In the modern world we have access to thousands of different typefaces some of them wonderful, some of them plain awful.

But where did they all come from:

In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.

The speech has, therefore, been around for some time, being highlighted in The Guardian on David Foster Wallace’s death, but the video is new.

Speaking as a resident of the United Kingdom where we, to our shame, often look down on education this is fabulous call to see knowledge in a new way:

This is Water

This one is a spectacular set of scenes showing the skies over Death Valley, this includes some footage of a pink aurora:

Via Wired

If you’ve walked in any public place recently you’ll relate to the challenge. Once upon a time the people who were a menace on the pavement were people walking a bit slower than everyone else. It was relatively easy to negotiate your way around these people because all you had to do was to execute a simple overtake manoeuvre and you were past them.

Over recent years though a new menace has entered our streets, these are the people who are distracted by the little screen in front of them. The problem with these people is not just that they are generally going slower than everyone else, but that they also behave erratically.

My own particular grievance is with those people who are walking along at a pace keeping everything moving, and then they receive a text. There response to this text is an immediate transition into a new mode which means that they can no longer be relied upon to behave like everyone else, they are now in modus erraticus. This is especially annoying when it’s a member of the group of people that you are walking with.

It’s another example of the massive social change that our response to technology is precipitating. Note here that I’m not blaming technology for the problem, but our response to it, although, I do think that there is a balance to make. The design of technology isn’t completely agnostic in these situations, much of our response to technology is automatic and would require a significant amount of retraining to change.

New modes of being plugged-in are on their way that may less social impact, but I suspect that they will still result in attention problems, just different ones.

In this video the domino chain reaction is taken to a whole new level:

The chart above shows the impact of a single tweet from the Associated Press twitter account on the stock of Apple, Google and Microsoft as well as the NASDAQ and Dow Jones indexes. That dip right in the middle was all caused by a single tweet.

The tweet reported, falsely as it turns out:”Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

This wasn’t news at all, it was a hack, and Associated Press had to move quickly to quash the false information.

What this demonstrates, again, is the power of the tools that we have available to us to communicate information rapidly. The real power that caused the impact wasn’t, however, with Twitter, it’s with Associated Press as a trusted source of news. The tweet only had an impact because of where it appeared to come from, but it only had an immediate impact because of Twitter’s ability to communicate broadly and quickly.

The problem for Associated Press now is that the level of trust in its Twitter feed has been diminished and the current embarrassment is in danger of having a last impact. It’s the same for us as individuals. If our Twitter (or Facebook, or any other site you’d like to choose) gets hacked the level of trust from others goes down. Associated Press responded decisively and with clarity, it’s a good strategy. We will have to do the same if we are ever in that situation our reputation may depend upon it.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Warren Buffett