An entertaining look at creativity and genius. Enjoy the strategies.
How Geniuses Think | The Creativity Post
Some of you may have been following a tiny brouhaha (“kerfuffle” is so overused, don’t you think?) that has sprung up around the question of why the universe exists. You can’t say we think small around here.
First Lawrence Krauss came out with a new book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (based in part on a popular YouTube lecture), which addresses this question from the point of view of a modern cosmologist. Then David Albert, speaking as a modern philosopher of science, came out with quite a negative review of the book in the New York Times. And discussion has gone back and forth since then: here’s Jerry Coyne (mostly siding with Albert), the Rutgers Philosophy of Cosmology blog (with interesting voices in the comments), a long interview with Krauss in the Atlantic, comments by Massimo Pigliucci, and another response by Krauss on the Scientific American site.
I’ve been meaning to chime in, for personal as well as scientific reasons. I do work on the origin of the universe, after all, and both Lawrence and David are friends of the blog (and of me): Lawrence was our first guest-blogger, and David and I did Bloggingheads dialogues here and here.
Too good not to flag. Literary cartography rocks.
- William Strunk
The best advice for would-be writers: make every word tell. And read Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style.
(via stoweboyd)The primary characteristic of our new, pervasively connected world is the ability to collect data passively (think Runkeeper or Mint.com) or with minimal effort required (Foursquare). And not just collect the data, but present it back—via feedback loops and visualizations—in a meaningful way to the user. These are smart products that have personalized intelligence about our behavior.
The impact of a formula and our (I.e. human) inability to operationally grasp the nature of risk is a volatile recipe.
Global guerrillas (the blog and the book, Brave New War) is about open source warfare and systems disruption. Open source warfare is a new form of guerrilla warfare that works exceedingly well in the modern, connected environment. It’s loose and highly effective. It worked in Iraq during the insurgency and in Tunisia/Egypt to topple dictators. Systems disruption is about taking sabotage to a new level. Systems disruption is how individuals and small groups can topple critical networks with very small attacks. These attacks are so successful–I have plenty of examples–they can generate returns on investment over one million to one! This area of my work has lots of fans in US special operations, the CIA, the NSA, guerrilla groups around the world. Resilient communities is a topic where I spend most of my time. Why? There are two globally systemic threats we can’t solve.
Finance and the environment. Both systems are deeply broken and they are going to do considerable damage to all of us over the next decades. The only way to get ready for that is to build networked resilient communities. Resilient Communities efficiently produce most (not all) of the food, energy, water, and products we use daily. These communities reduce our vulnerabilities to the future’s inevitable disruptions (that will damage/impoverish those that don’t transition), reduce complexity to a human scale, and improve the quality of our lives. Since these communities network with the global system, they don’t lose any of the complexity/value we enjoy in the current intellectual environment. My bet, and it is the reason I started the resilient community newsletter, is that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.
Drones. Robots are transforming the US military and warfare. I’m a former military pilot. I have seen first hand what drones are doing to the Air Force. Already more than half of all of the people going through pilot training end up flying drones. There are more military drones flying right now than manned planes. We’ve also seen the development of the last manned fighter (the F-35) and I doubt anybody anywhere will produce a new one. Around the world, drones are being deployed permanently (eliminating the need for soldiers) and they are being used frequently (they kill thousands). Unfortunately, this makes sense. Drones are nearly costless. They don’t generate any public push back (no US casualties) and they are much less expensive than people (no retirement/health/etc.). They can also be controlled from Washington. What makes them really scary is how fast they are becoming autonomous, smaller, and less expensive. It’s easy to envision a 10 million drone swarm pacifying a 30 m person city in 20 years time (completely controlled by just a few people at the top).
Even if you aren’t a teenage boy, I’ll bet that you were exposed to some pornography today. You can stop sweating; I’m not talking about erotic films (at least not necessarily). I mean the concept of pornography, at the simplest level. When broken down, what pornographic films do is take the most arousing parts of regular films (i.e. the sex scenes) and have those parts comprise the main content. In other words, it’s all meat and potatoes. We want the good stuff, and we don’t have time to eat the veggies. For example, a movie like Black Swan is a salad: lots of boring lettuce… with that Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis sex scene as the sprinkled bacon bits. The same concept applies to the actors: pornographic filmmakers understand their main demographic, and use actresses that will appeal most to that group. That’s why certain features in these women are either selected for in casting or exaggerated with surgery.
Ivan Herman recently offered some insight into how Watson actually works. Herman reports, “I was at Chris Welty’s keynote yesterday at the WWW2012 Conference. His talk was on Jeopardy/Watson and, althou
gh this is not the first time I heard/saw something on Watson, some things really became clear only at his keynote. Namely: what is really the central paradigm that made the question answering mechanism so successful in the case of Watson? Well… query answering in Watson is not some sort of a deterministic algorithm that turns a natural language question into a query into a huge set of data. This approach does not work.”
He continues, “Instead, a question is analyzed and, based on search in various set of data, a large set of possible answers is extracted. These ‘candidate’ answers are analyzed separately along a whole series of different dimensions (geographical or temporal dimensions, or, which I found the most interesting, putting back candidate answers into the original question and search that again against various sources of information to rank them again). The result is a vector of numerical values representing the results of the analysis along those different dimensions. That ‘vector’ is summed up into one final value using a weight values for each dimension. The weights themselves are obtained through a prior training process (in this case using a number of stored Jeopardy question/answers). Finally, the answer with the highest value (I presume over a certain threshold value) is returned.”
Despite its perception in the West, Feng Shui does not involve mythology. Perhaps because of the manner it is talked about and presented, Feng Shui often gets brushed aside as superstitious hoo-ha. However, at the core, Feng Shui is an approach to energy, not an expression of religion. Feng Shui, referred as “qi,” can be described as the energy that surrounds everything in the world. For the West, this is recognized as electromagnetic energy or gravitational magnetic energy. While many Westerners believe that Feng Shui is only based on Asian mystical philosophy, it is in fact rooted much more in science.
The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. Their subjects include daily life, construction, crime, city business, aerial photographs, and more. I spent hours lost in these amazing photos, and gathered this group together to give you just a glimpse of what’s been made available from this remarkable collection.
Apple’s success is made possible by keeping things simple. This started with the iMac’s one-size fits all mentality. Steve Jobs and Co. correctly identified that the average consumer doesn’t care about specs but rather capabilities. The spec has been dead at Apple for more than a decade. Where Dell, HP and the others target the average computer shopper, Apple looks to sell to their parents.
The same philosophy is driving the iPhone’s massive growth. There isn’t a better universal smartphone on the market. This isn’t open for discussion and the numbers prove it. Smartphones are now outselling less expensive feature phones with the iPhone as the number one seller. That states above all else that consumers overwhelmingly prefer Apple’s take on mobile phones. And for good reason.
The Data Journalism Awards full shortlist | News | guardian.co.uk
Government funding for the arts: Up in flames | The Economist
Mathematics of Eternity Prove The Universe Must Have Had A Beginning
Cosmologists use the mathematical properties of eternity to show that although universe may last forever, it must have had a beginning
” —I am SO relieved to know this…
Mathematics of Eternity Prove The Universe Must Have Had A Beginning - Technology Review
What Part of Your Brain Falls in Love With Art?
Take a look at the Futurity.org article as well.
The brain network activated during an intense response to art overlaps with the brain network associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment.
When looking at additive manufacturing at the personal level, I am reminded of the tentative, creaky and (apparently) useless examples of personal microcomputer systems in the 70s. It’s not there yet. What I can ‘build’ today is of minimal use. But I know that in a short time, the technologies and their availability at the personal level will be amazing.
The adoption of additive manufacture in industry is going to be revolutionary. Mass customization gives way to bespoke production.
Interesting article on just how much and what form of information can be gleaned from social network activity.
Such a great Quora thread about the possibility (or impossibility) of time travel.
We like to think of ourselves as “serious” music listeners here at evade, but after reading this article we’re starting to doubt ourselves. The good people at The Atlantic have some helpful tips on just how to listen to music. Here’s the 7 main points (all of which come from the book Music: Ways of Listening, published in 1982):
- Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet…On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games.
- Time is a crucial component of the musical experience. Develop asense of time as it passes: duration, motion, and the placement of events within a time frame. How long is thirty seconds, for example? A given duration of clock-time will feel very different if contexts of activity and motion are changed.
- Develop a musical memory. While listening to a piece, try to recall familiar patterns, relating new events to past ones and placing them all within a durational frame.
- If we want to read, write or talk about music, we must acquire a working vocabulary. Music is basically a nonverbal art, and its unique events and effects are often too elusive for everyday words; we need special words to describe them, however inadequately.
- Try to develop musical concentration, especially when listening to lengthy pieces. Composers and performers learn how to fill different time-frames in appropriate ways, using certain gestures and patterns for long works and others for brief ones. The listener must also learn to adjust to varying durations.
- Try to listen objectively and dispassionately. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there.
I will now start to take donations for the Race Against Witzelsucht Fund (RAWF). Please … don’t let this steal another unfortunate’s life.
A disease that causes people to make jokes and puns constantly
Is this the future of successful retail? /ht @stoweboyd
IKEA has announced launching the Uppleva line of integrated HDTV and furniture: it’s genius, and completely supports my contention from yesterday that only two kinds of retailers are growing. One, like IKEA and Apple, are selling their own designs, more or less exclusively. The second are specialty purveyors of carefully curated goods, like Trader Joe’s.
The Uppleva line is going to be very successful, I predict, and opens the TV market to IKEA, and will hasten the demise of chains like Best Buy:
Matt Burns via TechCrunch
The new UPPLEVA line completely disrupts the big box store’s HDTV buying process with a high-dose injection of Ikea genius.
Ikea has yet to announce the nitty-gritty details around the UPPLEVA line including the price. The line will apparently hit key stores in Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Gdansk, and Berlin in June 2012. Come autumn it will arrive at additional stores in Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway, and Portugal with a more broad launch following in 2013.
The YouTube teaser lays out some basic spec concerning the HDTV. It seems up to the task with a 1080p LED LCD screen, 400Hz response time, and some sort of smart TV functionality — all good stuff. But the HDTV really doesn’t matter. Even though it has the specs of a high-end screen, Ikea could have employed a mid-range model and still made the same magic.
Ikea understands that everything needs to work together. This new product line from the Swedish retailer exemplifies the notion of an all-in-one system. Sure, this probably doesn’t appeal to audio heads or A/V geeks, but it brings a beautiful system that works to the masses. Like with everything else Ikea sells, the UPPLEVA system is completely customizable with a range of TV sizes and cabinet designs. Buyers probably still have to piece them together using those dumb keys, though.
IKEA is one of the few companies that can really battle Apple for the living room.
Twitter has drafted up what they’re calling the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA). With it, the company is promising to only use their patents as the actual inventor intended — read: defensively, not offensively.
More specifically:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
Excellent news. Twitter is promising to implement the IPA later this year and says that it will apply to all their patents past and present. Yes, this means things like Loren Brichter’s pull-to-refresh (which he’s excited about).
Hopefully other startups large and small will follow Twitter’s lead here. It would be really excellent if larger companies (*cough* Yahoo *cough*) did as well, but it’s hard to see that happening given the current state of things. This is a movement that will have to start from the ground up.
Big time kudos to Twitter for this.
Music of the spheres? Oh, no… musicbox of the spheres.
I am clearly the victim of selective attention disorder, and that is NOT improved with the incursion of social networks, email, IMs, etc.
It’s way past time to take this advice.
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work?
It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
Paul Higgins put together a great list of books and future thinkers, including one book I have just received in the mail, Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman — so go check it out.
