Coming soon, new IF speaker videos

Featuring the IdeaFestival 2012 speakers, we'll soon begin to release a new and improved series of videos. Stay tuned.

Over time, the festival has documented the appearance of people like Born on a Blue Day author Daniel Tammet, game designer Jane McGonigal, Twin Towers arielist Philippe Petit, the irrepressible sprite Lindsey Stirling and Sean Carroll, who explains the Arrow of Time in the video shown here.

We're also busy of course putting together IF13, set for Sept. 24- 27 in Louisville, Kentucky. I'd talk about who might appear there, but the very next video would be of a taped interrogation and tearful confession.

I might, however, shake my head or nod if you're up for a game of twenty questions.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Big Blue Marble "Overview:" Intimate distance

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Carl Sagan

It's often been said that astronauts have acquired a special view of lifeboat Earth. In this video, several of them explain what it was like to experience the sight for the very first time.

As astronaut Nicole Stott says in the piece, "I don't know how you come back and not be changed."

Whether it's the experience of watching Earth from space, or of having the final line of poem fit just so, or of seeing that business idea work - really work - in the marketplace, perspective is an intimate distance.

Wayne

Charming video: Pinokio, a "Pixar" lamp, wants your attention

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it? Pablo Picasso

This is a charming little video and a Vimeo staff pick.

We immediately recognize the lamp's response when its human counterpart's face is covered as intelligent. It's by design. An exercise in "expressive computing," the developers write that the robot has been created "to be aware of its environment, especially people."

In human biology of course, facial recognition, as opposed to what I suspect are far more limited (though still impressive) capabilities displayed by "Pinokio" in the video, is something we take for granted. It helps us navigate the subtleties of each encounter in ways that have been difficult to generalize across software and silicon. And its absence can be particularly vexing for the same reason. Jane Goodall and Oliver Sacks suffer from Prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

The lamp, "Pinokio," is powered by Processing, Arduino, and OpenCV technology.

Wayne

Learn the six principles behind the science of persuasion

Do you have a great idea? Good! But unless it's implemented, it won't have any value beyond the pleasure you might derive from the insight alone.

And implementation often depends on persuading others that your idea is worth their time and trouble. Tipped off by Daniel Pink, I watched this video by Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, on the art science of persuasion this morning.

Farnam Street is right. It may be the best 12 minutes you spend today.

Since the IdeaFestival undoubtedly has the smartest fans anywhere, please remember: use your new persuasive powers for good.

Wayne

Things. The new thing

Are things the new thing?

At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal interviews anthropologist Genevieve Bell, who has some interesting things to say about the digital tribe and our personal technology, pointing out that e-reader sales are driven by women, that the kitchen seems to be one of the few places that people don't want gadgets, and that the automobile should give us an idea of the future of mediated experiences. But it was the following comment about the virtual revolution and its connection to 3-D printing that really grabbed my attention:

And it doesn't surprise me that after 10 years of early-adoptive dematerialization, all the identity work and now the seduction of physical objects has come back in full force. Now it's kind of a pendulum: we move between the virtual and the real a great deal. And we have historically--that's hardly a new thing. I suspect that part of what we're seeing with the Etsy maker and that whole spectrum is a kind of need for physical things because so much has become digital, and in fact, what's being manifested in some of these places is really a reprise of physical stuff. Physicality has kind of come back.

Leave it to the ever truculent Nick Carr to boil it down though:

Is the worm turning? Are we tiring of fiddling with symbols on displays, watching the pixels flow? Are we beginning to yearn for stuff again? Are things the new thing?

Given my role as the social media guy with the IdeaFestival, there is something about this particular way of talking that is like hiding out in plain sight, which is to say that I've had enough of the irony and the cleverness. Spending as much time as I do online, it reminds me of that episode of Star Trek where people willingly stepped inside phone-booth sized spaces to have their atoms scattered randomly, casualties of an interplanetary war fought with numbered lists. In this bloodless conflict, when your number was up, it was really up. Yes of course, digital technologies make connections that would otherwise not be possible, and years ago I remember arguing with Carr (online) about this very point (it was one-sided).

So tonight I'm thinking of spending time in the shop bringing out the lacing in some Sycamore that I've had stickered and drying for a couple years now. Working this particular wood with a finely tuned smoothing or jack plane sends up salmon colored see-through shavings, and sometimes I'll just stand there and enjoy the scent.

The shop, it always smells of orchard pears.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Theodore Scott