Gitify Your Life

Git was written to manage code, but Richard Hartmann presents a whole range of projects and tools that use Git for all sorts of things. 😀

From tracking personal notes to managing your website, wiki, and blog over tracking system and personal configuration files to managing videos, photos and other large files and making system backups, a lot of tools have been grown around the git ecosystem to help you support most tasks of your digital life. This talk will show you a lot of neat tools and tricks and it’s highly likely that you will adopt at least one of the various solutions.

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http://youtu.be/Ln1Ri8kLzok

Watch it on YouTube or get it from the Debian Archives.

Fareed Zakaria’s Talk at the Bon Mot Book Club

Fareed Zakaria talks about how where you come from deeply biases how you view world events, how this ties in with a truly global economy. He also talks about “how we are building a global economy [and] a global society quicker, than we have a global political system, that can deal with it.”

He argues that since the late 1970s two major forces are shaping our world:
1. secular, interconnected, interdependent markets and trade
2. large scale religious and nationalist movements

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XKjZ6vPLSU

Authors@Google: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is discussing his book “The Pluto Files” … basically recounting a few thousand years of finding things in the night sky, naming them and building an understanding of what they are … case in point: (now dwarf planet 😉 ) Pluto … including his hypothesis on why Americans in particular get so worked up about Pluto not being a planet any more. 😀

The Y Combinator

I take my head off to Jim, that’s a great way to approach a weird intersection of mathematics and programming. 😉 For those who are curious … he uses a very simple mathematical algorithm to explore how you can express recursions in Lambda calculus and thus “derives” the Y combinator.

Totally useless, but worth every minute. 😉

 

Secrets of Search

Douglas Merrill from Google talks about what it takes to build a search engine for the web.

Besides that what strikes me as interesting is their choice of languages “focusing” (he didn’t exactly say that, but it’s what you understand, when he says they won a prize for it) their efforts in machine translation on: Arabic and Chinese … o.O