Bourbon, Basketball, Horses, Spacecraft

You probably know that Kentucky makes some mighty tasty bourbon, plays some mighty good college basketball (Universities of Kentucky and Louisville: shout out!) and raises and races the fastest horses in the world. 

What you may not know is that it also builds and flies small spacecraft doing high value work in space, that young astro-engineers in the commonwealth are gaining commercially valuable experience and that, like exploration in any other extreme environment, experimental work in the dark and irradiated void of space delivers benefits to you and me.

One example: because hauling around bulky vacuum tubes wasn't practical, Apollo-era engineers created the integrated circuit. That breakthrough, now indispensable to every consumer electronic device on the planet, made it possible for the lunar astronauts to fly, control and communicate inside the lunar landing module. They flew the (primitive) software that flew the spacecraft.

Space exploration presents other challenges with Earthly payoffs.

What, for example, is the role of gravity in cellular and genetic expression? Controlling for that implacable, eternal force with a series of rapid, iterative experiments aboard the ISS may surrender clues that lead to successful therapies for terrible diseases on Earth. If that sounds like a stretch, consider this: the atoms and molecules that make up more complex structures like amino acids and proteins in your body were fused in ancient starry furnaces. We are stardust.

To tackle these questions and many others that have yet to be asked, the first business accelerator specifically for space enterprises and entrepreneurs - sorry Peter Thiel! - has been created in Kentucky. Applications are being accepted.

Other Kentucky craft in a very small class of free-flying spacecraft called Cubesats will characterize remnant X-ray energies originating from the Big Bang, and make serious contributions to Big Picture cosmology. Still more target the DIY space-enthusiast, pushing the envelope on functionality and cost. What's the minimal size for a working, communicating spacecraft? These "femto-class" craft will launch this fall and are designed to deorbit after a period of time, harmlessly vaporizing in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, leaving no trace of their existence.

Still others, like twin spacecraft pictured above, will test technologies like a stellar sextant, which will compare pictures of star fields to precisely locate themselves in the vast three dimensions of space, and, at the local level, back out that information to determine the tumble and roll rates of the craft taking the pictures. Scheduled for next month, one of these two craft is safely buttoned up inside its launch vehicle as I write this. Its flight will depend, as these things so often do, on the schedule of much larger and much more expensive spacecraft, which in this case is MAVEN. That craft set to leave Earth on Nov. 18 and will gather data on Mars' atmosphere when it reaches the Red Planet. Should for some reason MAVEN not fly on Nov. 18, KySat-2 could go as early as November 19.

Kentucky Space will share a specific launch date and time for KySat-2 with you via the @kyspace twitter account (please follow!) when it has it, and include a link so that you can watch the launch live. Once on orbit, amateur radio enthusiasts in backyards across the state will be able to hear and, using software created for the task, decode some data delivered by the craft. If you're interested, read about the development of KySat-2 in the "K2 Tuesdays" series over at the Kentucky Space web site.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Are you as open as you think you are?

We are what we repeatedly do. - Aristotle

Why has a course in Chinese philosophy that teaches lessons about an openness to opportunity and the satisfaction of living in the moment become one of the most popular classes offered at Harvard?

The Atlantic:

[Professor of Chinese history Michael] Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this 'are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,' he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. (emphasis supplied)

Perhaps the appeal of such a course to the bright, ambitious and exceptionally goal-oriented students that attend the school should be obvious.

But I was struck too by the idea that what each of us want from life is readily available, if only we pay attention to what our biologies are saying. Sadly those cues often clash with what we think we ought to be doing, a subject raised with "Happiness" author Oliver Burkeman in this "Five Questions" video. And insofar as our happiness depends on "the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire us," it's sad that we're willing too often to ignore moments of energy, of living, in favor of an action plan that may or may not be working.

This kind of lived curiosity is also essential, as Puett says, to the creative act, whether it involves important life decisions or "other possibilities." Why?

I think it's because people interested in things make interesting things.

Stay curious.

Wayne

h/t 99U

Image: Some rights reserved by Vladimir Yaitskiy

TMI and the Secret behind Great Questions

When is added information bad for you?

We've all had the experience of listening to an acquaintance or work colleague divulge something that makes us uncomfortable or, in those very special cases, looking for the nearest exit. We'll figuratively throw up our hands or mentally tune out the chatter because there's little we can do with what we've been told other than to question why it was divulged in the first place.

Shane Parrish went to the question of information utility in a post at Farnam Street last Friday, "More information might not improve your ability to make decisions." I think he touches on an important dimension of decision making that is too often overlooked.

The more we look for new rationale to make decisions, the further we are from understanding. The harder we look, the more we’ll find. The more we find, the more we’ll mis-weigh what we find. The more we mis-weigh, the more likely we are to make a poor decision.

So the next time you find yourself seeking out hard-to-find esoteric information to give yourself an edge in that important decision, think hard about whether you understand the fundamentals of the situation. The more esoteric information you seek the further you move from the likely variables that will govern the outcomes of the situation.

As Parrish points out, looking for "a new rationale' when we're certain that an answer, the answer, is there waiting to be discovered, should tip us off that perhaps our understanding of the problem is wrong. Why? Because information is never perfect or complete, and we only have control over the questions we ask, not the answers we get. Genuine questions call on us to check and recheck our assumptions.

They call on us to accept risk.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by ulisse albiati

Thanks for Reading. Be Back Soon!

I will be taking a short break and be back on Oct. 21. On my return I'll be interviewing more people for our Five Questions series, as well as introduce you to a new contributing writer for IF blog. And if you enjoy the blog posts, please consider using our syndicated feed to have them automagically appear in your reading list as they are published.

Thanks for reading! In my absence, please visit these IdeaFestival articles elsewhere.

• GE's Beth Comstock on the importance of hackerspaces.
• "Oddly enough, inefficiency can be a key to productivity--if you're trying to make new things," Fast Company's Drake Baer writes about innovation in his piece on Comstock. Check out his other work for the magazine.
• Karen Wunderlin writes about "the buzz of fresh ideas at the IdeaFestival," a nice write-up on the festival as a whole. The IdeaFestival buzz is a common occurrence. Take 51 weeks and come back next year.
• Or pick up Kevin Smokler's new book, Practical Classics and pace yourself.
• With its emphasis on better ideas, startup culture is a lot like the IdeaFestival. Village Capital announced funding for a couple of startups in September during IF13. And elsewhere the festival is described as a closet Venture Connectors meeting. Nice.
• A number of Business First articles on the IdeaFestival may be found here.
• KET was hard at work preparing interviews to air, according to Bill Goodman.
• Humana, which very generously sponsored the festival, calls it a celebration of innovation, and cites the consensus that "business needs more creative brains." We know where it can find them!
• Describing it "as easily one of my favorite conferences," C.C. Chapman was on hand this year to take in IF13. Check it out his blog post, which has several of the creative commons-licensed pictures he also contributed to our Flickr pool. Thanks C.C.!
• Do you make, build, hack or code? A Mini Maker Faire happened in Louisville as part of NuLu Fest.
• Insider Louisville was omnipresent at the IdeaFestival. Check out this index of articles, which stretches on for pages. Its piece on the Creative Capital artists was a favorite of mine.
• Creative Capital, by the way, highlighted the artists it brought to the IdeaFestival here.

This list of festival-related pieces is far from exhaustive. I know, for example, that We Blog The World's Renee Blodgett will blog her follow-up soon. And there are numerous other articles, videos and interviews that aren't listed here. That's because we've already shared them over the past two weeks.

So in addition to taking the syndicated feed, please follow us on Twitter - @ideafestival - and like us on Facebook! You won't miss a thing.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Photo of the Ron Finley dig courtesy of Amber Sigman.

When is a Relationship Not a Relationship?

When is a relationship not a relationship?

In response to a question from an audience member that started with the premise that art is a form of communication, a mildly agitated Rafael Lozano-Hemmer rejected that idea, saying during IdeaFestival 2013 that "art is not about communication.

"It’s about communion."

Having just mounted a powerful and eloquent defense of public art because it offers meaning rather than information, he leaned into the thought once again, pressing the case that his interactive works were shared experiences and that art, like meaning, was an incomplete and open-ended process. It wasn't solely about the artist.

His vexation leapt to mind when I read The Attention Economy by Tom Chatfield, which was posted recently at Aeon Magazine. Like Lozano-Hemmer, I think Chatfield might ask that those who measure, map, sell or otherwise insist on surrender when it comes to our online relationships think about a set of shared experiences rather than communication. Because right now the exchange is woefully one-sided. Chatfield:

Attention... ‘comes in many forms: love, recognition, heeding, obedience, thoughtfulness, caring, praising, watching over, attending to one’s desires, aiding, advising, critical appraisal, assistance in developing new skills, et cetera. An army sergeant ordering troops doesn’t want the kind of attention Madonna seeks. And neither desires the sort I do as I write this.’

However, when it comes to automated systems for garnering attention, there’s more at play than one person listening to another; and the processes of measurement and persuasion have some uncannily totalising tendencies. As far as getting the world to pay attention to me online, either I play by the rules of the system — likes, links, comments, clicks, shares, retweets — or I become ineligible for any of its glittering prizes. As the American writer and software engineer David Auerbach put it in n+1 magazine, in a piece pointedly titled ‘The Stupidity of Computers’ (2012), what is on screen demands nothing so much as my complicity in its assumptions:

Because computers cannot come to us and meet us in our world, we must continue to adjust our world and bring ourselves to them. We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can ‘understand’. Their dumbness will become ours.

....Where is the space, here, for the idea of attention as a mutual construction more akin to empathy than budgetary expenditure — or for those unregistered moments in which we attend to ourselves, to the space around us, or to nothing at all?

Chatfield's defense of "attention" in distinctly human terms was so refreshing, and I marveled, having heard Lozano-Hemmer, at how poor we still are at understanding the emotional content, much less the emotional potential, of what it means to be with each other. The pity we seem so willing to attend to our stupid machines, unable as they are to tolerate our silence.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Video: "Under Scan" (2005) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.