IdeaFestival

Serious craft and sense making

As a sense-making method, Matthew B. Crawford wants you to know that serious craft and skilled manual work is hard to beat.

The New Atlantis article, Shop Class as Soulcraft, praises manual competance, the attribute of being physically attuned to the material world, and makes the case for skilled craft by linking it in part to my favorite subject, how we know:

Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials—that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems. And in fact, in areas of well-developed craft, technological developments [historically] preceded and gave rise to advances in scientific understanding, not vice versa.

The essay is equal parts political economy, social science, blue collar educational advice and a cognitive enterprise with body knowing and a deep appreciation for serious craft its core.

Image source: Jason Michael, "Experienced Hands"

Wayne

TEDtalks on choice, happiness

TED Blog continues its run of great video releases. Just released: Dan Gilbert, psychology professor at Harvard on the subject of happiness, and Barry Schwartz, sociology professor at Swarthmore College, on the paradox of choice.

Click the links and then the video image to run the presentation in its own window.

Wayne

Design evolution

Luke Wroblewski at Functioning Form has blogged a conversation, The Lifecycle of Design, on how design evolves as products mature. His archives list all four installments.

Wayne

Sound mind, sound reason

Cognitive Daily links to an interesting new blog, Sound and Mind, which will write (frequently, I hope) on music and cognition. Since posting E-minors and String Theory, I've been interesting in the aesthetic links to "non-Euclidean space" ("music" for nerds), what Alan Boyle called in one of his columns the Geometry of Music. Author Daniel J. Levitin calls the growing neurological understanding Your Brain on Music.

If, like me, you enjoy exploring these links, the long-concluded Art and Cognition virtual conference makes available a number of contributions, like Beauty and the Mind: Lessons from Kant, that may be of interest. The AlphaPsy blog - again, found courtesy of Cognitive Daily - appears to be another great source of information. The blog tag line, "humanities and human nature," intrigues, since it brings to bear all of our current understanding, not just the knowledge from science, to these mysteries.

Wayne

Scared straight? Not really

When it comes to behavioral change, scaring people doesn't work. The Science Blog post reminded me very much of the terrific 2005 Fast Company article "Change or Die," which explored the same issue in health care, and of course, business.

Wayne

Reason + evidence

USA Today published last week (alas, I can't find it online any longer) a general interest article on the future of string theory since, so far, little real world data has been brought to bear in support of the idea. In the article, Lee Smoling, the author of The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next, believes that crucial evidence is missing and experimentation is next to impossible.

String theory, which suggests a universe of ten or more dimensions, offers a potential grand solution, a theory of everything uniting general relativity, which explains the contours of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which describes the machinery of inner space, of the tiniest matter.

In addition to the obvious question - does the theory, in fact, correspond with reality? - the article highlights the differences between the two historic methods of knowing - rationalism and empiricism. If I may summarize: Smoling wants us to know that science is reason + evidence.

Wayne

Mary Carmichael recommends

When asked what books she'd recommend reading, Mary Carmichael, who is a journalist and web editor for mental_floss magazine, and who will be speaking at the October 11 - 14 ideaFestival in Louisville, Kentucky, suggested:

• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
• Saturday by Ian McEwan
• The Economics of Life by Gary Becker
• Consilience by E.O. Wilson

Wayne

Self organizing fluid?

What is science learning about fluid dynamics? How about this from USA Today science columnist Dan Vergano, who suggests science may have missed "something fundamental" about turbulence for quite some time:

Naturally, we do know some things about turbulence, observations that pertain to air, gas and liquids alike. 'Generally, the motion of fluids is smooth and laminar at low speeds but becomes highly disordered and turbulent as the velocity increases,' notes a paper by a physics team led by Bjorn Hof of the United Kingdom's University of Manchester in the current Nature. After making the full-fledged transition from smooth to turbulent flow, the paper adds, 'it is generally assumed that, under steady conditions, the turbulent state will persist indefinitely.'

Maybe not. Describing an experiment by Hof's team, Vergano goes on:

'In contrast to previous findings,' the team found that turbulence in the pipe always returned to smooth flows, if one waited long enough. The finding suggests that rather than turbulence obliterating smooth flow, fluids somehow retain the ability to reorganize themselves back into a regular pattern.

The Nature executive summary is here.

Wayne

Wikipedia: chaos theory

Don't push that button!

Creative Generalist links to History of the Button, a blog that "traces the history of interaction design through the history of the button, from flashlights to websites and beyond." Up today: button and icon placement on a 1967 Ampex reel-to-reel recorder.

Wayne

Wired!

Right off the press. The 2006 ideaFestival was featured as a place to be this fall in the new issue of Wired Magazine.

Kris Kimel