By Lindsay Bell
Welcome to the 74th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss – from Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), Joe Cardillo (Visual.ly), and yours truly.
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t subscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
Today we explore the politics of SXSW, why limiting your imagination is so stifling, and, well, a five-hundred pound chicken dinosaur!
Howie on spying. This was shockingly published by Forbes an unabashed champion of letting business run rampant. Just ask yourself, who do you trust more to spy on you? A Government supposedly by and for the people, or Facebook and other businesses who exist solely to sell stuff? And surprisingly – I trust the NSA more when put in that framework. While I support open government, and cheered Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, don’t we also deserve transparent business practices?
What the World will Look Like if Elon Musk Becomes the Next Henry Ford
Joe on how great entrepreneurs ask questions most people never even think of. One of the reasons I like Elon Musk is that he doesn’t seem to limit his imagination the way most people do. At times this means he’s called crazy or weird, but it doesn’t stop him from coming up with new ideas.
What most people won’t tell you, but is operating in the background, is that Musk isn’t some savant or born eccentric / with Rainman like abilities type of thing. Asking good, and progressively harder and weirder questions, takes practice. It’s something you see in in the lives of Einstein, Planck, and my personal favorite Richard Feynman.
Elon Musk seems to be in that category and regardless of whether Tesla becomes wildly successful or not I suspect he’ll be remembered for changing the limits of what we think is possible.
Five Hundred Pound “Chicken from H*ll” Dinosaur Once Roamed North America
Lindsay on “OMG a Five Hundred Pound Chicken!!” I’m not gonna lie. I’m a total science geek. And I firmly believe that the cute birdies we see hopping around on our lawns in spring (when will spring arrive??) are direct descendants of the dinosaurs. So, when I saw this article fly by my social stream this week, my pretty little head nearly blew off. Today, when thinking about The Three Things of recent past, I had to admit they’ve been pretty deep. Very serious. Big time social analysis, and stuff.
So, today, I leave you with this: A 500 pound chicken from h*ll, roaming around North America, with the head of a chicken, the crest of a cassowary, big sharp claws and, probably, feathers. Enjoy. And the next time you see a tiny little red red robin, bob, bob, bobbin’ along, give thanks to evolution.
Now it’s your turn. Is there a book, podcast, article, TV show, blog post, or story we should read?