IdeaFestival

Trey Ratcliff, image maker, interviewed

Baron.vc has posted an interview with a photographer that I like very much, Trey Ratcliff, who has runs the popular photography site, nee travelog, Stuck in Customs.

In the interview he discusses his his professional life (running an online gaming company), his approach to photography (one technique "brings the phi ratio to colors and luminosity rather than to geometry and angles") and his bad right eye, which, he explains, has contributed to the development of his art.

There is a compact richness in his work that I like, as in this photo of a Roman man, Vespucci, he references in the interview. The textual description accompanying the portrait is likewise spare and complete:

Vespucci's dream is to find his son and tell him important things.

Just what do you add to that description?

Check out his "best of" portfolio at Flickr, or just visit Stuck in Customs and take the feed. Ratcliff does great things with light.

Wayne

Plotting happiness

Building on work done by Adrian White at the University of Leicester, Ethan Zuckerman plots a global happiness distribution. Are happiness and national wealth connected?

Wayne

What do beliefs see?

At The Splintered Mind guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa, offers his take on Colin McGinn's book, Mindsight. It's the second (so far) in a two-part series from Ichikawa. Part one is here.

I'm interested in the nature of belief for what Ichikawa in his first post calls its role in our "cognitive economy." I've also mentioned Mindsight before, in case you thought the term vaguely familiar.

At issue: philosophically speaking, what do we believe - what is made visible - when we hold beliefs?

Wayne

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Belief

Paper hearts, mad science

Via Arts & Letter Daily, a fascinating New Yorker article, The Origami Lab, about former physicist Dr. Robert J. Lang, who left science for origami.

Except he didn't, quite:

One medical manufacturing company hired him to figure out how to fold a heart implant—a mesh heart support designed for people with congestive heart failure—so that it was compact enough to be implanted via a skinny tube but, when released from the tube, would unfurl properly around the heart. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had him work on a similar folding problem, but this time the thing being folded was a telescope with a lens a hundred metres in diameter which had to be packed into a rocket so it could be sent into space.

As someone with an in an interest in the functional arts - studio furniture, mostly, Lang's prowess with a single sheet of paper gives the words "functioning" and "art" new meaning.

Wayne

Wikipedia: origami

Swivel: Please! Say it with data

Swivel, a really interesting place where data is uploaded and massaged into all manner of graphic geekery has a company web log that I scan (due diligence and all that). On Wednesday, blogger Joe Hellerstein filed a report declaring half of the Internet missing in action:

I've always been amazed by the popularity of text on the Internet. Who would have guessed that the largest agglomeration of computing power in the history of the planet would be used to serve up ... prose? Where are all those facts and figures that computers are supposed to be so handy with? How is it that the Web is so text-rich, and data-poor?

Now the point of Swivel of course is to turn up all that missing data, but the observation seemed appropriate for week-ending post.

Incidentally, Swivel is also in the current issue of Fast Company. Check it out. And in all seriousness, I think the company is on to something.

Wayne

Chindogu! (Gesundheit)

Nicolas Nova's description of uselessness in artificial pets reminds me of another design principle called Chindōgu, which I suggested some time ago was whimsical. The inappropriateness, the irony, gives life to things.   

Wayne

Games not fun?

At MacArthur's Spotlight in Digital Media David Shaffer reports that games aren't necessarily fun, but they do solve some very human problems. Read on.

Better yet, subscribe to the ecology-of-games category. Shaffer's recent post on what we know about learning and video games is terrific as well.

Wayne

The meaning makers win

As grand narratives go, I still find this one, from Dan Pink,  very attractive.

Wayne

Butterfly names unknown to us

Continuing yesterday's naming theme... saving obscure languages may be our best hedge against losing irreplaceable knowledge of indigenous plant and animal species.

NewScientist:

Information about local ecosystems is so intricately woven into these languages that it cannot be replaced simply through translation.... The indigenous taxonomy alone can provide a huge range of information about species, which young speakers in these tribes acquire instantly through learning the name.

For example, the article describes how one butterfly turned out after DNA analysis to be 10 different species. Not coincidentally, a Costa Rican tribe where the butterfly is found has a name for the larvae of each of the 10 species.

About 20 percent of the world's plant and animal species have been officially classified, though much of the remaining 80 may have names unknown to Western science.

Wayne

Name, power, cure: better medicine

American Scientist asks what's in a name? By giving cancer tumors their "right names," can science gain power over them? Yes, if medicine becomes acquainted with disease mechanisms and not just disease symptoms.

Wayne