IdeaFestival

Oblivion is unstable

Oblivion has its own meter and rhyme. Science author and ideaFestival speaker K.C. Cole offers this fine comment on the numinous and poetic dimensions of symmetry.

In fact, our universe could once have been so symmetrical that it amounted to nothing at all. "Nothing" is as perfect a symmetry as you can imagine, since there's nothing you can do to it that makes a difference. This nothing would have been unstable, however—like a pencil balanced perfectly (which is to say, symmetrically) on its tip. And that means—as Frank Wilczek has put it—the answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would simply be that "nothing" is unstable.

There is a beautiful logic in that.

Wayne

Play, discover

Playful & Tangible, the "playful learning" blog from experientia, writes about the need for play in discovery. The Wikipedia entry on play says play describes it as an amusing prelude to discovery, meaning its serious in its unseriousness.
 

Wayne

Poincaré and proof positive

Its timing could not be better. In a lengthy but illuminating piece, The New Yorker adds background to the recent events surrounding the Poincaré conjecture.

In constructing a possible proof, theorists follow a method described thusly:

Like a sonnet or an aria, a mathematical proof has a distinct form and set of conventions. It begins with axioms, or accepted truths, and employs a series of logical statements to arrive at a conclusion. If the logic is deemed to be watertight, then the result is a theorem. Unlike proof in law or science, which is based on evidence and therefore subject to qualification and revision, a proof of a theorem is definitive.

Grigori Perelman, who may have finally cracked the code, is said in the story to have offered a proof that is "unorthodox... astonishingly brief for such an ambitious piece of work."

In addition to the nature of the solution the piece talks at length about the personalities behind the competition to be first with a proof, jealousy in the academy and the importance of the riddle itself.

Wayne

Theater of the mind

Quoting neurobiologist Bernard J. Baars, Donald Beecher has this to say in his work, "Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of Consciousness:"

All unified theories of cognition today involve theater metaphors.

The quote in part reminded me why I enjoyed Stephen Goldblatt's profile of this mind reader so much. Baars also uses the theater metaphor in his publication, In the Theatre of Consciousness.

Wayne

Design as business strategy

Luke Wroblewski describes why some businesses are turning to design for reasons other than "make it pretty."

So where can decision-makers turn to make sense of the information soup they regularly find themselves swimming in? To people skilled in pattern recognition and visual communication -in other words to designers.

Check out the thoughtful pushback in the comments. There is a bit of inside baseball, but I was particularly interested in this statement about design-as-thought-process:

Design remains one of our most complex fields, and the most primitively understood of any field of similar complexity.

True? Not true?

Wayne

Quiet!

A sound proof cell phone booth?

Maybe the phone booth is an idea whose time has come and gone and come again. Hat tip: Business Innovation Insider.

Wayne

Doubling down

Doug Sundheim, an executive coach in New York, recently riffed on "the gift of risk" in Fast Company. What I really appreciated about the short piece is what it has to say about risk and innovation. Discovery very often, perhaps most often, means being certain about uncertainty.

You know, be the change.

The gift of risk-taking doesn't lie in what you achieve by risking - it lies in who you become as a result of the process.

For a more heavily footnoted take on the subject, the Wall Street Journal recently recommended Against the Gods, an economic history of risk.

Wayne

Passion and peril

Linked courtesy of Business Innovation Insider, Bob Sutton prefaces one hair raising idea with this background:

As I was preparing – and giving – my weird ideas talk to [some] executives, I kept thinking, after spending 20+ years in the Stanford Engineering School and studying innovation for a long time, about which single lesson matters most, at least given my biased view and experience. Weird Ideas That Work came out in 2002, but it was based on a talk that I’ve been giving – and tinkering with -- since about 1995.  It has 12 weird ideas for sparking innovation. But I’ve come to believe that one of these weird ideas is more important, more empirically valid, and more troubling than the rest...

His idea?

Do something that will almost certainly fail. Then convince people that success is certain.

Wayne

Futurist: immortality could be pricey

Covering the recent World Future Society’s annual meeting in Toronto, Michael Rogers, who is MSNBC's Practical Futurist, asks tongue in cheek, "what do futurists know?"

Assessing in particular what Ray Kurzweil, who will also be speaking at the ideaFestival in October, has to say, Rogers delicately makes a point about the high cost of living.

The highest profile futurist was keynote speaker Ray Kurzweil, the prolific inventor who has become a best-selling author with visionary books like “The Singularity is Near.”  In the category of here-and-now, Kurzweil showed off his latest invention, a remarkable portable reading device for the blind that verbally helps its owner photograph any piece of text — a clothing label, a menu, a sign on the wall — and then reads it aloud. Kurzweil also reviewed at breakneck pace his vision of the future, which involves both human-level artificial intelligence and stunning medical breakthroughs by 2020 — by which time, Kurzweil predicts, research will lengthen our lives by more than a year for every year we live.

Immortality? Probably not, but Kurzweil does suggest that if baby boomers just hold on for another fifteen years or so, they’re looking at a lot more lifespan than previously supposed....

And then of course there’s the human factor, which might well derail Kurzweil’s optimistic scenario: what if society decides they don’t want to pay the bills to make baby boomers a permanent fixture of the American landscape?

Harsh.

Wayne

Beauty's reason

Linked here are two attempts separated by 250 years to understand beauty. One is Edmund Burke's 1757 work, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," which I began (and never finished) many years ago.

The other is less expansive but perhaps a bit more accessible. Ken Taylor offers his thoughts on athletic beauty at Philosophy Talk, venturing into aesthetics with a brief essay in advance of the audio cast (also available at iTunes).

He offers this brief descriptive on beauty:

I won’t try to describe aesthetic experience. You all have had aesthetic experiences. But I will say something further about the objective sense of “beauty.” What property does it denote? Actually, I think this is a misleading question. There are several different properties that something can have to make it beautiful in the objective sense. I doubt I can give a whole list, so I won’t try. But some words will suggest what some of these properties are: simplicity (in an appropriate context), harmony (the matching of parts), and fluid motion. That these properties are distinct can be seen as follows: something can be harmonious without being simple (a Bach cantata); something can be simple in the relevant sense without having fluid motion (a simple painting); and something can have fluid motion without either simplicity or harmony (a turbulent rapids). And, again, the reason why these properties all get to be denoted with the same word, “beauty,” is that they all, when recognized, elicit a certain kind of experience.

Wayne

Wikipedia: aesthetics