Skip to content

Ivica Baraba

personal blog

  • Home
  • About
  • Now
  • Contact

Category: wow

Free MoMa online art classes

You might like some of the free MoMA online courses that are currently available. I’m considering to take the one about Contemporary Art. Which one is your favourite?

Author adminPosted on 2020-04-152020-04-15Categories wowTags learning

Free documentaries

Oh You Pretty Things is a web shop run by a collective of filmmakers and visual artists based in Brooklyn NY. They make films, art, books, posters, photographs, clothing, and other fine stuff. 

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID-19 crisis. Each Tuesday he is posting another film here.

This week’s turn is a documentary about the industrial designer Dieter Rams.

Author adminPosted on 2020-04-082020-04-08Categories wowTags art, film, recommendation

Emotions touch us

The strongest memories are the ones where we’ve felt a strong emotion. Throughout the years we accumulate an archive of memories we hold on to. Here’s a video with a nice emotional story arch. This one touches me.

Author adminPosted on 2020-02-052020-02-05Categories wowTags video

Symbolikon

I’ve recently watched Graham Hancock’s banned TED talk “The War on Consciousness”. Graham, during an interview on London Real, later said the only reason why it got banned was because his views “challenged a dogma of a particular faction of science”. The faction he is referring to is the faction that holds a materialist-reductionist worldview. Since I always thought TED stood for openly sharing a vast array of worldviews, so that one can approach a topic from different angles, I find it weird that TED banned his talk.

I went on exploring Graham’s website and watched a featured interview with John Anthony West, about “The Mysterious Origins of Civilization”. If you are curious about human history, I highly recommend it. You will notice that John is, well, a true character. Through Graham’s news section I stumbled upon a Fast Company article about a new project around ancient symbols. During the last three years an Italian designer named Michela Graziani has been doing research about the meaning of ancient symbols and is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for a digital library of symbols, hooray!

As some of you already know one of my current projects, VAU, is inspired by universal symbols that extend through diverse aspects of life, from nature to geometry to spirituality to art. I’ve already backed the project and I hope you will, too.

Author adminPosted on 2019-07-312019-07-31Categories wowTags graham hancock, symbol

A fun fact

“It’s one kind of information. And it has its own limitations. I think there are other kinds of information that are valid. For example, the information that comes from your own experience. And I like to point out to people that in all languages derived from Latin, unfortunately not English, the word for experience and the word for experiment are the same. In Spanish, experimentar means both to experience and to experiment. So your own experience is a form of experimentation that produces useful information. You have to check it against other kinds of information. With double-blind studies, this is held out as the gold standard. And many people think this is the only kind of information we should pay attention to. But here’s an interesting thing. You can try this yourself. And it’s an assignment that I give to medical students and doctors.” Dr. Andrew Weil

Discovered via a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Dr. Andrew Weil. Here you can find the full transcript of the episode.

Author adminPosted on 2019-02-232019-09-17Categories wowTags dr. andrew weil, fun, podcast, quote, tim ferriss

Rimac

The fastest electric car is made by a company you have probably never heard of, Rimac Automobili. Since its inception, in 2009, the company is located, out of all places, in Croatia. Known for its soccer team and tourism, Croatia is rarely spoken of in connection to hardware technology. It is a remarkable entrepreneurial story of vision, innovation, team effort and plain old hard work, too. 

Named after its founder, Mate Rimac, the company now counts 450 people and has a number of international investors, amongst them Porsche. If this draws your attention I recommend the following article by the Financial Times. 

Author adminPosted on 2018-12-252019-05-13Categories wowTags entrepreneurship, rimac

The Highest-Paid YouTuber

One of the rare email newsletters that I am daily looking forward to is a newsletter by a German magazine named Der Spiegel. One of their recent newsletters contained a link to an article about the Forbes Highest -Paid YouTubers. I was surprised to find out that the number 1 was occupied by a seven year old boy named Ryan who is reviewing toys!

Between June 2017 and June 2018 he supposedly made 22 million USD and he currently has 17 million subscribers. I find this stunning as new media channels such as YouTube are opening up opportunities like these. Everyone can nowadays be a media outlet. Here is the link to his channel. The channel only exists since March 2015 and so far it has gathered 26 billion views.  

Author adminPosted on 2018-12-132019-05-13Categories wowTags media, wow, youtube

We humans

We humans are remarkably different, e.g. in what we look like, what we think about and what we feel. We build our worldviews through nurture and nature and come to create a life so distinct from one another. Beneath all this there are a lot of similarities, though. According to Abraham Maslow,we all crave to satisfy our physiological needs, our need for safety, for love & belonging, for esteem and for self-actualization.

What is particularly fascinating is how differently we humans we can respond to the same occurrence, e.g. a serious illness. As Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

I recently watched a documentary named Dealt. Its a story about Richard Turner, one of the world’s greatest card magicians, despite being blind! Its a magnificent story about resilience, determination and about how tenderness and vulnerability open up a path towards being more human.

Addendum, 17 December 2018: here is a link to a podcast interview with Richard, Episode 124 of The Human Experience podcast.

Author adminPosted on 2018-12-022019-05-13Categories people, wowTags dealt, determination, movie, resilience, richard turner, tenderness, viktor frankl, vulnerability

If by Rudyard Kipling

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

by Rudyard Kipling (born on 30 December 1865, in Bombay, India – died on 18 January 1936, aged 70, in London, UK)

Author adminPosted on 2018-11-142018-11-14Categories wowTags poem, rudyard kiplingLeave a comment on If by Rudyard Kipling

This is the personal blog of Ivica Baraba. I’m an entrepreneur at PES, a creative workshop for eye-catching artisanal Point of Sale material drinks consumers notice.

Additionally, as co-founder of VAU, I’m exploring the connection betweeen everyday design objects and mindful living.

Never miss a post

Recent Posts

  • Don’t think
  • The symbols of mythology
  • Alan Watts about the Illusion of MONEY, TIME & EGO
  • The simplest definition of grit ever
  • Free MoMa online art classes

Feed

  • Entries RSS

Categories

  • Home
  • About
  • Now
  • Contact
Ivica Baraba Proudly powered by WordPress