For Information Overload, a Fast

Thinking isn’t about learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information. It requires concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea of your own. William Deresiewicz, "Solitude and Leadership"

Sometimes we can have simply too much on our minds to be creative. Reading this Douglas Eby post at The Creative Mind, I was reminded of an early morning mash-up at the IdeaFestival last month. Sitting on a panel with Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Joel Pett and Creative Capital artist Liz Cohen, Technology Review's Jason Pontin suggested that while a wide range of interests is essential to connection-making, it can be overdone. At Technology Review, he said, "information fasts" are regularly imposed.

He didn't elaborate at length but it's not much of a stretch to understand why. Given the pervasive nature of information today, I think the constant ping-pinging of contemporary life can overwhelm minds conditioned by the last couple hundred thousand years to notice the outliers. Is that rustling in the bush friend or foe? When seemingly every call, email or detail demands our attention now, our sensitivity to what might be essential or new or important is dulled. Information fasts are a perfectly sensible response to information fatigue; they might also pay a welcome creative dividend.

Wayne

Little Bets and the Sketches of Frank Gehry

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game. -Goethe

Recommended by Peter Sims while speaking at the IdeaFestival last week because it shed light on "how little bets can lead to great innovation," Sketches with Frank Gehry traces the work of the architect who has managed to combine riveting art while defying the laws of physics.

The last scene in the embedded clip perfectly illustrates the creative moment - most of the time. The creative flash is preceded by sheer tedium, a fear of failure and the plain hard work of modeling, in his case, one idea after another.

What little bets are you making?

Wayne

Big list of IdeaFestival 2012 story links

It's not an exhaustive list by any means, but here are a number of stories about last week's festival. Enjoy.

• From Mental Floss, "Celebrating the Golden Lobes at the IdeaFestival."
• Kevin Smokler offers his takaways on Peter Sims, "Bully" filmmaker Cynthia Lowen and, of course, Louisville's food.
• Tom Cottingham on Baratunde Thurston’s session and book "How to be Black:" "There are ways to talk about race that aren’t productive. Dealing with race using humor helps start the conversation.”
• Renee Blodgett at We Blog the World was surprised she had never run into Kevin Colleran until she met the seventh employee of Facebook at the IdeaFestival. About product delivery: Colleran "encouraged hackathons and believes every company should do them. He says that some of the best products they have ever shipped have come from an all nighter coding event. In other words, 'academics meet coder types all night long and great ideas have come out of it.'"
• WFPL on Shakespeare behind Bars "No presentation earned a more emotional response at IdeaFestival than Saturday's Shakespeare Behind Bars panel moderated by founder Curt Tofteland." 
• Chess Grandmaster Talks about Applying Game Concepts to Business Ed Green at Business First: "Many of the world’s best chess players, he said, are very successful on Wall Street or as hedge fund managers because they have 'instantaneous recognition of how patterns change' and the effects of those changes on business situations."
• Humana Showcases Health and Fitness at the IdeaFestival
• Artwithoutwalls Commissions New Art for IdeaFestival
• "Former Facebook employee Gives Glimpse inside Company" at Business First
• The Finland School Phenomenon, WFPL: "As Peter Sims pointed out Thursday and Wagner repeated, in schools, we penalize failure, even small failures. 'We've created a risk-averse academic culture,' said [Tony] Wagner."
• WFPL also interviews the award winning poet and University of Kentucky professor, Nikky Finney. Check out the WFPL's posts on Lisa Randall and Jodie Wu.
• More on Jodie Wu's presentation from Business First.
• Tony Wagner on the need for education reform: "The world doesn't care what you know, but what you do with what you know."
• Insider Louisville on "Bully" filmmaker Cynthia Lowen's moving presentation on bullying: "Ms. Lowen shared a couple of long clips from her film during her IF session that focused on one her subjects, Alex, and how those around him struggled to make sense of something so senseless."
• Melissa Chipman: describes several sessions, including Peter Sims, Peter Van Buren, Richard DeMillo and John Barker.
• Stacey Servo writes that the "festival is like boot camp for the brain."
• Check out this video of Louisville's Hackerspace, LVL1, which put several 3D printers to work replicating the entire city.
• USA Today ran a nice story just prior to the festival, "IdeaFestival a blend of minds, dreams," which documents how the festival has sent at least two people on entirely different life paths.
• The Lane Report: "IdeaFestival Offers Fresh Ideas for the Future."
• At Insider Louisville, Chelsea Gifford describes the "accessible genius" of the four Creative Captial artists who were at the festival: Liz Cohen, Sam Van Aken, Hasan Elahi and Tahir Hemphill.
• The Louisville Courier-Journal reports on Kevin Colleran's appearance at IdeaFestival 2012: "Colleran described the evolution of Facebook, from a simple site that used one photograph and a brief profile to a multi-layered platform that can chronicle every stage of life using videos and photos."
• We Blog the World also describes the "Ideas and Art of the IdeaFestival," noting "their tagline, Stay Curious, says it all."

Wayne

Image of Grimanesa Amorós, Geoff Oliver Bugbee

"Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may become"

Just three quotes on the powerful and uplifting session, "Shakespeare Behind Bars."

"Lord, we know what we are, but not what we may become." Hamlet

"Shakespeare Behind Bars offers participants the ability to hope and the courage to act despite their fear and the odds against them. By immersing participants in the nine-month process of producing a Shakespeare play, Shakespeare Behind Bars uses the healing power of the arts, transforming inmate offenders from who they were when they committed their crimes, to who they are in the present moment, to who they wish to become." - Geoff Oliver Bugbee

One inmate on what Shakespeare has meant to him now that he's out. "I am my own author."

Wayne

Lisa Randall "Knocking on Heaven's Door"

What you see depends on how you look. Showing a picture of the Eiffel Tower, theoretical physicist and author Lisa Randall begins by demonstrating the deceptively simple idea of scale.

Example: because humans have until recently only used the visible spectrum to observe the universe, knowing that it’s 10²⁷m in size omits crucial information. Finiteness or infiniteness cannot be determined - that’s just how long the earliest photons has been traveling before emptying into our eyes.

Today, she’s going to talk about what we can’t see.   

“As you probe at smaller and smaller scales you don’t find new objects, but new laws.”

I’m struck by the argument she’s making for theorizing, conceptualizing, and its importance to discovery. It’s the same force used by artists, for example, but their conclusions are deeply meaningful rather than deeply independent.  

She transitions to the Large Hadron Collider, which is now using great energies to produce data that can be collected and matched - potentially - to theory. The best matches add to the knowledge of matter at the smallest scales.

A couple LHC facts: it can reproduce a “tenth of a trillionth of a vacuum” and produce a cold “only 1.9 degrees above absolute zero,” which is colder than space.

What can physicists learn using this massive machine? She suggests a few: how particles acquire mass, why gravity is so weak (think about it, the whole Earth is tugging at you right now, yet you can still jump up and down), suggest (or disprove) the symmetry for space and time, or add new dimensions to space and time.

This is an interesting thought: “Mass is not an intrinsic property of particles, otherwise physics would not make sense.”

The LHC has just this summer produced very good evidence for one of the theorized particles, the Higgs boson. Physicists believe that particles acquire mass by by interacting with the Higgs’ field. An excitation of the field produces the boson.   

As for other dimensions, why even consider that possibility? There are a lot of things we don’t know about until we get to the scales that make the possibility meaningful. Relativity, the science of the very big, is in theory compatible with any number of scales. There are connections that we couldn't have anticipated. Other dimensions might explain why gravity is so weak by suggesting, for example, that these dimensions drain, to use a bad metaphor, gravity from the three dimensions with which we’re familiar. If so, experimental physicists hope of find so-called Kaluza–Klein particles, which would provide evidence of interaction between the colossally massive and fantastically small, and perhaps thereby unify the two into a single physical theory.  

She ends with a quote from Steve Jobs’ well known Stanford graduation speech.

“You can’t connect the dots by looking forward, but only by looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

As a theorist, her role is to suggest where the dots may connect.

Wayne