29 karma · joined September 10, 2012
Try to generate some interaction - ask questions, preferably ones that can be answered with a show of hands.
Breathe.
Know your material, but don't try to memorize it. Work it like a TV sports anchor - know what's going on and the details and ad-lib the specifics.
Smile and seem/be genuinely happy to be sharing this information with your audience. Wanting to be there is obvious, and so is not wanting to be there.
Obama bothers me most of all because Candidate Obama was exactly what I wanted. Transparent. Forward-thinking. Respectful of individual rights. Willing to dismantle systems that denied rights to perceived enemies, both foreign and domestic.
And then this fellow who looked and sounded like Candidate Obama started in as President of the United States, and we found exactly where the buck stops - not with the supposed head of the free world, but with the practically invisible collection of people and corporations that work behind the scenes to operate the puppets we vote for.
It's sad. It's also not new. What is new, however, is our ability to communicate via non-centralized channels. It allows us to know that the wool is being pulled over our eyes and, with any luck, start more and more to pull it away.
It's turtles all the way down.
Cooking: I put this plant in and set fire under it and it tastes good.
Chemistry: I put these two substances together and they explode.
Nanotechnology*: I put tiny ground-up bits of gold in this and it turns red.
This may be waaaaay side-tracking, but at what point do we step back and realize that everything we do consists of just... writing down what happens with different combinations of things? And today's nanotechnology is just the result of tons upon tons of writing down things like the linked article's results and then adding whatever the next logical(?) step might be?
(Makes me think the Asheron's Call spell research back in the day captured all of human ingenuity boiled down)