Thursday morning open thread

So Steve Jobs is gone, Sarah Palin is out of the race, and the NYPD is finding new and wonderful ways to cruelly and inhumanely punish the #OccupyWallStreet protesters. I'm not entirely sure what the NYPD is up to, or why, but they sure seem to be handing the protesters a PR bonanza.  Back to Steve Jobs, it's always odd mourning celebrities.  We don't know them, so why do we care more about them than other people we don't know who die every day?  To some degree it's because even though they're not part of our personal life, they are a part of our cultural life.  We grew up with them.  And now they're gone. But that's not all.  I think when celebrities die it's a bit of a wake up call as to our own mortality.  Obvious as it may seem, it's a reminder that if they can die, so can we.  Please do watch the video I posted last night of Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford.  I'd never heard of it before.  It's really great.  And touches on dying, and living.  It's just really good.