Out of Pod Experience

tl;dr - don't post in this thread if you don't read past this line.

CCP touts EVE as a "thinking man's game". We all know this is rather ridiculous or at least a half-truth. We didn't have to be particularly smart to pick up EVE nor does EVE increase our intelligence or knowledge of the real world. Playing EVE is roughly the equivalent of going to the pub, so you can play darts or some cardgames and talk to people. You kill loneliness and boredom, and that's it.

... well, ok, some of us do learn new skills, RL skills.

• Some of us improve their english, because many aspects of this game facilitate the practice of written and spoken english.
• others start using spreadsheets and learn about basic concepts of economic science.
• some get creative with music, painting, writing, video editing ...
• there's even a great incentive to learn about physics (you know: wtf is rad/s ??)

But most of us are regular Joes or Janes (or Jills). We kill loneliness and boredom in the same way any other gamer on this planet does. I could digress at this point and rave about how the usage of keyboard and mouse sets us above gamepad users in terms of ability to interface with a computer game (yeah, that was sarcasm. We can have the "input device" discussion in a different thread at a different time). I could point out that EVE's subscription fee and steep learning curve act as a natural barrier against raging FPS kiddies ... but we know that none of this keeps anyone from raging in or ragequitting out of our space sim sphere (sphere sounds so much better than bubble, doesn't it ?).

Now let us do something small and easy to help CCP out.

Let's pretend we are thinking men and thinking women. Let us flex our intellect without actually putting our brains to work. Let us watch one inspiring TED talk per day / week / month ... after that we can resume playing EVE, knowing that we're a tiny little bit more inspired and smarter than your average WOW-clone junkie.

So here are the rules

1. Link to one TED talk (or TEDx) video per post. Less would defy the purpose of this thread, more would distract from EVE.
2. Post not more then once per day in this thread.
3. Don't comment on the video you or others posted. I want a neat TTT with one link per post.
4. You can optionally ad keywords to help us know what the theme of the talk is. Avoid: cool video, wtf?, woah ... Use broad but meaningful categories: education, literature, music, economy, biology, psychology, food, logistics, marketing, sexuality, medecine, movies, military, astronomy, gastronomy, nuclear physics ...

Now go for it !

(Don't forget: the NSA is reading everything you do on the interwebs. You don't want to look stupid to them, do you ?)

Tastes great, less filling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMrzdk_YnYY

(Like much of modern science, interesting but ultimately unsatisfying.)

Just to spite you a little bit

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

warehouse logistics, don't walk to each shelf, Amazon


http://www.ted.com/talks/mick_mountz_the_hidden_world_of_box_packing.html (12mins)