Minds Wide Open

Ever since I read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open I've been fascinated with the human brain...how little we understand about it, but how much it governs (whether we like it or not) every...single...thing we do. So I present to you this week, a pair of videos on our brains. It's a topic I'm sure we'll come back to in the future, so if you have any you'd like to see featured here send me a link.

For today, the first is a captivating lecture from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist who recognized she was having a stroke and what she learned from that experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor - My Stroke of Insight



The second is lecture by Jeff Hawkins, most famous for inventing the Palm Pilot, but also very passionate about brains and artificial intelligence. I'm embedding a 5-part playlist from YouTube of a lecture he gave at the 2008 RSA conference.

Jeff Hawkins: On Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

I've been looking for an embeddable version of this for a while, and I found it so I thought I'd post a little something fun this week (it's a musical!). This was project that developed during the writer's strike last spring. This was done relatively cheap (by Hollywood standards) and wouldn't usually qualify for WWW inclusion except that A) it's from the mind of Joss Whedon, and B) it exists solely as a web exclusive video. Shows you how far the web has come in just the last two years. Anyway, enjoy! I'll embed the whole thing first and also include the chaptered version below that.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (full version)






Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 1)



Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 2)



Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog (Chapter 3)