My friends and I have spent an embarrassing number of hours reliving our adolescent days, coming up with these groan-worthy puns. Occasionally, a few will touch upon the absurd and, very rarely, the sublime. After the jump I present to you the current, canonical list of Er-jokes. Add more in the comments or in emails and I’ll keep the list updated.

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A fake media history from the future: http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

It runs about five minutes. The invented histories and news presentation technologies in the 2008-2014 time span are interesting and plausible.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.

Instructables user GorillazMiko is… I don’t know what to say. He’s awesome. He’s on the site almost all the time, reporting bugs, putting encouraging comments on every new Instructable that gets posted (that can be up to a hundred, some days), and making cool ones, himself.

He does all this, and he’s 13 years old. He’s trying to get his parents to bring him to the office, the next time they have a family vacation in San Francisco. His parents must be a little confused as to why their son wants to visit some company while they’re on vacation.

In any case, he really topped himself, today, by painstakingly sketching out his suggestions for a redesign of our front page:

It is so. Effing. Cute. Plus, there are some fun ideas, here, like using the robot as an icon for help. For reference, here’s what the site currently looks like:

He wins, Big. Check out his profile, here.

Fun (click through to see the whole site):

Firms and students developing buildings and other structures using the ubiquitous shipping container. Listed from A-Z.

Jill Homer spent a year biking in Alaska. She’s badass, and so is her bike.

Here’s her blog. And, here’s another blog on “fatbiking.”

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

At Instructables, we just debuted new, super-easy-to-contribute content types. One is slide shows (an series of images that plays automatically) and the other is videos (just and embed from any major video service.) It allows people to share projects with the community commenting features at instructables, without having to create a whole instructable. The idea is to let people just show off their projects; we expect this to increase the content available at Instructables dramatically.

Here’s a video I put up of the huge fish tank stand we’re building at my house:

And here’s a slideshow I made of the liner I put in my Chrome messenger bag.

Here’s a full description of the new features.

I love DIY porn. That’s why I work at Instructables: to see how people practice their crafts, reinvent objects around them, and experiment with new ideas. Every so often, I do one myself, but it’s mostly just compulsive clicking on images to see how people make stuff.

A similar thing that gets me off is what I’ll call “Factory Porn.” I love videos of industrial processes, from automated bread-baking to car manufacture. One of my best memories from Vietnam was touring an entire town that devoted itself to pottery making, from dredging silt to make clay to the huge kilns that fired the painted urns and bowls. Enter HowStuffIsMade, a wiki-based site that describes the manufacture of all kinds of things:

What is this?

HowStuffisMade is a visual encyclopedia documenting the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental accounts of contemporary products.

Who made this?

HSIM is a collaboratively produced, independent, academic, wiki-based publication. Encyclopedia entries are summative photo essays created by engineering, design and art students guided by faculty who ensure high standards of evidence (see diagram/scenarios for student participation process). HSIM is accessible to students and faculty, to manufacturers, professional engineers and designers, and to the general public, all of whom may contribute edits and updates to any student entry.

Here, for example, is how jellybeans are made. I think I’m in heaven…