On display at the Whitney, and my favorite moment there, is a telegram sent by Fuller to Noguchi explaining relativity. I got to the exhibit close to closing time, so I couldn’t stay and memorize it, but this has to be the best telegram ever:
Bucky-Noguchi Relativity Telegram
A .0027 average is pretty good . . . for creatives
37Signals has a nice blog post, immediately about photography, but which applies to design and creativity in general.
The author laments, post Labor-Day, that too many of his friends post too many of their pictures without enough editing, thus making the otherwise enjoyable experience of looking at pics into a drag. Then he invokes a photography lesson:
I had a photography teacher (Richard Stromberg at The Chicago Photography Center) tell me once that if you get one good shot on a roll of 36, you were doing good. That’s the ratio: 36:1. When you edit ruthlessly like that, you come out with great results. People think you’re better than you are. It’s not that you became a brilliant photographer, it’s just that you started exercising taste and restraint.
It’s one of the biggest challenges in the digital age: When you can bombard people with everything, it’s tempting to do so. That’s why taste, restraint, and editing are so important. Sometimes it’s about throwing out the 35 bad shots and revelling in the one great shot.
2.7% is probably a good percentage in any creativity business.
Sea-powered data center patent by Google
Listed in lots of other places, but preserved here for my easy access: Google filed a patent for wave-powered data centers, specifically, pelamis wave-powered centers. Cool patent diagram, and cool video showing how much power the ocean contains.
Learning from Bucky’s language
Tensegrity, synergy, and ephemeralization are familliar Buckminster Fuller words. But while reading up on Bucky for the Whitney Exhibit (an exhilirating, but slightly sad display of his vision, passion, and borderline crankishness), I came across a few others. They’re valuable for their insights into etymology more than anything, but are also charming in that he cared enough about the concepts to adopt them in his daily language:
world-around — instead of world-wide, a word that comes from the image of the earth as flat.
sunsight and sunclipse — instead of sunrise and sunset, two words based on an earth-centric view of the universe
NYC Haircut – Ghana-Style
From the blog of a friend living in Cairo and till-recently working in Ghana:
Gaming Digg?
This looks like an interesting way to taint content. My understanding of the “may contain inaccuracies warning” is that it’s a way to highlight deliberately false, or rank amateur content. This warning over a highly-Digged US News and World Report article feels off of that purpose.
What Storytelling Really Is
… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.
While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)
The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.
I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:
for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (“Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (“Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”
City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.
On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.
I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.
Hug a developer
bad project management hurts people and undermines our family values:
boingboing praises XO, Amazon sells them
Cory Doctorow, in a boingboing post about Amazon planning to continue the ‘give one get one’ XO program, calls the much maligned box “a marvel of engineering and pedagogy”.
Reclaiming and reconfiguring expertise
Sociology visits the science “lab” and discovers: 1) science is often social; 2) expertise is a tricky balance.
An interview in American Scientist about the nature of expertise by way of a sociologist (Harry Collins) who spends serious time with physicists. Some of it is very old ground, like what we read in the 19086Laboratory Life
The idea of analyzing expertise grew out of my long study of the sociology of gravitational wave detection. I’ve slowly become a quasi-member of the gravitational wave community. This means I chat with my new colleagues in restaurants, cafeterias and coffee bars. I began to find I was talking physics—just the normal to-and-fro of science chat. Sometimes I would recommend that they try something different in the experiments and my remarks weren’t just shrugged off; for instance, I might be putting a case that had been considered and rejected for physics reasons that I could follow, or, rarely, I might even get something right.
This began to strike me as interesting: Here was someone, all of whose university degrees were in sociology, talking physics with physicists. I could not do the math, design the circuits or solder wires, and I would never contribute to a physics paper. Yet I could still talk gravitational wave physics.
Then it struck me that the managers of the big gravitational wave experiments … were also not doing much in the way of maths, or designing and building experiments, or co-authoring research papers in the field. Most of what they did was mediated by the same kind of talk that I was doing. And I also realized that talk of this kind was what I heard when I sat in on review committees—it was talk that happened in these places, not calculating or experimenting. I could follow most of this talk, and, every now and again, I felt that I could even have offered something. This made me think about the nature of expertise: how my expertise differed from that of the scientists and the managers.
But then there is a counterbalance:
Nowadays any parent of a young child, or anyone who can access the Internet, thinks their opinions on technical matters are sound. Many of my colleagues in the social sciences seem to think the same thing … I found I wanted to work out how to value expertise without going back to the bad old days where anyone in a white coat was treated as an authority on anything scientific or technological. We have to solve the very hard problem of reconstructing the value of science when we know it can’t deliver the certainty that people want. Studying expertise may do the trick.
One of the services of this discussion is to unpack different moments and types of expertise. The book, Rethinking Expertise contains a periodic table of expertise types, which includes “interactional expertise” (being able to interact with experts in the field) and “referred expertise” (leveraging expertise in other fields in a field which is not your own). It also discusses types of knowledge, such as “tacit knowledge” (“things you can do but can’t describe how”, might be a better phrase than ‘thin slice’).
The interview doesn’t go into much detail, sadly. I’m hoping the book catches on and others review and dissect so I can talk about it without having to read it. In the meantime, it does contain some interesting ideas for management or areas of expertise by non-experts, collaboration, and the eternally fascinating topic of T-shaped people.