onfocus

Ignite Corvallis is going to have its second event on November 5th. The basic idea is that several speakers will each have 5 minutes to give a presentation with 20 slides which advance every 15 seconds. That's pressure.

I'm helping choose the talks that will be included this time around, so I thought it'd be good to revisit some of my favorite Ignite Talks and collect them in one place for easy viewing. I've been to several Ignite events now, and what I love about them is hearing a wide range of ideas in a short amount of time. Half of the fun is that the format forces speakers to stay on task, and most of the time the presenters aren't pros. I've always found the audience is pulling for the speakers.

So here are some of the five minute talks from Ignite events that have stuck with me. I was at the first Ignite Portland in 2007 and this year I was in San Jose at Ignite Etech. But most of these I've just seen online.
















If you have an Ignite event in your area you should check it out. It's a fun way to learn about and from people in your community. I'm looking forward to hearing what folks in Corvallis are thinking about in a few weeks.

I find it amazing that two people acting against contemporary sentiment saved some of the works of Aristotle from complete oblivion. Boethius aggressively translated Greek philosophy into Latin in the Middle Ages and Cassiodorus preserved it:

"Cassiodorus retires from public office at the age of fifty and moves to Vivarium, a town in southern Italy. It is an epochal move, since to house his library he founds an abbey that begins the monastic tradition of preserving and copying ancient manuscripts. Boethius rests in an unmarked grave, but his translations and commentaries on Aristotle's works, his textbooks, and his prison memoirs live on. For the next five centuries, they are copied and recopied by monks who hardly know what they are preserving, or why." — Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children.

Is founding a monastic order for the sole purpose of preserving knowledge that no one in your own time cares about brilliant or mad?