Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week, with a light Valentine’s Day theme:
- Suleika Jaouad, who writes about being young with cancer, talks about the embarrassing but very real prospect of being a sexually active cancer patient. [The NYTimes Well Blog] For other unconventional responses to cancer, watch Ananda Shankar Jayant’s talk on fighting cancer with dance.
. - Data visualizationist and programmer Olivier H. Beauchesne maps Wikipedia geotags to uncover some unexpected connections across the tome. [Collaborative Cybernetics]
- Read Leslie Morgan Steiner’s CNN article, “Why abused women stay in bad relationships,” in which she calls on lawyers to provide pro bono work to victims of domestic violence. [CNN] Make sure to watch her TED Talk on the same topic.
. - An 18-minute documentary on the future of interactive design, along with eight insights. [Co.DESIGN]
. - Soren Kierkegaard’s Valentine’s Day ode to his love — a pen. [The American Reader]
. - On Tuesday night, TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein‘s documentary about gun violence in Chicago aired on Channel 4 News in the UK, before the U.S. State of the Union address. [Channel 4] See our annotation of Obama’s speech, in TED Talks and playlists.
. - How moshing taught a physics grad student about the dynamic of human collective motion. [The Atlantic]
. - Here, 34 tips from the Vimeo Video School on shooting a video promo for a nonprofit. The featured lesson was created by the film production crew, What Took You So Long? [Vimeo] They also happen to be behind this video chat with Hans Rosling from the TEDxSummit in 2012.
. - Simply sublime watercolors accompanying stories by beloved Italian author Italo Calvino. [Brain Pickings]
. - Don’t feel bad if you’ve failed the famous invisible gorilla test. Eighty-four percent of radiologists, who seem to have superhuman attention spans, fail, too. [NPR]
. - Is a wearable wrist computer on the horizon? Will we soon all be wearing iWatches? Perhaps so. [NYTimes Bits blog]
Photo: Anne Francey