The title of the speech is pretty much what the speech is all about, but at about 16 minutes into the talk, Mr. Sasselov uses two similes for introducing an incredibly powerful perspective: the significance of life-as-we-know-it on a universal scale relies in its duration.
Swedes aren’t really known for their sense of humour, yet sometimes they amaze me. Taken from this article:
When Malmö launched its Malmö Festival around 20 years ago, local daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet printed up t-shirts that said: “If you have seen Malmö, you have seen the world.”
Soon after, neighbouring Lund launched its riposte: “If you have seen Lund, you don’t need to see Malmö.”
I know the two cities very little but my vote – I must admit – goes for Lund.
Well, a couple of days ago TED released the latest talk from Hans Rosling… Another great one, both content-wise and for the way it is delivered. Enjoy!
A powerful ad relies on a blend many factors: a compelling message, an original concept, the ability to shoot and cut a film, the capacity to telling a story, originality, conciseness… just to name a few. A powerful ad -- at least to me -- is a form of art on its own.
The ad here below was done by the Anderson M Studio for the Te Kaunihera Pukapuka o Aotearoa (yes, I know… I could have used the English name for it… but would you have clicked the link, then?) who states:
Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination. It enables us to understand those around us. It allows us to project the future and reach back into the past. Reading can entertain, challenge and educate. We believe that reading can transform people’s lives. Our mission is to inspire more New Zealanders to read more.
In my opinion, the only shortcoming of the ad are its sound effects: too many, too heavy, too loud… (it makes difficult to follow the narrating voice) but other than that, I find the ad to be awesome!
A few days ago, when the Obama administration forced BP to set up an escrow account for speeding up the process of refunding residents of the the gulf region that are affected by the spill, it made world news what Carl-Henric Svanberg said during the press conference.
Of course -- for as evil as one can imagine BP top management to be -- the intended meaning of the expression was not derogatory. The expression itself was a translation slip from the expression “den lilla människan” which a commenter on the New York Times explains much better of how I could do: Read the rest of this entry »
The video “suggests” that Guillaume reaches the bottom of the hole, which is not the case (being the world record about half the depth of the hole), yet the visual impact of the video is noticeable or -- to say it like one of the commenters -- freaking epic.
Curiosities:
The camerawoman filmed the dive while holding herself the breath (and you think your job was hard?!)
Despite the video being most certainly the result of cutting several different dives, the running time of the entire clip is close to that of real-life free dives of this kind.
Naturally, oil companies have no interest in promoting use of truly renewable energies: energy generation based on natural, abundant and freely accessible resources (such wind, tides and solar radiation) would radically change the “rules of the game” and break the monopoly of the supermajor. The business model of oil companies is extracting natural resources and selling them, and this is why they are now trying hard to legitimise coal and natural gas as “environmentally friendly” source of energy.
Of course I never believed for a moment that natural gas could be the right answer to the problem, but – until yesterday – I was under the impression that natural gas was at least cleaner alternative to oil. Little I knew that: Read the rest of this entry »
Here they come a couple of videos of RC planes that I StubledUpon recently (yes… I miss flying gliders, and I can’t wait for when I will be able to do that again on a regular basis!).
The following video is a full episode of United States ABC News’ “What would you do?“. The programme captures people’s reactions to challenging situations that might occur in everyday life. This particular episode is about discrimination against a Muslim, veiled, young woman.
This is the blog of Nadia and Mac: a happy multicultural couple living in Sweden (Stockholm), where we moved in 2009.
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