Several TEDxNYU attendees agreed: “Nailed it!” My friend recorded it with her phone. It ran out of memory, but here are the first six minutes, followed by some stills. Word is that I have to wait 6 to 12 weeks for them to edit the video. I’ll link to the full, official one when I get it.

Preparing for tomorrow’s TEDxNYU talk led me to a curious observation. Everyone I asked for advice gave useful advice, but no two people’s advice was completely consistent with anyone else’s. That is, every person’s advice conflicted with everyone else’s in some way. I finished each advice session with each person thinking, “I got some useful advice. I’m going to use it.” Then each next session began with me thinking, “darn,[…] Keep reading →

You know you’ve wanted to see a TED talk live. Now’s your chance. Cancel your old plans for next weekend. [NOTE: I will post the video of my talk here when the organizers finish editing and post it. They estimated 6 to 12 weeks from April 6 — that is, likely late May or June.] See me and six other brilliant, engaging speakers this Saturday, April 6 at TEDxNYU—the intersection[…] Keep reading →

Business school humbled me from before I started my first classes there. I came in thinking, “I have a PhD in physics, so all the math will be easy, and I ran a company, so I know all the business. I’ll have fun for a couple years and earn a degree that will be my passport to success.” On the contrary, I found finance and accounting not about math, but[…] Keep reading →

I’m an uncle, not a parent, and a college educator, not a grade school teacher, but I look at how people live their values in raising kids and wonder. I tried to pair questions suggesting differences between people’s values and behavior: Would you blow smoke in a baby’s face? Would you pay to put 10 tons of CO2 into the environment by flying? The pollution from flying is millions of[…] Keep reading →

Have you noticed how many of today’s most successful people chose to leave our educational system–Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Erin Brockovich, Elon Musk, Sean Combs, Lauren Hill, Michael Dell, Whoopi Goldberg, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin, to name a few. Ever wonder why people who chose to leave mainstream education became so successful? Why did breaking the once-standard advice “stay in school” not work[…] Keep reading →

One thing about nature. It doesn’t react only to the consequences of your actions that you like. It reacts to all of them, including the ones you don’t like. Take greenhouse gas emissions. You might like doing something that pollutes and emits greenhouse gases. You might wish that your activity didn’t pollute, make the world unclean and impure, undue your intent to steward the environment, or hurt others, but if[…] Keep reading →

Why are women’s studies and gender studies departments so gender segregated—in particular, female dominated? I clicked the top few results in a search on “gender studies department.” Nearly every name and image I saw on those pages seemed female. I then searched on “problems with male dominated fields” and got this post stating, “Male-dominated industries and occupations are particularly vulnerable to reinforcing masculine stereotypes that make it even more difficult[…] Keep reading →

When I was growing up in the 70s, when someone said something sexist others would say that person was living in the past. “It’s not the 50s anymore. Get with the times, chauvinist pig.” It took people time to catch up with how times had changed. I’ll come back to chauvinism and living in the past in a moment. Privilege in academia in the past Today people talk about how[…] Keep reading →