Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
This has been waiting in my queue for a while. It’s a wonderful TED talk from Elizabeth Gilbert on dealing with the elusive nature of creativity – the moments of genius and the grasping at straws that inevitably precedes and follows those moments of brilliance.
What is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each others’ mental health in a way that other careers… don’t do?
TED just posted a fascinating clip from 2002 where Mae Jemison talks about the relationship between the arts and sciences. As someone who is at heart an artist, but who chose to study science in university, I’ve always been painfully aware of the communication barriers between the two worlds. To the artist, science is often too cold and calculating to be any fun. To the scientist, art can be subjective to the point of being irrelevant. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made a case for seeing art and science as complimentary ways of approaching life over thirty years ago, but I think Jemison states their relationship even more eloquently in this video, saying: “Science provides an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a personal experience.” Now the only problem is convincing universities and high schools to teach this way…
I watched Woody Norris do a fascinating talk on TED last night. He’s invented a device that focuses sound like a laser focuses light. Speakers are messy. They send the signal out to anyone near the speaker. Woody’s device effectively “beams” the sound to whoever it’s pointed at. So yes, if you start hearing voices in your head, you might not need to call the psychiatrist just yet…
After watching this, I found an interview with Woody Norris on Makezine that I thought was interesting. In particular, I found his advice on patents interesting:
I think a lot of inventors are paranoid about sharing their work for fear that it will be stolen. This is a near pathological problem among inventors. File a patent and get over it. You can file a provisional patent with an attorney for $1,000, or you can do it yourself for $80 if you can’t afford an attorney. Then you can talk about it. Expose it. If you are not willing to do this, you don’t really believe in your invention–you are just kidding yourself. I have never had a company steal one of my inventions in over 40 years of doing this; companies are scared to death of being sued. So do your work, get your patent, and then sell it. Stop making excuses.
The patent system can be downright ridiculous and I think it needs major reform. However, Woody Norris talks about it here in a way that reminds us of its purpose: to encourage inventors to publish good ideas by offering them a legal entitlement to receive compensation when others use those ideas. I wonder if start-ups like Cambrian House might end up eventually replacing the patent system. They solve exactly the same problem in a way that seems much more responsive and fair.
You might not think it’s possible to make a comedy act out of stuff you’d find in a modern art gallery, but Ursus Wehrli does just that in this video by giving his version of “tidied up” paintings. My favorite is his attempt to tidy up one of Pollock’s paintings: “Jackson Pollock, for example… yeah, that’s a really hard one… but after a while, I just decided here to go all the way and just put the paint back into the cans.”
As we witness what could be the beginnings of the collapse of the last remaining superpower, one has to wonder if the rest of the world isn’t royally screwed as well. After all, great civilizations are no longer isolated experiments. With that in mind, check out Jared Diamond’s talk on common characteristics of societies that collapse, with the sliver of a hope and a pinch of advice on how me might pull ourselves out of this one. Unfortunately, the parallels he draws to the United States (and western society in general) are circa 2003, which means you should multiply the ominous overtones in his talk by about a billion to bring them up to 2008′s standards.
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