One lump of coal is the energy required to move a single megabyte of data across the Internet, according to Jay Walker — the man behind Priceline.com and curator of the Library of Human Imagination which he created in his mansion.  Makes you think of the energy one uses to transfer files over BitTorrent each day.

Elizabeth Gilbert, a famous author, spoke at TED about nurturing creativity.  In it she describes how the ancient Greeks and Romans considered creative energy exerted by an artist or scholar as coming from a divine source — in Greece this was a “daemon” and in Rome it was a “genius”.  By the time the Renaissance came, an individual person was thought to originate creativity from within themselves (“rational humanism“).  After the Renaissance, a creative person might BE a genius rather than HAVE a genius.  Elizabeth Gilbert wishes we could go back the ancient times, because it places a great burden on creative people to think that they are the beginning and end of their own creative success.  This was a fascinating lecture that resonated with me when I saw it.