How Long Do You Live in the Question - IF13 Edition

At the heart of anything good there should be a kernel of something undefinable. And if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then in a sense you have missed the point. John Peel

The game designer, futurist and former IdeaFestival presenter Jane McGonigal once said that the opposite of play is not work. It's depression. 

I agree.

With that thought in mind, I wanted to share this image from IdeaFestival 2013 of Ariel Waldman talking about play in the context of hacking space. She is making what I believe is one of the central and frequently forgotten truths of discovery in an age when metrics and measurements (gah!) would appear to have replaced wonder in many discovery toolkits.

Facing the unknown, explorers of every kind embrace the undefinable by taking time to investigate, to play, to live in the question. Actors and entrepreneurs alike share a belief that what's new or important or interesting or good can't be defined up front because deciding now what's new or important or interesting or good short-circuits a very important and fundamentally playful process, a process that participants in Science Hack Day have used to create such things as wearable masks that mimic synesthesia and "particle wind chimes." And as she pointed out while on stage, the latter invention may even have diagnostic uses in the hands of particle physicists. How's that for a useful payoff?

So how long are you willing to living in the question?

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman

Oliver Burkeman: We Have a Failure to Accept Failure

Our culture of positive thinking is a sort of allergy, a neurotic refusal to feel one whole swath of the human life. - Oliver Burkeman at IdeaFestival 2013

Do we have a failure to accept failure?

Writing his book, “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,” Oliver Burkeman said he attended a “Get Motivated!” seminar, which, he added, was a bad scene for an Englishman.

He believes that a fixation on relentless positivity is a barrier to happiness. It hides much more than it reveals.

Burkeman illustrates the point by referencing climbers who died in 1996 on Mt. Everest, a tragedy he attributed in part to an unwillingness to accept the ominous signs that the climbers encountered. The ill-fated ascent is documented in the book “Into Thin Air.”

Numerous studies have shown that we are, in fact, awfully good at ignoring bad information. A conviction that everything will turn out fine despite the evidence is not the antidote.

But because summits of any kind exert enough pressure, there is a danger we should not ignore when external goals become part of our identities.

It takes time and perhaps a willingness to cultivate new skills and habits, but Burkeman identifies four ways “negative thinking” can help us lead better lives.

1) Focus on the worst case scenario. “Game out” how bad things can go. A gratitude that circumstances are not that dire will bubble to the surface. A "defensive pessimism" can provide relief. By bringing contrasting beliefs with reality, we can see how out of bounds those beliefs are.

Successful entrepreneurs, Burkeman says, don’t spend a lot time persuading themselves that things will go just right. They ask themselves what’s the worst thing can happen, and whether or not they can take the risk. As Peter Sims did last year, Burkeman says that placing little bets is a better and ultimately less risky strategy for reaching satisfying outcomes.

2) "Non-attachment," a Buddhist idea, encourages us to passively observe our interior lives. The point is not to calm down your mind, but, rather, to relate to our feelings much like we relate to the weather. You don't need to feel like doing something in order to do it.

3) Recognize uncertainty is an incredibly creative force. Because we don’t in fact know what will happen, any quest for certainty can block the search for meaning. "It's the struggle to feel secure that creates feelings of insecurity" Burkeman says, quoting the great countercultural philosopher Alan Watts.

4) Remember, you’re going to die! Well that was a bit jarring. But there's something to be said for keeping the really big picture in mind when it comes to putting life into perspective now.

Posted at the top is an IF interview with Oliver Burkeman in which he discusses the role of awe, the idea of "opensure," and what he lately has been reading and studying. Enjoy.

Wayne

Image by Amber Sigman

Tererai Trent Dreamed of an Education

In 1991, Jo Luck from Heifer International visited a rural village in Zimbabwe to talk to a group of girls. She wanted to know what they dreamed of.

For one woman in the crowd, Tererai Trent, the question had never been asked. Trent, like other girls in her community, was not allowed to go to school. By using her brother's schoolbooks and secretly completing his homework, she was able to teach herself to read.

But by age 11, Trent had been married off. And by the time she was 18, when she met Luck, she had three children and "no GED."  Hearing Luck say that "anything is achievable" was a turning point for Trent. she realized that unless she pursued her own goal of education, her children would be destined to a similar fate.

Trent began working for Hefer international and then was accepted to college in Oklahoma. Fast forward to today, and she now has her Ph.D.

Trent is the first woman in her village to have gone to school. And after Oprah (who picked Trent as the "favorite guest" in her 25-year-long career) donated money to help build schools in Zimbabwe, her home village now has many girls in school.

Trent now runs the Tinogona (which means "it is achivable") Foundation to help rebuild schools. 

Talking to Tererai Trent about her story at IdeaFestival 2013 was an honor and privilege. She is the ultimate proof of the power of the mind and spirit in making dreams a reality.

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: The Solution is Translation

Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer kicks off the final day of IdeaFestival 2013 by talking about the intersection of art and community. 

Lozano-Hemmer creates interactive, public art installations, in which participants can both "observe and be observed." An installation in Australia, which displays shadows of portraits on a large wall, is both playful and dark, allowing people to distort their own shape and size and interact with other shadows people. (Maybe you need to see this to understand).

He sees art as a powerful social tool, with an obligation to speak truth to power. In a 2008 project, Lozano-Hemmer set up a megaphone in Zocalo Square in Mexico City, where 300 protesters had been massacred in 1968. Citizens would come up to the megaphone to voice opinions about anything from government corruption, tributes to loved ones lost, and even marriage proposals. The voices were broadcast live, giving voice to an often-silenced public.

Yet another example of the social implications of a creative mind.

@ideafestival #IF13 #staycurious

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Image: Amber Sigman

Ariel Waldman: Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy

At the heart of something good there should be a kernel of something undefinable. And if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then in a sense you have missed the point. John Peel

Ariel Waldman announces that she has fallen in love with an image of the Milky Way. It was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, an instrument that records in the infrared.

The view of the Milky Way she displays is edge-on, and Spitzer is able, in effect, to reach into the center of the our galactic home. Pointing to a picture of the Earth, she says, "Hi, I'm Ariel Waldman, I live about 27,000 light years" from the center of that image.

Charming.

As recently as 1924, people thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy in existence. Now we know there are billions. At the center of our galaxy is a super-massive black hole. "I'm fascinated by these because they're the hackers of the universe, they take raw material and make derivatives."

NASA employees, engineers and astronauts were, she says, the original hackers. They were enthusiastic, and in the age of Mercury and Gemini, of the right stuff and Apollo, they were young, averaging 25 years of age. "They were amateurs," she adds, and shows a picture of other amateurs in the history of science like Albert Einstein. That combination convinced Walldman that she too could do space. "I was amateur," she realized. Today the average NASA employee is decidedy middle aged with - my parenthetical - aspirations to match.

Segueing into Science Hack Day, an event for which she is probably more well known, she says that its mission is to regain a bit of the old excitement, of sheer possibility. The people who show up at one of those events are amateurs. They don't HAVE to know where their idea or project is going. She describes several hacks - building a wind tunnel to test a series of letters that will make a new typeface; or a lamp that lights up each time an asteroid passes the Earth; or a mask that would simulate synesthesia, aptly named, given the creepy image she display, "syneseizure;" or a cocktail made with DNA. On the latter she issues a warning - "it tastes disgusting."

What if, she continues, one could listen to mapped sounds of high energy particle collisions? And in fact, she points out, one such instrument has been created, "particle wind chimes." There's more: given license to roam freely, to make new and maybe unorthodox connections, the creator of the particle wind chimes may have created something with real diagnostic potential in the hands of physicists. Formerly abstract concepts have been made available to the senses of researchers.

Returning to the theme of space, she goes on to question our assumptions about Mars rovers - why should they be car-like and not tumbleweed-like? By treating science as a creative act, hackers, makers and amateur scientists like Waldman understand that the creative act is an act of courage, and that failure, as Lance Hosey pointed out earlier in the week, is just information.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman