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posted by n1 on Tuesday March 17 2015, @06:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the expensive-echo-chamber dept.

Megan Hustad writes in the NYT that while it’s not exactly fair to say that the TED conference series and web video function like an organized church, understanding the parallel structures is useful for conversations about faith, how susceptible we humans remain to the cadences of missionary zeal, and how the TED style with its promise of progress, is as manipulative as the orthodoxies it is intended to upset. According to Hustad, a great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon, a gathering of the curious and the hungry. "A persistent human problem is introduced, one that, as the speaker gently explains, has deeper roots and wider implications than most listeners are prepared to admit," says Hustad. "Once everyone has been confronted with this evidence of entropy, contemplated life’s fragility and the elusiveness of inner peace, a decision is called for: Will you remain complacent, or change?" TED talks routinely present problems of huge scale and scope — we imprison too many people; the rain forest is dying; look at all this garbage; we’re unhappy; we have Big Data and aren’t sure what to do with it — then wrap up tidily and tinily. Do this. Stop doing that. Buy an app that will help you do this other thing. "I never imagined that the Baptists I knew in my youth would come to seem mellow, almost slackers by comparison," concludes Hustad. "Of course they promoted Jesus as a once-and-done, plug-and-play solver of problems — another questionable approach."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by redneckmother on Tuesday March 17 2015, @07:53PM

    by redneckmother (3597) on Tuesday March 17 2015, @07:53PM (#159042)

    This a bit OT, but...

    I use a cronjob script with youtube-dl to get the clips I want in the wee hours... it also helps to to manage my data caps (additional download allocation is available to me from 02:00 to 08:00, local time). I edit a "queue file" with the URLs I want, and watch the results the next day.

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    Mas cerveza por favor.
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 17 2015, @08:54PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 17 2015, @08:54PM (#159061)

    OK interesting. I download modded minecraft video series from youtube (everyone has their secret shame) into /var/youtube and then run a "simple" bash script mythmediamonitor 0.7 to insert the shows into my recorded items. Its just a symlink from /var/recordings to /var/youtube. From memory I had to add a .webm handler to the mythtv gui for /var/video but the built in player doesn't understand webm so I get the joy of converting file types by hand. You get to manually delete files from /var/youtube after they're viewed and deleted. Also if you view and delete episode 7 and re-run mythmediamonitor then it'll happily re-import episode 7.

    For something I'll watch once and never again, I prefer the "watch recordings" functionality including deletion. For something I'll "keep forever" it goes into the mythtv video system.

    Despite the above, sadly, its much more convenient and enjoyable than using a youtube app or screencasting or any of that. In fact the youtube app totally sucks for episodic content, its oriented strictly around cat video consumption.