Dirty Jobs - Mike Rowe, my hero!

I'm sure most of you have turned on the TV and caught a Discovery Channel favorite, Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. The talk he gave for TED tv presents an insight on those "dirty" jobs that will make you think and reevaluate the importance of those jobs.

There are times that you may think he is poking fun at the jobs, but judging from this talk, he has learned a lot about the importance of those jobs that we'd rather not think of.

School kills creativity

A friend pointed this talk out to me. I watched, I laughed, I nodded in agreement.

I always believed that children should be allowed to express their creativity freely as long as it doesn't put anyone or themselves in danger.

I remember when my daughter was in kindergarten, the teacher pointing out to me that she was not using the "right" colours in her pictures. She showed me the picture and I didn't see anything wrong with it and said as much. She pointed to a beautiful sky filled with green clouds, a teal lake, blue trees with yellow trunks and orange grass. That all those were not "proper" colors. I asked her what she thought were proper colors and she responded in the expected manner, blue sky, green grass, blah blah.. so I asked her "what if this is the colours she sees?" are we supposed to retrain her brain to see only those colors in relation to the object? To me that is killing creativity at it's most fundamental. 

What do crochet and coral have in common?

Geometry of course!

Although mathematicians claimed that hyperbolic space could not be seen or demonstrated, Margaret Wertheim shows us many examples of these beautiful shapes in nature as well as in crochet during her talk presented on TED tv.

Through math, marine biology, feminine handicraft, environmental activism and a crochet hook, Margaret Wertheim founder of the Institute of Figuring leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs. Margaret and her sister hope to draw attention to distressed coral reefs around the world that are rapidly dying  from changing ocean saline levels, overfishing, and many other threats.