IdeaFestival

Backstage: The IF Insider Pass

When the agenda, speaker lineup and brand new web site for IdeaFestival '10 are revealed - soon, we promise! - you will have the opportunity to buy for a limited time a special IF Insider Pass that in addition to being the lowest priced all-access pass, will also provide these benefits:

• A personal invitation to the “Insider Look at IF” hosted by IF Founder Kris Kimel and selected speakers on Wednesday, September 29th at 3:00pm at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts.
• An IF Gift Bag filled to the brim with lots of special gifts chosen specifically for our IF Insider Pass holders.
• An invitation to the IF opening reception for sponsors, speakers and All-Access Pass holders on Wednesday, September 29th at 6:00pm at the 21c Museum+Hotel.
• Discounted tickets ($15) to Louisville Orchestra’s 2nd performance of Frans Lanting’s LIFE: A Journey Through Time.
• Entrance to all IF events (excluding Thrivals @ IF, IF Kids and The Main Course).

The first 55 people to purchase an IF Insider Pass will also receive a ticket to the Janelle Monáe concert to be held September 29 at 8:00pm in the Bomhard Theater.

Don't go anywhere!

Wayne

Image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hryckowian/ / CC BY 2.0

Marc Yu - "The thing is, you have to love music"

A prodigy at the piano, Marc Yu wowed IdeaFestival audiences last year with his mastery of complex music. In this IdeaFestival Conversation, he says any child can be as good as he is as long as she is dedicated. But, he added, "the thing is, you have to love music."

For another take on the relative roles of nature versus nurture in producing extraordinary talent, check out this IF Conversation with the world's greatest juggler, Vova Galchenko.

Wayne

Seeing is not Believing

When is seeing not believing? Beginning at about the three minute mark of the video below, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall and architect/designer Chuck Hoberman engage in a brief discussion about what our sense of sight has to do with knowing. As Randall points out, scientific method offers passage beyond our immediate sense of the world. After all, our sense of sight is dependent on a particular narrow wavelength.

It's the mediated experience that ironically, can offer more and better evidence for the veracity of a claim, a proposition that artists and designers continually exploit.

The suggestion also strongly reminded me of the "Science of Magic" session at the 2008 IdeaFestival, where Teller brilliantly demonstrated, first with a trick, and then with an explanation of the trick, how our senses can easily be fooled.

Wayne

Friday linkage: Denial, dark chocolate and pretty algorithm edition

Sitting down this morning and running through the items in my feed reader, some suggested reading:

• A question I've never heard: Why do computers crash - and we don't?
• What if the TSA were running New York City?
• Denial does have advantages in the short run - and as a cultural phenomenon it seems to be the preferred strategy for dealing with the dizzying pace of change these days. What role might denial play in business?
• Let's hope this bit of news is true: dark chocolate might protect the brain.
• In an example of how beautifully elegant and simple natural processes can lead to wonderful variety, a single algorithm can reveal the secrets of leaf shape.
• The John Templeton Foundation has lately posed a series of "big questions" to scientists, scholars and public figures. The most recent: "Does moral action depend on reasoning?"
• Finding microbial life elsewhere in our solar system isn't that far fetched when hellish environments on Earth provide examples of extreme life.
• Related, the enumeration of potential hosts to life continues, with the Kepler promising to dramatically increase today's number.
• Finally, from the video above, can a dedicated and competitive rock climber who has lost both legs be considered a cheat?

So that you don't miss anything festival-related, please fan our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter @IdeaFestival! There is BIG news coming!

Have a great weekend.

Wayne

Video: "The Boy with the Incredible Brain"

Prodigious savant Daniel Tammet will offer his thoughts on thinking when the new and much improved IdeaFestival web site debuts in the next few days. Please watch for it and the simultaneous release of the speakers and agenda for IdeaFestival 2010!

Meanwhile, have a look at this astounding video.

Wayne

Mammoth lives!

Jurassic snark? Hardly.

First reported in Nature Genetics, a team of scientists have sequenced the hemoglobin genes from the DNA of three flash-frozen Siberian mammoths to discover the living attributes between those animals and the modern day elephant, and in particular, how the mammoths managed to survive the extreme Siberian cold during their lifetimes some 25,000 and 43,000 years ago.

As it turns out, Mammoth hemoglobin was specially able to deliver oxygen to respiring cells at extremely cold temperatures, minimizing costly heat loss.

Using sophisticated techniques, Paleobiologists such as 2009 IdeaFestival presenter Chris Turney - no connection to the mammoth story - are increasingly able to use recovered biota and fossils to compare changes in life, then and now.

The agenda and speakers for the 2010 IdeaFestival ever will be released very soon!

Hat tip: Futurity.org

Wayne

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pong/ / CC BY 2.0

Second Kentucky-built "plug and play" microlab bound for ISS

What if, in addition to being responsible for micro-controllers and many other everyday technologies that have improved human life, space exploration and microgravity research radically changed our understanding of gene expression or why cancer cells metasticize?

What if Kentucky played a pivotal role in those discoveries?

Gestural computing

Merging personal expression and computational power, "spacial computing" marks a departure from screen-only computing to incorporate bodily movement, another step toward mimicking how we organically interact with the world.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Wayne

Art: "The lie that makes us realize the truth"

[I'm reposting this because in the video below, Lehrer gets at a thought from Pablo Picasso that I Facebooked recently: "Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth."]

Filmed shortly before his presentation at the 2008 IdeaFestival, Jonah Lehrer describes how through a process of experimentation and intense curiosity artists have anticipated discoveries about the mind later confirmed by science. Sure, were he alive today Proust wouldn't synthesize the next miracle drug, but his investigation and subsequent art musters something more vital to the human experience - the right question asked at the right time. Have a listen.

Wayne