apophenic pretentia
I only watched this cuz Presentation Zen told me to. Half-way through, I was bored and wondering if Zen had lost his touch, then wow …
Reminds me of the Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow the story of concentration camp butcher/doctor told in reverse — where by simply changing the direction of a narrative, not only is holocaust undone, but Europe is enriched with a whole new people.
Couple lines that show that we’re moving into a more thoughtful phase of thinking about markets. Rather than making them the cure-all for everything, Obama’s inauguration speech had a line many of us who respect markets but think there is more have been waiting to hear for years:
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.
But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.
Then I heard Bill Gates’s TED 09 talk this morning, and he had a great line:
I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. Only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.
Kevin Kelly has an invigorating post about our the inevitable increase in our ignorance. When I saw the title “The Expansion of Ignorance”, I had a curmudgeonly joy at reading about how stupid we’re allowing ourselves to become. Yesterday, I listened to a series of Open Source interviews with Harold Bloom (while playing my Rogue alt on WoW, no less). He railed against the ‘school of resentment’, lamented the celebration of crap books, condemned the loss of memorization, etc. Cocktail Party Physics had a post about how Sarah Palin represents a celebration of dumb and connecting it to bigger, scarier trends:
Despite the Palin-centric focus, this is not meant to be a political post; rather, her candidacy epitomizes one of our most fundamental failings as a nation. I’m talking about the triumph of mediocrity, of settling for “good enough,” in America. No wonder our country is in a shambles, teetering on the edge of economic ruin and losing our historical edge in technological innovation. No wonder we’re lagging so far behind other developed countries in educational testing scores, when we demand so little of even the highest offices of our land.
In a recent post here about how fivethirtyeight.com was uncovering basic 101 weaknesses in long-standing polls, I was surprised to find out how pissy I was about the media’s and larger public’s inability to figure out this problem for themselves.
So I was looking forward to a bilious post from Kevin Kelly, which, now that I think of it, is silly. He’s not the bilious type. What the post is about is how, despite all of the knowledge we’ve acquired, we’re not really getting close to knowing it all or being done with science. He points out that, if every answer raises to more questions, our pursuit of truth is creating more ignorance than knowledge. Chart:
As one who was depressed that Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was turning things I once saw as art and as having mystery into simple riddles, this was a big pick me up. There’s something very Jean-Luc Picard’s love of discovery and surprise in all this.
White Roofs for a Green Planet | EcoGeek | Roofs, White, Enough, Heat, Buildings
“if the 100 biggest cities painted all their roofs white, and switched their road materials to lighter colors (concrete instead of asphalt) it would reflect enough light and heat back into space to entirely offset the warming of the last few decades.”
A good article for creatives, particularly in agencies, who are tasked with ‘leap frogging Apple’ (*bumps head on table three times), but are inundated with barely actionable statistics, mind-numbing personas (“I read Time Out and BoingBoing, watch LOST, and I want my product to work well”), and have brainstorms that last for an hour with an agenda of “whatever we have at the end of the hour is what we’ll take to the client” is in the Boston Globe.
The article reports that new research is suggesting that daydreaming, a shunned/discouraged/culturally mocked behavior, is a source, maybe THE source of creativity. Invoking famous daydreamers like Einstein, and a new (to me) story about the invention of the Post-It Note, it suggests that loosely directed, even undirected, time is when our best, freshest ideas come to us. This does, of course, require a clear and deep understanding of the situation (for agency types, a brief, for Einstein, an ongoing relationship with the problem of the nature of light) as opposed to just screwing around. But it still points pretty clearly to a problem many of us face: creative time being overdirected and compacted.
Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.
This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.
There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.
The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:
It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.
Other interesting things about McNair:
Things learned from the trip:
The most artistic thing about theatrical [and] advantage of the small theatre is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty – GK Chesteron, 1909
My friends Tom and Donna take me to all sorts of lo-rez, lo-tech, junk-tech performances: puppet shows, performance art based on slide-shows (literal slideshows — with carousels, film-strip projectors, unsynched sounds, live music), and toy theater.
Last night, I went to St Anns Warehouse‘s 8th toy theater festival, produced by Great Small Works. It consisted of four shows:
As a digital designer who tracks CG for improved hair and water effects, it’s fun to watch powerful stories emerge from <1 fps, 0-fidelity, 0 apology to artifice media and find them even more engaging than the adventures of Niko and Roman.
One of the cool things with St Anns is that they usually have theater and festival memorabilia on display around the warehouse. So I got a lot of (crappy iPhone) pics of small toy theaters, an art form unto themselves.
Inspiring morning about invention, innovation, design, and the cognitive surplus. It started with reading Clay Shirky’s web2.0 expo talk on the blog White African (“where Africa and technology collide!”). On White African I read an interview of the founder of CraftSkills, Simon Mwacharo. I’m having one of the moments where accessible technology + surplus time + application to small aspects of big problems == something amazing.
Craftskills focuses on bringing affordable energy to parts of Kenya that are currently off the grid. It has a special focus on wind power because it’s more readily available and less prone to theft than solar equipment. My favorite part of the interview is the origin story. The founder knew that he wanted to do something with wind turbines, and got it moving thus:
I started with two workers. I could not afford to hire trained people so I decided to train myself first then train my two boys. Then I got a friend who repairs radios and TVs in Kibera to help me design and put together a charge controller.
There are so many powerful dynamics in that simple story.
- cognitive surplus: he saw something he wanted to do and trained himself in the skills he needed to do it
- physically accessible technology: he collaborated with friends to acquire the basic skills needed
- intellectually accessible technology: those basic skills (managing electrical power) already existed, just in another place (TV and radio repair) and partly obscured. (Intellectually accessible, doesn’t mean that it’s simple. Rather, it refers to the fact that this technology is transferable among non-experts, without need of a lab or deeper training.)
- small aspect of big problem: the problem of getting people on the grid was defined as simply as: I need to figure out how to build a charge controller
And just like that, Mwacharo is transforming the lives of thousands of people directly, and many thousands more indirectly through the promotion of an industry.
The Mars rover Spirit is being put to sleep, or “infinite hibernation” mode, as reported by the AP. Now begins the long process, where across decades and lifetimes, the small pulse of energy from the sign will be self-directed towards Spirit’s sentience. Like Vee-ger before it, Spirit will come back and let’s hope it’s not pissed. In ten years, someone will write yet another Mars colony book, in which it the colonists — a multi-culti mix of scientists, jocks, babes, nerds, a bureacrat, a rogue unfairly disgraced military, and an artiste of some sort — are terrorized by an uncaring, mercilessly logical machine that calls itself Brit.
This is a serious bummer, really. These Rovers have already lasted 16x as long as planned and it’s made very cool discoveries, took the highest res picture of Mars, and had Marvin the Martian on its mission patch. Cheap government wankers . . .
A Martian sunset, brought to us by Spirit.
