Everything we have to do

From Simon Sinek's Notes to Inspire newsletter:​

If we think of everything we have to do, we feel overwhelmed. If we do the one thing we have to do, we make progress. 

Content or Objects: Neil Gaiman and the future of books

"I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches--that was publishing. Not any more." 

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers and this keynote at The Digital Minds Conference 2013 is further evidence why. 

​I've been an avid reader my whole life. Growing up in Puerto Rico my parents used to say that I was a "come libros," literally a book eater. The only thing I would consume more was music. You could see me with headphones from a brand new walkman or a book in hand, sometimes foolishly reading while walking. While my schoolmates grumbled at having to read Cervantes, Quijote was my hero.

Nothing has changed, I still devour books and music. Sometimes listening to music while simultaneously reading on the same device. Well, something has changed, I now have a deep understanding of what it takes to both write and produce a book. ​

And then there is digital. I've spent most of the past month tumbling through the wild frontier of editing, programming and packaging digital books in EPUB format. I find all of it challenging, frustrating and terribly exhilarating. I feel that to honor all those books I've read and that in many ways have consumed me, that I too have to do my part in figuring out the future of books. 

Writing, creating, is a dandelion thing. When writing, make good art. When coding, make good art. Produce beautiful content in beautiful packages, make good art. Try everything. 

Earth Chorus: Dancing to the beat of Earth

"The Earth has music for those who listen." George Santayana

​In October 2012, NASA satellites recorded mysterious radio waves emanating from Earth. These radio waves known as "Chorus," were given an audio rendering. This is what they heard. For the very first time, we could hear the Earth speak. So we decided to speak back.

Original song "The Night Sky" by Kerry Muzzey. Read more about the NASA research here. Produced by DS2DIO.

How to win at poker: Sleight of hand→

The Economist: ​

A POKER face. It is the expressionless gaze that gives nothing away. To win at poker, the face must be mastered, and master it is what the best players try their best to do. But a study just published in Psychological Science by Michael Slepian of Stanford University and his colleagues suggests that even people with the best poker faces give the game away. They do so, however, not with their heads but with their hands.

All of last week I found myself thinking about hands. Two weeks after 9/11 the season opening performance for American Repertory Ballet was scheduled to happen at The State Theater in New Brunswick, NJ. A former RKO movie house the theater is beautiful and large holding approximately 1800 people. I was working with ARB and the weeks leading to that performance were tense and difficult as the organization decided how to proceed. As we all know, the show must go on. 

I don't remember where the advice came from, whether it was friends in the armed forces, or if I read it or saw it on tv. All I remember, and I remember it clearly, is talking to the theater's front of house staff and conveying something I had learned. In such a large space, with such tension and fear in the air, what you are supposed to do is look at people's hands.

You don't scope the venue glancing back and forth. If you do that the faces become a blur. Instead you look at people's hands and if you see something suspicious then you look up and do whatever you can to remember as much about the face and the person. 

Last Friday morning, while the Boston manhunt for the marathon bombers had shut down most of the city, I walked through New York's Penn Station on my way to work. I had never seen that many armored security personnel. ​They had situated themselves in such a way that you couldn't exit the space without walking through them. As the shock of having to walk through a virtual wall of rifles and bomb sniffing dogs settled, I noticed the discreet way in which they were looking at hands, then making eye contact and finally looking at bags as we walked through. 

​Eyes may be the windows of the soul, but hands is what gives your intentions away.

The Week's Links: April 19, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:

• Type Talk: The Definitive Guide to Smart Quotes ➞
• "Ode to the Book" by Pablo Neruda, exquisitely read by Tom O'Bedlam ➞
  
• Great in-depth article: The making of Medium.com ➞
  
• Mind. Blown: The Big Squeeze: Can Cities Save The Earth? ➞
  
• Google's Reader retirement is leading to lots of content being collected in non RSS ways: Links to Inspire ➞
  
• CourseSmart E-Textbooks Track Students’ Progress for Teachers ➞
  
• Fascinating: Is Stanford a university or "a giant tech incubator with a football team." ➞ /via @davepell
  
• How to get better feedback ➞
  
• Three Points Of View On Fandom, Fan Fiction & Fan Art ◉
  
• So great: Andrew Zuckerman's vast collection of beautiful animal images: The Creature Book ➞
  
• From touch displays to the Surface: A brief history of touchscreen technology ➞
  
• Cool: Paper Sculptures That Defy Expectations ➞
  
• You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help. - The Chronicle of Higher Education ➞
  
• Better By Design: Keith Yamashita On CEOs and Designers ◉
  
• Q&A: Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots ➞
  
• Title Treatment for Disney's “Wreck-It Ralph” ➞
  
• Creating Your Artist Resume ➞
  
• The Timelapse Project: El Morro & El Yunque ◉
  
• The Story Behind Smithsonian Castle's Red Sandstone ➞
  
• From TEDGlobal speakers: 11 websites you didn’t know you needed ➞
  
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs Post Sign at Concert Asking Fans to Put Away Phones & Cameras During Show ➞
  
• Video: "MOOCs and the Emerging Digital Classroom" - MIT Comparative Media Studies ➞
  
• Visualization as Process, Not Output - Jer Thorp ➞
  
• Karloff: the convergence of beauty and ugliness on a typeface ◉
  
• Pulitzer Prize Winner David Mamet Wants to Direct Commercials Again ➞
  
• The most frequently highlighted passages in famous business and management books ➞
  
• Richard Branson on the role of creativity in business ◉
  
• Andrew DeVigal: Smart Readers Are Too Distracted to Dig Smart Content ➞
  
• The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame ➞
  
• Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? 11 Rules for Critical Thinking ➞
  
• Frank Rich on the State of Journalism ➞
  
• Jason Silva: The Nature Of Creativity And How We Can Embrace It ➞
  
• Warby Parker Co-Founder: Creating A Strong Brand Without Marketing ➞
  
• Whiny Rants Are Inversely Proportional to Accomplishments (and Other Lessons) ➞
  
• Why designers never retire ➞
  
• The World’s Oldest Photography Museum Goes Digital ➞
  
• Smithsonian Magazine: Educating Americans for the 21st Century - Special Reports ➞
  
• Shakespeare scholars unite to see off claims of the 'Bard deniers' ➞
  
• Creativity Top 5: Week of April 15, 2013 ◉
  
• Scary-Smart People Really Do Accomplish a Lot ◉
  
• Dance and the brain: Bill T. Jones and Oliver Sacks Connect at Live Arts ➞
  
• Effective Perfectionism ◉
  
• Longform Articles Tagged '2013 National Magazine Awards Finalists' ➞
  
• What it's like running an arts org in Australia: Juggling the craft of cultural leadership ➞
  
• Intrigued by the process of UX design? Want to learn the basics? UX Apprentice ➞
  
• Elegant and useful, easy way to show what responsive design is. - Define :: Responsive ➞
  
• Sapphire Could Replace Gorilla Glass in the iPhone and other Smartphones | MIT Technology Review ➞
  
• Creative Collaboration Lessons From A NY City Ballet Pas De Deux ◉
  
• Ted Greenwald Reconstructs the Invention of Wired Magazine a Pioneering Publication ➞
  
• A History of Graphic Design: Chapter 61 : A History of Wine Labels ➞ /via @Coudal
  
• Rare Books on Calligraphy and Penmanship ➞
  
• Ten Great "Lost" Text Faces ➞
  
• Why you hate the sound of your own voice ➞
  
• The 12 Most Influential Cell Phones ➞
  
• What Aspiring Designers Need to Know About Strategy ➞
  
• Watch: Modern Dance Melds With Projection Art ➞
  
• A look at how a great story came together: “How’d you find that secret-compartments story, Brendan Koerner?” ➞
  
• Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 ➞
  
• Beautiful: JF Rauzier's Bibliothèques idéales ➞
  
• A $5 app isn't expensive: Customers need to help fix the App Store economy ➞
  
• David Foster Wallace: On Real Freedom ◉
  
• What is a book? ➞
  
• NASA Best of Satellite 2012 ➞
  
• Is Instagram the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Photography? ◉
  
• Russian Landmarks Imagined as Small Parts of Much Larger Buildings in Ad Campaign ➞
  
• 26 Time Management Hacks I Wish I'd Known at 20 ➞
  
• 10 Terms to Describe the Anatomy of a Book ➞
  
• Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was the Genius Behind Citizen Kane ➞
  
• Ha! Famous Artworks Recreated With Food Items On Toast ➞
  
• How did supercomputer Watson beat Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings? ➞
  
• 10 Very Costly Typos ➞
  
• 35 Astounding And Uplifting Facts About The Universe ➞
  
• Love this: Flashmob recreates Rembrandt painting in Breda shopping centre - video ➞
  
• 24 Dates To Take Yourself On ➞
  
• Trapped By The Web — But For How Long? Take the Kelberman Challenge ➞
  
• MIT and Harvard fund software that grades essays at college level ➞
  
• The standardization of chess set design ➞
  
• David Bowie Releases a Collection of His Vintage Videos Online ➞
  
• Yesteryear’s stereotype-defiers: Kick-ass vintage public domain photos of women in science. ➞
  
• The beautiful landscape photography of Michael Bollino ➞
  
• Tech cycles: The untold story behind Apple's $13,000 operating system ➞
  
• So great, web tech to demonstrate: How Far is it to Mars? ➞ /via @daringfireball
  
• RIP Maria Tallchief: Chicago dance legend, Balanchine muse ➞
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Comma From Which My Heart Hangs. ➞
• Isaac Asimov on Curiosity, Taking Risk, and the Value of Space Exploration in Muppets Magazine, 1983 ➞

Recommended This Week: