IF Blog

The New Big Blue Marble

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:47:23 +0000

It's a massive and richly detailed update on an icon taken by the crew of Apollo 17 at a distance of about 28,000 miles. (For comparion's sake, the ISS orbits at an altitude of less than 280 miles.)

The full sized retake, taken by the Earth observation satellite Suomi NPP, is enormous but well worth the time to download. It's simply gorgeous.

Wayne

Some rights reserved by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

You don't like regression analysis! Are you well?

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:01:01 +0000

Written in the context of a discussion on the cultural development of the "extrovert ideal" in Susan Cain's excellent book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking," the following quote ends with some gentle sarcasm. Cain carefully distinguishes "shy" from "introverted" - one fears social judgement, the other doesn't - and points out that the presumpton about what the shy and introverted should like doesn't go in the other direction.

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation. 'Social anxiety disorder' — which essentially means pathological shyness — is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology — not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease — if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance. 'It’s not enough,' one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, 'to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.' (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)

And the nerds rejoiced. We need every kind of mind.

Wayne

The Poet Knows Something They Didn't

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. - Robert Frost

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut links to an interview with poet and translator Jonathan Galassi, who points out that the significance of good art in general, and poetry in particular, does not lie in being accepted at the moment. The Economist blog, Prospero:

Poetry has a vital place in society, whether it's granted one or not. It exists; it is something people perversely do. Whether it gets formal acknowledgment or is provided an established role is really not the ultimate point. There’s a lot of energy and money spent on trying to make a place for poetry in society; I'm all for it, and I work on this myself in various ways. But I don’t think it has anything to do with the art. Poetry is anti-establishment by nature—except when it's not, of course, and then it tends to be of little interest. True poetry gets absorbed ex post facto, when people understand that the poet is seeing something, knows something, that they didn't. And that is the poet's ultimate reward: to change perception, to enter the language, to matter. There's nothing more mainstream than that. And it's something you can't buy, can't force. It just happens.

I just like the idea that some things are inaccessible to our matrixed and Google-optimized culture, that "the poet is seeing something, knows something" that can't be contextualized on the spot.

Wayne

Philosophy is pointless, Stephen Hawking edition

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Should Stephen Hawking be more interested in a philosophy of his chosen field, theoretical physics?

By way of explaining its relevance to science, philosopher Tim Maudlin argues in The Atlantic that philosophy can help science extend its reach into the domain of what.

For example, the probabilistic nature of the quantum world and its bizarre behavior should not be an end to the discussion about that inscrutable reality, he says, and, as he does in this Big Think video, goes on to suggest that perhaps philosophy is regaining its traditional role as the original science by contributing carefully framed questions to the current disciplines. Because as the agent for these questions, humans want and need to know at a deeper level.

In addition to offering a nice summary of why an apple falling on the head of Isaac Newton should have been so revolutionary in the history of physics, Maudlin's discussion in The Atlantic raises some "what" questions related to contemporary cosmology, as well as, for example, describing the kinds of mistakes often made when thinking about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Hint: it may not be intelligent.

As for the question about whether Hawking should be more interested philosophy and physics - he's recently said that philosophy was dead" - "he's just not well informed" according to Maudlin. And in true philosophical fashion, Maudlin says the better question would be "how do philosophy and foundational physics come apart," not how they might fit togeher.

The Atlantic piece is entitled "What Happened before the Big Bang?", a question also broached by CalPoly theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in the 2010 IdeaFestival Conversation embedded here.

Wayne

Good ideas? Give them time

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:55:21 +0000

Even the most brilliant minds fall flat. Writing yesterday in Wired, Jonah Lehrer describes one good way to separate the good ideas from the bad. Take a break from the creative process.

How can the rest of us get better at identifiying our best ideas? One key lesson from this research is that distraction and dilettantism come with real benefits, as they give the unconscious a chance to assess its new ideas.

So the next time you invent something new, don’t immediately file a patent, or hit the “publish” button, or race to share the draft with your editor. Instead, take a few days off: play a stupid video game, or go for a long walk, or sleep on it. Unless you take a brief break, you won’t be able to accurately assess what you’ve done.

Wayne

Daniel Tammet on aesthetic judgement and knowing

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:05:25 +0000

Asking for forgiveness if he does not put on a "one man savant show" for the audience, Daniel Tammet goes on to defend a thesis born of his own experience. Do our aesthetic judgements, rather than thought and abstraction, guide the knowing we get? It's an intriguing idea with roots in human biology, and his synesthesia, the "cross talk" between his senses, provides him with a perspective on an answer continually exploited by poets, for example.

Expanded, this intimate connection to the world has dramatically changed how experimentors' - to take another example - now approach the development of artificial intelligence. If thought is embedded in all of human biology, not just our brains, we know more than we can tell. "Our bodies," as Sir Ken Robinson has memorably said, "are not just transport for our heads."

The questions, of course, are inevitable and asked at the 2010 IdeaFestival what the color of a rather large, made-up number might be, he paused and with a comic's timing answered "red, white and blue" - because "everything's bigger in America."

Video of him at the IdeaFestival may be seen here, a brief interview, here.

Wayne

1,700 miles, 90 fewer pounds, one awesome beard

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:23:00 +0000

Condor's PCT Adventure in 3 Minutes from Kolby Kirk on Vimeo.

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog - Seventeen hundred miles hiked. Ninety pounds lost. One inspiring beard.

My father thru-hiked the Appalachian trail at the age of sixty-five, and has since hiked large sections of the Pacific Crest Trail and the Intercontinental Divide Trail, so this video, in addition to introducing me to some new music - seriously go check it out - stirred the emotional pot. Like him, I love a good long walk. Unlike him, I don't have the miles to my credit. But spending several months hiking through some of the most gorgeous scenery this country has to offer confers on the explorer perspective-changing, head-clearing, two-feet-standing sense that is comparable to few things in life. The beard, truly epic, almost makes up for the body odor.

Wayne

Infinite drive: LOST in an "alternate geography"

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:56:15 +0000

Some rights reserved by absentmindedprof

In describing the many clever ways in which baffles were used to defend castles and to force would be attackers to expose themselves to danger, the author of this piece at BLDGBLOG also pointed out in the comment section that a "digital baffle" had been set up to hide important government and military centers in plain sight. Besides reminding me of the island on LOST, which was famously difficult to get to or to leave, "alternate geography" struck me as an interesting way to think about an old term.

"Baffled," indeed.

Wayne

Genius always starts with a question, not an answer

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:49:13 +0000

A while back I stumbled on a quote that appealed to me because it captured the fundamental tension between the act of creation, where everything hangs in the balance, and the choice to avoid risk and achieve little of note. "How long do you live in the question?" is from a book that I'm finally getting around to read, "Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance." The author, Jonathan Fields, does particularly good job of pointing out that if creators, or anyone else for that matter, are unwilling to take risks they will get predictable results, and of suggesting ways of living in the question long enough to arrive at a place where the initial risk finds its reward.

That can never happen when the outcome is known.

Innovation and creativity cannot happen when every variable, every outcome, every permutation is known and has been tested and validated in advance. You cannot see the world differently if it’s already been seen in every possible way. You cannot solve a problem better if every solution has already been defined. You cannot create great art if every way to stroke a canvas, connect a note, or grace a stage has already been inventoried, categorized, and laid bare for all to see. If everything is known and certain, that means it’s all been done before. And creation isn’t about repetition.

Genius always starts with a question, not an answer.

The hazards for someone like me, fueled by an interior life, is that my thoughts, whatever their merit, might never be challenged - and improved - by others. If you've been reading this blog for a while, that you know that my particular danger is walking, still, into figurative walls that others, habituated to talking to other people, avoided with relative ease. It started with the question: "am I willing to act?" and will end, I'm quite sure, in the satisfaction of knowing that the unknown wasn't something to be feared. In the end, it was just unknown.

Wayne

"New Groupthink:" Is "joining" bad for creativity?

wayne@autography.com (Wayne Hall) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:02:08 +0000

Can "joining" stunt creative outcomes? In the past decade as always-on, collaborative work has become the norm and it has simultaneously become harder to escape the daily intrusions of connected life, some bright people are asking for a collective time out from the crowd. Jaron Lanier, for example, offered this cheeky take on "wiki world," or the group, in his essay "Digital Maoism" of a few years back.

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out.

William Deresiewicz has connected solitude to a kind of know-your-own-mind leadership more recently. Ever the skeptic, Nicholas Carr suggests that digital media is changing us, and not for the better. And Susan Cain, who has excellent representation and book due soon (I'm buying it), offered a provocative take on group think at the New York Times over the weekend.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Keith Sawyer pushes back on his blog, Creativity and Innovation, labeling it, surprisingly, as an "attack."

I'm not at all surprised that Cain's work is drawing attention. Speaking as someone who works out what he thinks alone and not in a continuous exchange with others, her book, and the essays mentioned here, are a useful corrective to a narrative that a majority of people, energized by the group and skeptical of soloists, find perfectly natural. There are hazard to introverts of course, but I think that many, many IdeaFestival fans are similarly inclined to seek out that unexpected connection in a book - or in front of the canvas - or in page of equations - or, like I do, looking to the heavens over a period of months and watching the stars pivot about Polaris. As for whether individual or group work is more likely to lead to creative outcomes, who knows? I do think, however, that in this time and place, particularly in this time and place, introverts have something to add to the conversation.

Wayne