IdeaFestival

Thanks for Reading!

Stock-taking is a popular thing at the end of every year. Here are retrospectives from people and places that I frequent, as well as a list of my favorites from 2007.

Having endured a difficult year, Ethan Zuckerman dives back into the year to rediscover some posts of his. They're all good, but coming as they did before the last IdeaFestival, I particularly liked his conference blogging guidelines.

As for me, I was satisfied in no particular order with Am I Machine Enough for Deep Blue?, The Impossibility of Prediction, Justin Timberlake Edition, Innovation is Thinking about the Wrong Thing at the Right Time, Rocking out with the Psalms, Retrocausality: the Outcome is Past, Evidence: No Feeling, No Thought and Jaron Lanier: What Do Metaphors Signify?

I nominate better numeracy for most worthy cause of 2007 - and in the years to come.

One of my favorite places is ScienceBlogs, where an unparalleled collection of science writers have something interesting to say almost every day. Readers of IFblog will undoubtedly recognize the name Dave Munger, who writes at Cognitive Daily. ScienceBlog's visual round up of 2007 is as informative as it is easy on the eyes.

Though it didn't do a best-of piece, MacArthur's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning consistently posts some of most thoughtful, contemporary work on digital literacy.

Elsewhere, National Public Radio runs down its list of people, music and stories of 2007. NASA chimes in with its top exploration stories. Steve Hardy offered a handy guide to his eclectic curiosity interviews, a series that I've enjoyed. Like Ethan, he also digs out favorite posts of his from the archives. In print, Fast Company's round up includes books and business movers and shakers. The magazine always features sharp writing and meaningful text.

If you want a really comprehensive 2007 "best-of" list in the arts, architecture, books, film, popular culture, etc. see Fimoculous. It doesn't get any bigger.

Well that's it. I'm really looking forward to the coming year. I'll be working full time with IdeaFestival and other interesting Kentucky-based initiatives. I should have more Five Question interviews, as well as frequent IF Conversations postings. I've discovered that I really enjoy reading about and interviewing creative people. What makes them go makes me go. Thanks for making this blog part of your day - as long as you'll read, I'll write. And please, if there is something I'm not currently targeting that you'd like to read more about, contact me at the address on the blog. All the very best in coming year,

Wayne
 

IF Conversations, Tiffany Shlain

The first in a series of video called "IF Conversations," filmmaker and entrepreneur Tiffany Shlain very briefly discusses her creative process and latest film, "A Declaration of Interdependance." In addition to its location on YouTube, the video is available, here, on the IF Web site. Regular and frequent releases in this series are planned.

Wayne

Evgeny Morozov drops link-post of the year

Ethan Zuckerman recently said that Evgeny Morozov's del.icio.us bookmarking was a source of inspiration. I'd agree. I'm nominating this Daily EM blog entry for link-post of the year. There you will find links to an artists' collective working on "land prints," to the use of cell phones as a proxy for mapping congestion, to the World Bank YouTube channel, to a Peer-to-Peer Foundation wiki page on crowdfunding.

Who knew?

Thanks Evgeny!

Wayne

Math, ethics problems share similar biology. Of course.

Canada's National Post has started a five part series on the subject of belief and yesterday, Sam Harris, the author of a couple well known books, described some of his doctoral research at UCLA. Let's get to it:

What was particularly surprising, [Harris] said, was that there were virtually identical patterns of brain activation whether someone was being asked to evaluate a straightforward proposition, such as two plus two equals four, or something that tested an ethical belief, such as whether torture is just or unjust.

We now know that emotion is necessary for thought. So the idea that dispassionate and passionate evaluations of propositional statements share similar brain patterns isn't necessarily surprising.

I believe that belief, whether it's the understanding that you won't fall putting one foot in front of the other or faith in a supernatural mover, goes to core of what it means to be human. It's basic. It is, as Harris says elsewhere, the basis for much human activity and the "engine for conflict and reconciliation." Being rid of belief means being rid of biology.

And since I had just written something on truth and beauty, this statement in the National Post piece also appealed:

Mr. Harris's study concluded with the poetic notion that 'truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense and that false propositions may actually [physically] disgust us.'

Cognitive dissonance takes a bodily toll. Conversely, Jeffrey Schwartz might have something to say about how cognitive consonance might change our biology.

Whether it's Krista Tippet, whose series on faith I almost always manage to save to my del.icio.us bookmarks, or others, the centrality of belief to our waking, walking, spiritual lives, makes thoughtful conversation around the subject welcome here.

Give the National Post article a read. It's brief.

Wayne

What kind of power, poetry?

What is the real power of poetry? The Poetry Foundation interviews Robert Hass, which in a neat turn of phrase the web site describes as a "tireless front man for poetry." I'll confess to not reading Hass or nearly as much poetry as I'd like, but his answer at the end of the interview as to why the form matters is thoughtful.

My shorthand goes like this—Wordsworth read a German philosopher who wrote about mountains, Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and so we got Yellowstone and Yosemite. It took 100 years—that’s the cycle of things.

Hass' Time and Materials has won the National Book Award for poetry.

Wayne

Beauty is sufficient, useful, a call to justice

Pointing to the video in my feed reader, SEED says "the correlation between truth and beauty is high."

I find it true in three different ways.

In a newly released TED Talk, the discoverer of quarks, Murray Gell-Mann, says that beauty is associated with the mathematical truth of physics and, at the end of his 16 minute video, asks rhetorically whether "we need something more to get something more." Clearly, for him, the beauty of physical theory stands on its own merits. It needs nothing more.

Seeing beauty as useful, the brand new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda, has other ideas. He believes in beauty's application, saying that because everyone can understand the language of the arts, the arts

have to advance the culture of knowledge around technology, [which has raced ahead of understanding].

Beauty is not merely a descriptive, but a prescriptive, both salve for a technology-driven society and knowledge in its own right.

Lastly, in John Caputo's book The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, the philosopher turned theologian explains why poetics speaks to us, relating beauty to the pursuit of justice. Rather than a cause, causing, it is a call, calling:

A poetics is not true the way a scientific theory is true, as a covering law that is weakened, altered, or refuted by the accumulated weight of evidence and replaced by a competing scientific theory. A poetics is true with the truth of the event; it wants to become true, to make itself true, to make itself come true, to be transformed into truth, so that its truth is a species of truth as facere veritatem. A poetics is true the way a novel is true even if its is classified by the librarians as a "fiction," or the way a poem is true without picturing a fact, or the way a hymn, a ballad, or a song is true, which is completely consistent with not being historically factual, that is, with not being a representational account. A poetics does not record the strong force of hard facts; it describes the weak force of a call for the kingdom, or for justice, which is true even if the real world is truly unjust.

Did any of that make sense? I'll see you online Wednesday.

Wayne

Xenon ions and interplanetary cruise

"...[C]limbing away from the Sun on a blue-green pillar of xenon ions as it begins a new chapter in its mission" reads like the beginning of a paragraph in science fiction. It's not.

Wayne

Thought without words?

At Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel writes about one French monk who suffered aphasia - an inability to use language - during epileptic episodes. By the monk's own report he was also deprived of inner speech during those periods, yet witnesses say he could effectively communicate even though his actions weren't accompanied by any outer (or inner) language.

Picking up on the idea that we think without language, Tanasije Gjorgoski connects it to the kind of mental activity intense gaming promotes in his post, Thinking without Langauge. That interior language must defer occasionally to conscious thoughts like "do I need to go eat, go the bathroom?"

Schwitzgebel's post also reminded me of the work done by Elizabeth Spelke on pre-language cognitive abilities of children, who are able, apparently, to think about the world unequipped with words. I'm inclined to think something is going on here.

Still, what kind of language is that? For that matter, when does communication rise to the level of language?

Wayne

Scientific American: 50 Innovations

Continuing the "best of" theme: Scientific American rounds up the top 50 innovations in the last year in categories such as "policy," "fueling alternatives," "advances in ultrameasurement," "neurological insights," "light manipulation" and "squirt and spin." 

According to SciAm, "this year’s SciAm 50 awards are replete with instances of new machines or chemicals that come close to the true meaning of innovation as something entirely new."

Wayne

Exoplanets too numerous to count

Looks like Sol is not unique.

According to news relayed by Centauri Dreams, which cites the Dynamics of Cats, the CoRoT space telescope team is hinting at some very, very interesting discoveries that could soon hit the news.

CoRoT is designed to detect planetary transits, those periods when planets outside our solar system pass between their parent stars and our observatories trained on that space. Kepler will have a similar mission.

According to CoRoT:

[The craft] is discovering exo-planets at a rate only set by the available resources to follow up the detections.

As Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams has said elsewhere, future generations may well look back at this period as the golden age of exoplanetology, of discovering other worlds. Are we alone?

Are you kidding?

Wayne

Wikipedia: COROT, Extrasolar planet