IdeaFestival

Liberal education, model investor

BusinessPundit links to "A Latticework of Mental Models," which talks about how Charlie Munger, who manages Warren Buffet's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, approaches investing. It's interesting to me for two reasons. One, we learn via mental models with which we process facts. Two, a wide range of models - a liberal education - can help investors succeed.

Speaking to a group of investment students, Munger challenges them

to broaden their vision of the market, of finance, and of economics in general; to see them not as separate disciplines but as part of a larger body of knowledge, one that also incorporates psychology, engineering, mathematics, physics, and the humanities.

Wayne

The balcony on Updike on books

John Updike's recent speech about the state of books and bookselling has drawn a diverse crowd. Here are two views of the same event, one from Kevin Smokler, who will be appearing at the 2006 ideaFestival in Louisville, and the second from Nicholas Carr - here and here - my favorite crank.

Kevin Kelly's publication of Scan this Book! (NY Times, now archived) kicked off the latest round between the digerati and literati.

I'm guessing that Updike won't appear at reboot.

My own view is that as an organizing force, the web is disruptive, and as an economic force revolutionary. So I'm buying what Yochai Benkler is selling in The Wealth of Networks. But a fan of the Big Giant Head? Not so much.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: books, reboot, Updike

Courage, Woz and Hairballs

Here are a couple of links to books that appeal to the nerd in me. Luke Wroblewski links to Orbiting the Giant Hairball, a survival book for creatives in corporate offices and on committees everywhere. First:

A concrete world where precedents take precedence is a reality more to a Hairball’s [corporation’s] liking. A world honey-combed with the established guidelines, techniques, methodologies, systems, and equations that are the heart of a Hairball’s gravity.

And Guy Kawasaki posts the top ten things he learned reading Steve Wozniak's forthcoming book I, Woz. I liked number eight:

The statement that convinced Woz to leave HP to start Apple (uttered by Allen Baum) was, 'You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.' 

The creative subtext to both is the courage to fly - and a willingness to crash and burn. I think it's a package deal. I think I'm getting there.

Wayne

Wind farms and building beauty

Justin Good at Design Observer discusses the aesthetics of wind farms, contrasting modern v. postmodern views on beauty using wind turbines as props. I'm attracted to what he says because Justin tries to honor the variety of ways we know, and in particular, because he wants to elevate the epistimol status of beauty. Here he makes a challenging point:

Modernism’s understanding of nature is autistic...

Beauty is a feeling, but feelings are objective and more precise than “thinking.” Feelings are not irrational reactions, but highly evolved ways of gathering information, knowledge and meaning from the environment. What we call thinking — linguistically-mediated inferential reasoning or reflection — is cumbersome in comparison to the countless ways our mind/body reads, and is read, by the ecosystem.

What's the big idea? We know more than we can tell. While the final outcome for the proposed wind turbines may be in doubt, the future of "body knowing" - embodiment (.pdf file) - is much less so (yes, I'm stretching to connect embodiment to phenomenal experience). Though the processes are far less developed than those used, for example, by mechanical engineers, designers are exploring (explorers are designing?) how through body knowledge and beauty we can fully experience our world.

Wayne

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, beauty, design, design thinking, embodiment, value theory, wind farm

KySat to build, fly satellite

The Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (KSTC) has announced KentuckySatellite (KySat), a public private partnership to design, build, launch and operate a satellite for education and economic innovation purposes in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. More information and background on the project can be found here.

Wayne

Technorati: Kentucky, satellite, space flight, KSTC, KySat

The design of wealth

According to this description of the ambitious new book, Origin of Wealth, "over 6.4 billion people participate in a $36.5 trillion global economy, designed and overseen by no one."

Describing the networked economy as a "complex adaptive system," the book seeks to explain its dynamics. Along with behavioral economics, which dismisses the "rational actor" as the basis for economic decision making, and the "Wealth of Networks," described by Yochai Benkler as a third method for value production, Origin looks to overturn long accepted descriptions of economic activity using other sciences - in this case complexity theory, genetic algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Wayne

Technorati: complexity theory, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence. Wikipedia: Ramsey Theory

"On Liberty" and biology

While I sat on the front stoop of the cracked and empty Presbyterian church at the Mays Lick Asparagus Festival last Saturday reading the Wall Street Journal, Roger Scruton surprised me with a piercing thought on thinking.

In his opinion piece he is critical of John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, for draining his logic of emotional depth:

Mill suffered from the same defect as his father. He never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. He never understood that the intellect, which flies so easily to its conclusion, relies on something else for its premises....

"Thoroughly Modern Mill" reminded me that thinking depends so much on emotion, and the best thinking, perhaps, on a depth of feeling - not the manic variety, mind you, but of red blood cells and heart valves, of the kind that proclaims its freedom, not with fences, but with a kind word or two. In Scruton's view, Mill's reaction against the prevailing and bloodless utilitarianism of the day simply replaced majoritarianism with minoritarianism. 

Whether one buys that conclusion or not, Scruton knows something. He knows that we are binary beings, in possession of logic and biology, and that privileging one method over the other eventually goes nowhere - or anywhere. Great art, useful insight, delightful discovery depends to a surprising degree upon our capacity to feel - whether revulsion or warmth - something toward the object of our thinking. 

Wayne

Technorati: innovation, art,  creativity, political philosophy, Wikipedia: Utilitarianism, "On Liberty"

Seaching for science cool at the movies

In a New York Times essay Dennis Overbye wonders when scientists will achieve their movie breakthrough, the point where science "grit" becomes science cool. Though his quest for such a movie comes up empty at the Tribeca Film Festival, I like where Overbye goes with his description of Kettle of Fish. Science just needs to laugh a little more.

Wayne

Technorati: Tribeca Film Festival

Reverse engineering junk

Rather than focusing on how things go together IBM figured out that there's money to be made in how they come apart, according to Business Innovation Insider. More than just money making enterprise, "Flipping the equation" strikes me as a good example of the power of observation, of seeing something new in the familiar.

Wayne

oil addiction

Not since he bought into the phrase "Axis of Evil" has President Bush employed another phrase of comparable power--and controversy--until he recently declared that our nation is "addicted to oil." That addiction, particularly to gasoline, is not provincially American; it is rapidly spreading to India and China as it earlier had spread to Europe (this occurrence marked by the first notes of George Gershwin's "An American in Paris").

The problem is not the consumption of gasoline but the automobile that voraciously consumes it. Described by Henry Ford as a liberating agent, the automobile has ensnarled our lives on city roads, on interstate highways and in shopping mall parking lots. Architects have made their own measure of the problem by moving the garage from its earlier detached, back-of- the-house location to its current thrust into first-place as the dominant feature (exclusive of cathedral ceilings) of the contemporary house.

The automobile is a prosthetic device, replacing legs as the primary form of human locomotion.

And so, it's not an "addiction to oil" that is the root of the problem but the ages-old desire to move faster in order to save time. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset said that we hurry because we are mortal: we want to make the most of our days. Traffic delays, however, are modern forms of frustration, thus impeding that objective. And so, neither ethanol nor hydrogen as an automobile fuel alternative will cause the removal of speed bumps or cause traffic signals to be adjusted so that the green light shines longer on your lane or mine.

Ray Betts