Roger Bannister 4 min mile

Nearly sixty years on and still one of the most iconic sporting moments in history,Bannister had intended to retire after the 1952 Olympics,but having only come in 4th in the 1500m final,hung on for another two years to make an attempt on the holy grail of middle distance running,the four

The OSX notes app icon

There is an Easter Egg in Notes. If you can get a magnified view of the the icon for the Notes app, you will see that the scribbling shown on the notepad is a tribute to the ancient but famous "The Crazy Ones" Apple TV ad from the late nineties – part of the "Think Different" ad campaign. The text reads: 

"Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things different.
They’re not fond of rules, 
and they have no respect for the status quo."

Hat tip MacObserver

Jeff Bezos on exploration

"I think it’s probably a survival skill that we’re curious and like to explore. Our ancestors, who were incurious and failed to explore, probably didn’t live as long as the ones who were looking over the next mountain range to see if there were more sources of food and better climates and so on and so on.

We are really evolved to be pioneers. For good reason. New worlds have a way of — you can’t predict how or why or when — but new worlds have a way of saving old worlds. That’s how it should be. We need the frontier. We need the people moving out into space."

Full interview.
 

Ben Shaffer, Nike Kitchen

You can’t get to the really brilliant ideas without first building off of the really awful ones. In the Nike Kitchen, the shoe company’s innovation lab responsible for the genre-busting Nike Flyknit (as seen in the 2012 Olympics and 2014 World Cup), the company focuses on building a safe space for failure to help push the envelope and develop completely new products. “By having an area where we can incubate and build, and not necessarily always worry about what a failure it is, we understand that we can learn from it. It really allows us to amplify and create new seedlings, off which we can build more crops,” explains Shaffer. But the most important part of innovating, says Shaffer, is including your user in the entire process: “For us, having that single focus, which is our athlete, and listening to and observing them from the beginning of a project all the way through to the end is extremely vital.” About Ben Shaffer Benjamin Shaffer is a designer/innovator who lives and works in Portland. As the designer and creative lead of Nike Flyknit he orchestrated the growth of a new paradigm shift in footwear manufacturing that was introduced in the 2012 Olympics on the feet of the some of the world’s fastest athletes. Then as a Studio Director, his passion for new materials and processes of making and a keen eye for aesthetic relevance positioned him nicely at the incubation of Nike’s future product within the Innovation Kitchen. He is now a designer at Apple. In a journey that began 12 years ago with Nike, Shaffer has designed products from a variety of categories ranging from Yoga, Dance, and Running, as well as contributing to the conceptualization of Nike Plus. Six years in, he joined the Innovation Kitchen assisting the Women’s Training team with their Diamond Flex technologies, Free, and performance calibration as their Innovation Lead. From there he transitioned to be the Innovation Lead of Sportswear where he was charged with designing, developing, and introducing technologies such as Nike’s Hyperfuse into Sportswear.

Wanderers

For more information and stills gallery, please turn to: www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers (Just in case my website runs slow, here is a link to an imgur album version of the gallery: http://imgur.com/a/Ur5dP) Wanderers is a vision of humanity's expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available. Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there. CREDITS: VISUALS - Erik Wernquist - erik@erikwernquist.com MUSIC - Cristian Sandquist - cristiansandquist@mac.com WORDS AND VOICE - Carl Sagan COLOR GRADE - Caj Müller/Beckholmen Film - caj@beckholmenfilm.se LIVE ACTION PHOTOGRAPHY - Mikael Hall/Vidiotism - mikael@vidiotism.com LIVE ACTION PERFORMANCE - Anna Nerman, Camilla Hammarström, Hanna Mellin VOCALIST - Nina Fylkegård - nina@ladystardust.se THANK YOU - Johan Persson, Calle Herdenberg, Micke Lindgren, Satrio J. Studt, Tomas Axelsson, Christian Lundqvist, Micke Lindell, Sigfrid Söderberg, Fredrik Strage, Johan Antoni, Henrik Johansson, Michael Uvnäs, Hanna Mellin THIS FILM WAS MADE WITH USE OF PHOTOS AND TEXTURES FROM: NASA/JPL, NASA/CICLOPS, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, ESA, John Van Vliet, Björn Jonsson (and many others, of which I unfortunately do not know the names)

SR-71 Blackbird

“This new aircraft was in a different category from anything that had come before. “Everything had to be invented. Everything,” Johnson recalled. He committed Skunk Works to succeed in its toughest assignment to date: to have the innovative, challenging, envelope-bursting aircraft flying in a mere twenty months.”

Get Better Mindset

In this talk, researcher Heidi Grant Halvorson explores the mindsets needed to ensure personal growth. Mainly we should avoid a “Be Good” mindset — one where we are constantly attempting to prove our superiority to the world. Instead, we should embrace a “Get Better” mindset — where we always perceive ourselves as having more to learn. When we embrace a Get Better mindset, we embrace risk and are less afraid of failure, which is key to personal development. About Heidi Grant Halvorson Heidi Grant Halvorson is the Associate Director of Columbia University’s Motivation Science Center, and a popular blogger for HBR, Fast Company, Huffington Post, Forbes, WSJ, and 99U. As a researcher, she studies goal pursuit, the obstacles that derail us, and the strategies we can use to overcome them.