Brain Pickings

Thank You Deb & Farah for turning me on to this Blog!!

about

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of talented contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.

Brain Pickings is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion. Please enjoy.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/about/

Welcome!

Everybody in the class should have access to the blog now. Please feel free to start posting. In the coming few weeks, the look of the site will probably change a bit and I’m working on getting some plugins for video, etc. This site will grow and expand on the strength of people using it. So if you feel there is an easier way to do something on here, or have a suggestion, email away.

If we have any graphic designers in the group, feel free to send in a new header. It should probably contain the same text that the current one does, but other than that fee free to get creative. The image has to be 900×200. If we get a few submissions I can change it out every few weeks or can have it rotate between a few of them so whenever people login or hit refresh, the image could change.

If you would like to use a different email address that you used on a previous wordpress site, just let me know.

Most of the class seems to be pretty familiar with wordpress, but if you aren’t or just rusty, ask away and I’ll try to help you out the best I can.

-Nick

P.S. It looks like the comment spam bot is on, so once you get settled in, please comment on this or another post and I’ll approve it. Once you are approved the first time, it won’t ever come up again.