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A team of computational linguists at Carnegie Mellon University… has used geocoded tweets to build maps of regional language use across the United States. …

From these mountains of data can be gleaned hidden patterns of informal English, like the profusion of hella as a form of emphasis in Northern California, as in, “It’s hella cold out there.” Slangy phonetic spellings also show distinct patterns of distribution, with New Yorkers preferring suttin to sumthin (for something) and Californians writing koo or coo for cool. Even emoticons differ from region to region

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— Twitterology - A New Science? - NYTimes.com (via interestingsnippets)

(via interestingsnippets)

"Have you forgotten that we invented time? That clocks did not exist in any real way until the 14th century? That hours and minutes and seconds, to the ancients, were measured in breaths and blinks, sunlight and moonlight, soil fecundity and menstrual cycles, the howls of the coyotes and the migrations of the birds? Of course you have. This is the magic of time. It swallows collective memory."

— Hurry up, get more done, and die. Plus, 7 essential cross-disciplinary books to understand time. (via curiositycounts)

(via infoneer-pulse)

"Before you can surf a wave, you have to throw yourself into the wave, and let it toss you around a little bit. Then you begin to understand the wave enough to surf it."

— Woolie Reitherman, one of the Nine Old Men of Disney Animation, via @bonifer (via taylordavidson)

"The richer–that is, the more varied and complete–the individual’s emotional life, the less is he driven to projection, and the more will he incline to identification. His outlet and satisfaction comes in identifying himself with the emotions of the other. On the other hand, the narrower and more restricted the individual’s emotional life, the more intense will be his fewer emotions, the less will he be inclined to, and capable of, identification–the lack of which he has to compensate for by projection. Projection thus proves to be a compensatory mechanism that adjusts for an inner lack. Identification, on the other hand, is an expression of abundance, of the desire for union, for alliance, for sharing."

— Otto Frank, “Love, Guilt and the Denial of Feelings” (1927)

(Source: psychotherapy)

"Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced."

— Jonathan Lethem (via verymuch)

(Source: quotesondesign.com, via infoneer-pulse)

"Two of the biggest impediments to truth and excellence are people’s ego’s and organizational bureaucracy. Most people like compliments and agreement, and they dislike criticisms and conflict. Yet recognizing mistakes and weaknesses is essential for rapid improvement and excellence. In our culture, there is nothing embarrassing about making mistakes and having weaknesses."

— Management Lessons from Ray Dalio : Farnam Street (via slantback)

(via infoneer-pulse)

"Different languages are spoken at varying speeds but thanks to correlated differences in data-density, the same amount of information is conveyed within a given time period. For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information."

— The speed and density of language (via wildcat2030)

(via infoneer-pulse)

"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar."

— Thich Nhat Hanh (via rahmin)

(via rahmin)

"Some in America are still addicted to the quick fix and the fast buck. They haven’t yet realized that the new bottom line is that there is no bottom line—there aren’t any lines, much less limits or logic. Life on this turbulent, complex planet is no longer linear and sequential, one thing logically leading to another. It is spontaneous, contrary, unexpected, and ambiguous. Things do not happen according to plan, and they are not reducible to tidy models. We persist in grasping at neat, simple answers, when we should be questioning everything."

— Leadership Is About Taking The Long View | Fast Company (via infoneer-pulse)

(via infoneer-pulse)

"Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about."

— John Holt (via Caterina)

(Source: suzannexie, via matthendrick)

"

1 Be healthy. Are startups all about pulling all nighters and eating ramen noodles? Steve Jobs wasn’t like that in his early days, Metcalfe argues. You need to be healthy. “Don’t buy into this bullshit that you need to drive yourself into the ground,” he said. “You should sleep eight hours a day. The trick is to figure out when you need to get up and then go to sleep eight hours before that.”

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— Five Skills You Need for Startup Success, According to Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe (via davemorin)

(via mikehudack)

"When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."

—  Steve Jobs (via stewartmccoy)

(Source: lahutter, via mikehudack)

"We need white space because “that’s when we process what has actually been happening in our lives, when we process emotions, our reactions to things, when we can work through and let go of resentments, when we can feel and come to manage our fears. We also need white space because that’s often when our most creative ideas emerge, when our real desires for our lives can speak."

— Do Less, Accomplish More | Think Tank | Big Think (via taylordavidson)

(via taylordavidson)

"

I am nothing. It’s simple. If I were smart, I might be afraid of looking stupid. If I were successful, I might be afraid of failure. If I were a man, I might be afraid of being weak. If I were a Christian, I might be afraid of losing faith. If I were an atheist, I might be afraid of believing. If I were rational, I might be afraid of my emotions. If I were introverted, I might be afraid of meeting new people. If I were respectable, I might be afraid of looking foolish. If I were an expert, I might be afraid of being wrong.

But I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.

This isn’t license to stagnate. Change is inevitable. Change is part of who we are, but if we aren’t changing for the better, then we are just slowly decaying.

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— Paul Bucheit - I am nothing