Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You Get What You Expect.

Author Roger von Oech describes this phenomenon as the self-fulfilling prophecy, where a person believes something to be true which may or may not be so, acts on that belief, and by his actions causes the belief to become true. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a case where the world of thought overlaps with the world of action. And it happens in all avenues of life.

Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of “memes” — a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain. On the way, look out for:
+ a powerful one-sentence secret of happiness
+ a compelling insight into terrorists’ motivation
+ a chilling view of Islam
And just when you think you know where the talk’s heading, it dramatically shifts direction and questions some of western culture’s fundamental assumptions.
This. Is. Unmissable.

View video

AFTER 2 WEEKS OF VOTING:1. HTML/CSS 7.6
2. Javascript 7.3
3. Ajax 7.2
4. Python 6.9
5. Java 6.7
6. C# 6.7
7. Ruby 6.2
8. .Net 6.0
9. C++ 5.4
10. C 5.1

More here.

A very good podcast! Here is some info:

We’ve all descended from a common ancestor, but, as Homo sapiens, we no longer brachiate through trees and have long abandoned our stone tools for iPods. Evolution has shaped us into the big-brained, bipedal, text-messaging specimens we are today. But it didn’t happened without a lot of pressure. We’ll look at some of the forces that have driven human evolution – from the snake-phobia that sharpened our eyesight, to the anger-management that was a prerequisite for civilization.

Also, how your Blackberry may be changing the brains of future generations. And, are we engineering our own successors through robotics? Guests:

• Lynne Isbell – anthropologist, University of California, Davis
• Timothy Taylor – archeologist, the University of Bradford in the U.K.
• Nicholas Wade – science writer, New York Times, author of Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
• Lee Gutkind – author of Almost Human: Making Robots Think

Hear it here.