IF never discriminates on the basis of vision

Artists are the antennae of the race. - Ezra Pound

Appearing with other Creative Capital artists, Shih Chieh Huang demonstrated a "messymix" of life featuring eerie and entrancing work the drew gasps, a few titters and lengthy and sustained applause for its daring. Along with Mark Shepard, whose "under(a)ware" wearable-tech is designed to foil business intelligence gathering, and Pamela Z, Richard Pell and Erika Blumenfeld, Huang explored what it means to be alive, to be in concert with the world - in Pamela Z's case, literally - and what it may mean to have it come to an end. Gus Grisson would be proud of Pell's bug collection. Why do these meaning-makers, these explorers, these westward movers do this?

They see more. At the IdeaFestival we never discriminate on the basis of vision.

Wayne

"G" at the IdeaFestival

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

"G," IBM's David Barnes, trippin'. IdeaFestival fans, please follow @ideafestival and the #IF11 hash on Twitter, and check out the Flickr pool for more incredible images.

Wayne

Multiverse depends on a single idea: It's complicated

According to Suketu Bhavsar, twentieth century physics rests on two pillars: general relativity (the science of the very large) and quantum mechanics (the science of the vanishingly small), which are two empirically developed, testable and provable concepts that as of right now don't work so well together. While science works on reconciling these two domains, I'll stick briefly to two simpler illustrations brought by Bhavsar to the IdeaFestival today.

Taking a "model of the universe" out of his pants pocket, Bhavsar blows up a party balloon to illustrate how the galaxies are moving away from us, which is, in fact, what they are doing - and at colossal speeds thanks to the 73 percent of the universe that we can't see but, through its interaction with the observable universe, know exists - dark matter. Given sufficient time, an observer on the "surface" of the universe would see the other galaxies disappear over the horizon. Moreover, by walking this surface he or she would never reach an end, but would nonetheless be in a finite and circumscribed space.

It's an apt metaphor.

He says that string theory might one day unite the physics behind the quantum world and the vast mechanics of the universal bodies. But with ten dimensions or more predicted by string theory, where would those extra dimensions be? Using a two dimensional shape that can be found in popular physics books from authors like Brian Greene, Bhavsar uses the following illustration. Image you are standing a hundred years from a telephone line and you spy a squirrel scampering along its length. From that distance, the line would appear as a single dimension, a line in the sky. But move closer and the diameter of the wire becomes apparent. It has a second dimension that wraps around the line.

When it comes to quantum mechanics, we are hampered by our terminology.

Wayne

Azure Antionette on stage at the IdeaFestival

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The science of kissing? It's in the application

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Having spotted that special someone, few of us have ever needed a prompt when it came to a kiss. A few ackward lean-ins, and we get the idea.

But who knew that there was a science behind all this?

Introduced by Detal Dental, which sponsored her event - shrewd, shrewd, shrewd - the author of the "Science of Kissing," Sheril Kirshenbaum, says no one really knows how kissing got started, but perhaps the color red on lips was an attraction. Well, yes.

There is surprisingly little known from science about what's actually happening when we kiss. Perhaps familial kissing as children is responsible for feelings of security and belonging, and our sense of smell, particularly a woman's sense of smell, offers cues about the compatibility of a potential partner.

From history, we know that kissing is mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, but romantic kissing is not mentioned. Today it's a nearly universal practice.

Scientists know that the lips are "overrepresented in the brain" because the sensations of taste and smell are located nearby, and that there are noticeable increases in chemicals associated with pleasure and bonding.

"Trying to understand it doesn't take the pleasure out of it," she adds, and follows up with a clip from The Big Bang theory to make the point that awkwardness and the kiss are familiar to many of us. Some knowledge, after all, can only come in the application.

Men and woman kiss for different reasons. Woman describe kissing as a way to assess how they might feel about a man - after all, they have to be choosier about with whom they will pair. A woman's sense of smell and taste are thus heightened because the stakes are higher.

Showing some brain scans of couples engaged in various kinds of kisses - romantic, erotic and familial - she points out that neuroscientists have begun to study kissing, and that this, too, is a new way of understanding what exactly is going on when our lips meet.

As for advice: limit the alcohol and drugs. Because if kissing acts on the body, and it does, why cloud that feeling? And as for when: often. It's good for you.

Wayne