IdeaFestival

The struggle to say so

I found this passage Sparks of Genius, a book on thinking tools, appealing. It describes the difficulty of abstraction.

Indeed, the essence of abstractions is that we say to ourselves, "My kid could do that." It is easy to forget that although we learn to use these abstractions, few of us could invent a new mathematics, discover a new law of nature, devise a new way of portraying perception, develop a new gestural language, or describe a fundamental truth about human feelings. Such triumphs are rare and difficult to achieve. Picasso commented repeatedly  on how difficult it was from him to learn to draw simply and directly. He had to learn the process step by step. The notebooks of E.E. Cummings similarly show how hard he worked to achieve his simple effects. It is so much easier to see and convey the complexity and confusion of reality.

Indeed, abstracting is difficult for people in every discipline. Many famous novelists -- Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway come to mind -- have written to their editors that they regretted the extreme length of their manuscripts; if they had had more time, the work would have been half as long. Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that he could talk for a day with five minutes' notice but needed a day to prepare if he had only five minutes in which to speak. The poet Edwin Arlington Robinson shifted from writing short verse to lengthy works as he got older, remarking, 'I am over sixty now and short poems require too much effort....' Similarly, when one reads a brilliantly simple paper in science, it is all too easy to pass it off as inconsequential. But as Harvard biologist George Wald once said to Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi after reading one of his typically lucid and simple papers, 'This paper of yours is so lightly written that you must have sweated terribly.'

I'd define it this way: abstraction is what is, essentially.

Wayne

Poetry pulled from the deepest sea

Like science fiction, which also uses imagery to conjure up a universe, some facts are so bizarre that they can only be completed in verse. Using images from the deepest sea, collected in a recently released book The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, one poetry instructor inspired her students to write.

Wayne

SciFi: "literature of change"

What is science fiction? From a "literature of change" to a device to explore "cognitive estrangement" or a "mythos of scientism," (or, conversely, to attack scientism), Machina Memorialis supplies several thoughtful definitions from prominent writers in the genre and links to many, many more.

My favorite quote in the larger list is attributed to Damon Knight:

What we get from science fiction---what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust---is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.

Wayne

An artist-scientist dream team

In the current issue of Seed, Chuck Hoberman - designer, architect, artist, and engineer best known for inventing the Hoberman Sphere, a geodesic globe that can expand up to five times its diameter, meets with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, famous for her work on extra dimensionality, to discuss the idea of shape.

A brief video with highlights from the discussion may be found here, a transcript, here.

On the menu: what it means to see. I found it interesting near the end of the video that for Hoberman, shape should to be functional above all else, whereas Randall seems to indicate that aesthetic values also come into play when evaluating the fitness of scientific ideas. It thought it might have been the reverse.

But her hesitancy to endorse practicality above all else, if indeed it was that, brought to my mind cosmologist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne's suggestion that "if you've got some ugly equations, you almost certainly haven't got it right." Of course, any discussion of our mental models and what they can access (or not) touches on the much older ideas expressed in Plato's theory of forms. Whether real or not we cannot comprehend, at least not now, all of reality at one time. An even deeper and related question might be why is there something rather than nothing? Because oblivion is unstable?

Heck if I know.

Elsewhere in Seed - it's a terrific issue - editor Jonah Lehrer fantasizes about other artist-scientist dream teams:

What are my dream art-science pairings? I'd put Richard Serra in a room with Edward Witten, and have them discuss the possibilities of 10 dimensions and curved space. Richard Powers would talk with Gerald Edelman about the strange nature of the self. Ian McEwan and Richard Axel would discuss scientific descriptions of consciousness. John Updike could talk with Steven Pinker about the uses of language. My list goes on and on. What artists and scientists would you pair together, and what problem would they work on?

Wayne

Virtual philanthropy

In addition to its focus on digital learning, MacArthur is also looking at what philanthropy means in virtual worlds, granting $550,000 to University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication to explore the issue.

MacArthur also links to a New York Times article (free registration required) on same.

Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman

Wayne

John Gaeta interview posted

Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee, www.geoffbugbee.com

Chaz Rough at PodFactory has posted the latest IF podcast.

Fresh from a sit down interview as part of the 2006 ideaFestival formal agenda, pictured above, Oscar winner John Gaeta follows up with a few quick remarks on the future of screens.

Some quick hits from the ten minute audio:

• He's pleasantly surprised by the quality and production value he sees in some YouTube content.
• Film marketing could be turned on its head. The step by step product roll out of products based on feature films could be reversed. Who knows what other media, like World of Warcraft, might spawn films?
• The gaming industry wants to open up the medium to the casual gamer. The Wii paddle helps move that along.
  
• Television will find levels of engagement to keep its audience.
• Asked about his current (October, 2006) projects, he says he has recently directed two short films. In one, some gaming platforms were used to generate visual effects. Another short took its inspiration from Japanese cinema.

Have a listen. IF podcasts may also be found to the upper left of IFblog.

Wayne

The Wired, Wired West

Sci-Fi author Cory Doctorow has begun reading aloud Bruce Sterling's influential 1992 non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown, which recounts the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The audio is here.

In the opening minutes of the audio, Doctorow calls the period the "early days of Internet liberty." It brought to mind the title of this post.

Wayne

New books for the bookshelf

Just bought a couple of used books for the bookshelf: Knowing: The Nature of Physical Law, which promises to explain some of the thornier physics ideas without the math, and Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step, which seeks to move cognition beyond the computational analogy so often used (and, I think, now being abandoned) and toward a representational system based in biology.

It was the references to phenomenology of Martin Heidegger that sold me on "Reconstructing." He uttered a quote that I've always liked, "as soon as we come to be, we find that we already are," which speaks to the idea of experience as the basis for understanding. Given recent advances in psychology, which now understands emotion as critical to thought, the idea that we ordinate or compute our way to sentience, to self-reference, is barren. I'm glad to see, rather, the serious exploration of experience and biology as the basis for our cognitive lives.

Have a good weekend, all.

Wayne
 

Five Questions: SETI's Scott Hubbard

Scott Hubbard is The Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe, which was established at the SETI Institute in 1997. At my request, he graciously agreed to answer a few questions on Monday. Here are his replies. Any mistakes or misunderstandings in reporting his views are my own.

1) Could you explain for a moment your work at SETI? - As the Carl Sagan Chair I provide strategic direction and guidance to about 50 scientists engaged in the broad study of life in the Universe. Those include aspects of space science, planetary ring systems and so forth. My job is to help identify new areas of research, to help scientists diversify their research portfolios, to find funding opportunities and to create a sense of team work.

Calling all advertising creatives!

After reading a review in Creativity of the iPhone that Apple will introduce to the market later this summer, I realized that the ideaFestival needs to reach out to those same advertising creatives and invite them to review their experience at this year's ideaFestival.

So if you consider yourself an advertising creative, I'm personally inviting you to the festival this year. If you attended the successful Idea Conference, you will will be in for a similar treat by coming to Louisville KY, September 13-15.

Ad guys & gals, the festival needs you. And if you are lucky, you might just hear what Steve Wozniak thinks about the iPhone!

Brett