#tedxtuesday

There will be a lot of marching coming up soon. The Queen Liliuokalani Kingdom Spiritual Walk this Saturday, January 17, 2015 9:30am-6:00pm, and The Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade and Unity Rally on Monday, January 19, 2015 9:00am. Both will be celebrating peaceful protesters of the past, but with all the injustices going on here in Hawaii, what shape should peaceful protests be taking in the future.

How and why we started to get involved - why it changed our lives | Arash & Arman Riahi | TEDxVienna

I like these guys and their story of creative non-violent protests taking place all over the world. They created a platform, everydayrebellion.net, to allow people to share and learn different techniques and tactics to use in their own "everyday rebellion". Small, smart, subversive actions will trump big talk every time.

A rich life with less stuff | The Minimalists | TEDxWhitefish

The other TEDx Talk I found, was from a few months ago. I just found it rather comforting, after going through something similar in my recent move. It feels kind of liberating, not being bogged down by the weight of all this stuff that kind of just takes up space after awhile.

After taking a look at their blog, theminimalists.com, it gave me a few more ideas to handle some of the other things that I didn't feel good throwing away or donating, like old family picture albums, or high school year books. For the pictures, I'm thinking about having a scanning party.

I have two interesting finds this week. The first talk is from Heather Barmore, TEDxAlbany and the second talk is from Stefan Kertesz, TEDxBirminghamSalon. I chose these two because they both seek to empower people to take action, but use two very different methods.

Go Be Important | Heather Barmore | TEDxAlbany

I know I've written about this before. Find that thing that matters to you and work on that. I like her comments that you should get to know the names of your representatives at all different levels. I like it because it really isn't that hard to do, and interacting with your representatives isn't difficult at all.

Go be important. Use your voice.

We Don't Need to Be Heroes to Be Helpful | Stefan Kertesz | TEDxBirminghamSalon

I enjoyed Stefan's talk as well, and the idea that our brain's get short-circuited when we encounter an insurmountable problem and when we see other people tackling big problems we resort to hero-worshiping and shut down that part of ourselves that think we're not special enough to make an impact.

Click the image above to watch the video or follow this link.

We return to TedxTuesdays in a big way.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft navigates Flickr, satellite images and random data in a way that can't be described as anything less than "totally rad."

It's all thank to some impressive software called Photosynth which is like Color on crack.

"Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them."

If that old cliche about pictures and words is correct, then what can i say that gigabytes of crowdsourced, panoramic pictures haven't already?

There's obviously some mind-numbingly boring number-crunching going on behind the scenes. What I love about this kind of technology is how undeniably human it is. It reaches into the void of the anonymous internet, flickr and inanimate data and brings the world together in an amazing visual way.

Way to surprise me Microsoft. Based on my experience with your last few OSs, I was beginning to think you had lost all touch with the human race.