Sharing the wealth

I found a few cool links and things online today to which I thought I'd direct your attention.

First, Google has an "In-House Philosopher." I want that job. I found this out by listening to a TedTalk by Damon Horowitz. I like to listen to them during the job search-cover letter-resume writing process. You can find the talk here and find out more here.

Next, I found this amazing artist whose work you should check out. He makes art using data, digital technology, and crowdsourcing. Wikipedia says crowdsourcing is "the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a 'crowd'), through an open call." The artist's name is Aaron Koblin.
His work is seriously amazing on both visual and conceptual aesthetic levels. Really. His bio says:

Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies. Aaron's work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology. He received the National Science foundation's first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He made Radiohead's "House of Cards" video and two of his other music video collaborations have been Grammy-nominated. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and currently leads the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab.

To find out why this post has a "sheep" tag, check out his TedTalk and website.

Food for thought

I heard these two quips today, and I actually think I disagree with both:

If you're not growing, you're dying.

and

Everyone is a leader.

I could discuss forever, but my main objections are (1) that sometimes just being who are you are for awhile is a-okay. It doesn't mean you're "dying", just enjoying comfort or a happy state for awhile and (2) Not everyone is a leader. And, sometimes being a good leader means you have to be the best follower you can be. I recognize that being a good leader is about being who others need you to be at that time, which, sometimes means that you can lead by following. Like sheep. That's why they are my favorite animal.