Great images and commentary from TED Fellow Puneet Rakheja on this Blindboys street exhibit.

Blowing Up Bombay – one street at a time – TED Fellows.

This is worse (better?) than TED. Online playground for the curious, Sputnik Observatory is a Jonathan Harris project, which means, for one thing, compulsive “page turning”. Part of it is the flexible navigation. Part of it is the ability to store your path. And part of it is that the only thing we love more than listening to smart people talk about cool concepts, is having the clip of the smart person start and finish in under two minutes. Enter at your own (productivity) risk.

Sputnik Observatory : Frequency.

When someone gets $100,000 for a wish, you should pay attention.

By now I imagine each and every one of the citizens of our planet who speak English and have internet have been to TED.com, so I will allow myself to be lazy in defining TED here. Now, the TED dole out big ol’ awards to people for their wishes “to change the world”, and in 2008 Karen Armstrong was one of the lucky ones. Her wish? The Charter For Compassion. From the site:

“The Golden Rule requires that we use empathy — moral imagination — to put ourselves in others’ shoes. We should act toward them as we would want them to act toward us. We should refuse, under any circumstance, to carry out actions which would cause them harm. The Charter, crafted by people all over the world and drafted by a multi-fath, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders, is a cry for a return to this central principle which is so often overlooked in our world. It reminds the faithful that in the past leading sages of all the major traditions insisted that the Golden Rule was the essence of religion, that everything else was ‘commentary,’ and that it should be practised ‘all day and every day.’”

The Charter is not exactly crowdsourced (thank god, really, I am worn down by that, aren’t you?), but it has been put together all this time by a lot of different people in a lot of places from a lot of different belief systems, including open calls for contribution.

IT WILL BE REVEALED NOVEMBER 12. You probably won’t need to make a note to remember to check it out at that time, because the one thing TED and all it touches definitely has mastered, is viral promo. But just in case, I thought I would mention it here.

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