we know and love? It's because "Happy Birthday To You" is protected by copyright! They are legally not allowed to sing it in public, and neither are you. Copyright was originally created for two reasons: to protect the original creators so they could benefit from their work AND have creative works enter the Public Domain. Unfortunately, the whole system has gotten out of whack with copyright extensions that extend far beyond the life of the creator. The current holder of the Happy Birthday copyright is the Warner Music Group and the original creators of the song stopped having birthdays a long time ago because they're dead. It makes you wonder if copyright law hasn't deviated a bit from it's original intentions. Or maybe you just shouldn't celebrate your birthday in a Red Lobster.
 
Adventure Time is an animated kids show on the Cartoon Network that is super popular, not just with the kids, but with full grown adults too! Why would a bunch of serious adults, including Mike's Mom, watch Adventure Time? We think its because the show taps into our memories of childhood with nostalgia. But this isn't the "I Love the 90's" kind of nostalgia that we normally talk about! We're talking about Romantic Nostalgia which is a confusing emotion, mixing happy and sad, creating a powerful mix that really hits you right in your gut. It adds a ton of emotional depth to an already great kids show, which you should all really watch, because it is AMAZING!
 
Did you know there's a place where you can learn just about anything you'd like? It's true! It's called YOU TUBE! Sure, YouTube has hundreds of thousands of hours of deliciously time-wasting content, but it's a whole lot more than just a black hole of pet videos and FAIL clips. If you know where to go, YouTube has some of the best educational content on the planet! And although watching Kahn Academy all day might be a bit dry, the creativity of YouTube creators has allowed "education" to be transformed in variety of amazing and engaging ways. YouTube probably won't replace schools anytime soon, but it's a pretty rad alternative. So time to stop watching cat videos and get your learn on!
 
The animated GIF has had a long and fascinating history, but the GIF took a giant leap forward this year when it became part of the 2012 Presidential Election! This election season, GIFs of Obama, Romney, Biden and Ryan, populated not only Tumblr and Buzzfeed, but also media heavyweights like The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. It became the perfect vehicle to capture a reaction, a gaffe or hilarious election moment and stream it ad infinitum. Will the Graphics Interchange Format swing the election for Obama or Romney? Probably not, but it's a pretty bold step for our pal the GIF!
 

Previously on the Idea Channel:

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

The Power of Concentration & Mindfulness→

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Maria Konnikova, writing for The New York Times, makes a case for meditation and mindfulness.

In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.

Participants were instructed to relax with their eyes closed, focus on their breathing, and acknowledge and release any random thoughts that might arise. Then they had the option of receiving nine 30-minute meditation training sessions over the next five weeks. When they were tested a second time, their neural activation patterns had undergone a striking leftward shift in frontal asymmetry — even when their practice and training averaged only 5 to 16 minutes a day.

She also touches upon the myth of multitasking.

But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe that our attention is infinite, but it isn’t. Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention. When we are mindful, some of that attentional flightiness disappears as if of its own accord.
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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Useful Media vs. Entertaining Media→

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Media, of course, has morphed and expanded, and the change is accelerating. It has grown in both time spent and impact on us. Now, media consumption changes just about everything in our lives, all day long. While a century ago, a few minutes a day might have been spent with a newspaper or reading a letter, today, it's not unusual for every minute of the day to involve consuming or creating media (or dealing with the repercussions of that). Media doesn't just change what we focus on, it changes the culture it is part of.

Another insightful post by Seth Godin. Are we using media or is media using us? 

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Creativity Top 5: December 18, 2012

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The work speaks for itself.

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.