In case you missed LOMO #23, I got a new job, and this weekend am off looking for apartments. It’s gonna be fun!! In the meantime, a few links to brighten your morning:
A funny link to start with, from a pastoral ministries friend of mine. Words that laypersons are allowed to know. Like “layperson”…
How to turn your dumbphone into a smartphone using nothing but SMS! Yes, brought to you by Lifehacker. I kinda want to try some of this.
Derek Webb thinks giving music away is a good idea. (Via Evangelical Outpost.) Here’s why:
If someone buys my music on iTunes, Amazon, or in a record store (remember those?), let alone streams it on Spotify, it’s all short-term money. That might be the last interaction I have with that particular fan. But if I give that fan the same record for free in exchange for a connection (an e-mail and a zip code), I can make that same money, if not double or triple that amount, over time. And “over time” is key, since the ultimate career success is sustainability. Longevity. See, the reality is that out of a $10 iTunes album sale, I probably net around a dollar. So if I give that record away, and as a result am able to get that fan out to a concert (I can use their zip code to specifically promote my shows in their area), I make approximately $10 back, and twice that if they visit the merch table. I can sell them an older/newer album and make approximately $10 back. The point is, if I can find some organic way to creatively engage them in a paid follow-up transaction, I increase my revenue 10 times on any one of these interactions.
I’ve wondered for years what life was like before recorded music… back when you had to play it yourself, or get a friend to play it, if you wanted to hear music. When sheet music was incredibly popular and grandparents taught their grandchildren the songs they learned from their own grandparents before them. Were there concerts? Of course there were—think Beethoven and Bach, if nothing else. But otherwise, I can’t fathom a world without commercialized music.
Journalism’s future is bright—well of course the OJR (Online Journalism Review) would say that, but still. It’s an interesting read and I’m fascinated by the then-v-now timeline of how a reporter’s day is spent.
Can men and women be “just friends”? A college student takes a video straw poll. My opinion? Yes, they can. The simplest reason: What else would you call a brother/sister or cousin/cousin relationship?
When Pigs Fly—a Boundless article that exhorts people to view sex and gender roles positively, i.e. not portraying guys as “pigs out to get you.”
Would it be controversial to say men are supposed to be the way we are? That, despite the sin we struggle with, there is something good and God-like lying dormant in our sexual wiring? To believe that my sexuality is a gift and not a curse, most of the time I feel like I'm hoping against hope.
Everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong. And this is how to do it right. Or so says Wired:
Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite of the best strategies for learning.
I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, a distinguished professor of psychology, and a massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out.
It turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.
Stop whining about who’s rich and start helping who’s poor. That’s the approach that should grow out of the quintessential American attitude toward prosperity and income inequality, according to James Q. Wilson, writing for the Washington Post. At the end of the article he suggests a business model for developing ways to help the poor become not-so-poor, and it requires rich investors. (Didn’t it always? You can’t even have a good rental house without someone richer to rent it from…)
And today’s video… a song I heard on the radio last weekend and immediately fell in love with. Somehow, my college roommate has loved this song for years and I don’t remember hearing it emanating from her computer, ever!
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