Hacking space: Materializing the immaterial "is what we do"

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Over the weekend, I sat in today on a "hackerspace," a physical place reserved for experimenters to create new objects, to re-purpose old objects and to explore in code and circuits. As mentioned recently, "making" is resurgent today, and the event hosted by Kentucky Space encouraged these natural roboticists to think outside the atmosphere.

The IdeaFestival was a sponsor of the first annual hackerSPACE. Surprised?

Since the internationally popular spacecraft called the CubeSat - whose creator, incidentally, now teaches at Morehead State University in Kentucky - opened the door ten years ago to smaller organizations to do relatively inexpensive spaceflight, new ideas have flooded a practice traditionally dominated by national governments. And having started as a technology demonstration often derided as an inconsequential toy, the CubeSat, all of four inches on a side, has matured. NASA has launched its own biological experiments using the craft. Sophisticated science instruments about the size of a loaf of bread have been created for use aboard stacked CubeSats. Given the means and opportunity, makers do what they always do - surprise others with their inventiveness and vision.

Featured in this video, Marko Peljhan of the University of California, Santa Barbara works at the intersection of art and science as part of the Media Arts and Technology Program at that university, and is also very involved with the sensational and cross-disciplinary Allosphere, which I've mentioned in these pages from time to time. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy he decided to come, not simply because the graduate program at which he teaches has a small spaceflight component that made it a fit for a workshop devoted to new possibilities in spaceflight, but because, like hackers and makers everywhere, he works to materialize the immaterial.

Wayne

Truth? It depends on the next step

We're all familiar with the idea that we harbor sub rosa desires that inform our decision making, but more recently researchers have upped the experiential ante, pointing out that our senses routinely betray us as well. Experimental psychologist Daniel Simons, for example, amply demonstrated this inability to see what is right in front our noses in September at the IdeaFestival. Even when the relevant facts are in theory available to make an informed decision, we act against our own best interests all the time, thwarted by a buggy biology that is maddeningly inconsistent and all-too suggestible.

That's good news.

In a Jonah Lehrer review of Daniel Kahneman's just-published book on human irrationality, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Lehrer points out that the author himself understands the deep gap between act and - when we're aware of it - intention.

Kahneman, of course, knows all this. One of the most refreshing things about 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' is his deep sense of modesty: he is that rare guru who doesn’t promise to change your life. In fact, Kahneman admits that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. 'My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy'—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—'as it was before I made a study of these issues,' he writes. As a result, his goals for his work are charmingly narrow: he merely hopes to 'enrich the vocabulary that people use' when they talk about the mind.

Kahneman has won the Nobel Prize. But what's so interesting is that the prize was for economics, and his insights have informed the developed an entirely new field called behavioral economics. Struck by how until very recently economists viewed humans as rational, self interested beings with perfectly transparent motives, he says, quoted in another review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, "I had not appreciated the profound difference between our intellectual worlds. To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable."

Elsewhere, in this TED video, Kahneman describes other traps we fall into when thinking about the future, which we invariably forecast using past experiences. The end result is that "it's two very different things" to be happy about your life and happy in your life, he says. And going all Sybil on us, he describes how our remembering and decision-making self can, sadly, drag our experiencing-self through new experiences that it would never choose were it not leaning so heavily on the past. Watch the video.

Progress and personal happiness have never been tied to certainty and the presumption that we get it right. Getting it wrong is the basic human condition. And it's always been through trial and error and the belief that the next step won't be the last that we make discoveries. That's characteristic of science, of course, but in our personal lives as well. The good news, as Kahneman says, is that we're "neither fully rational nor completely selfish." As long as we're moving forward, the truth will always be incomplete.

Wayne

Take time to be bored

Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they're right. I've noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me - "Dilbert's" Scott Adams

The quote above is from the free preview of David Barne's IdeaFestival 2011 presentation on innovation. I've just been thinking a lot lately about it.

Wayne

Max Linsky - Five idea that stuck with me

Max Linsky is a writer and curator of the nigh-indispensable and writerly Longform.org who attended the 2011 IdeaFestival. In this guest post, he passes along some of his thoughts on IF 2011. Thanks Max! - Wayne

It's been a little over a month since IdeaFestival 2011, but I'd rather think of it as 11 months until the next one. That's a central theme of IdeaFestival, of course: looking ahead to what's coming next. Whether it's what experiments in space can teach us about medicine or what the infinite universe can teach us about ourselves, the topics discussed at IdeaFestival all face forward. You can't help but leave inspired. And, if you're lucky, a month later you'll still remember a few things. Here are five ideas I picked up during IdeaFestival that I haven't been able to shake:

Elizabeth Scarpf and the Power of Persistence
Don't know who Elizabeth Scharpf is? You will. The young founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), Scharpf changing the lives of women in Rwanda by creating low-cost sanitary pads—a glaring need around the world. Just tremendously inspiring work. But there was another part of her talk that I haven't been able to shake: once she had the idea for inexpensive pads, Scharpf threw herself utterly and completely into the making it a reality. She volunteered at conference after conference to network, cold called anyone she could think of, worked long hours for nothing. The takeaway: you can have no shame if you're trying to change the world.

Tim Donaghy's Can Teach You About Something Other than Gambling
For the non-sports fans out there, a quick primer: a few years ago, Tim Donaghy, an NBA referee, was busted for betting on basketball games. That's about as cardinal a sin as you can find in the sports world—information from Donaghy was being passed along to the mob—and he was rightly vilified. What happened next, though, is where the story gets interesting: Donaghy didn't decamp to some cave somewhere and hide. Instead, he started talking about what he'd done. He did it in a book, he did on 60 Minutes, and he did it at this year's IdeaFestival. The guy stood on stage and told his story, (numerous) warts and all. Yes, he was selling books. And, yes, he had the uncomfortable air of someone desperate for forgiveness. But he was also sending a message to everyone in that room: even if we make a mistake—even if it's an epic, catastrophic, front-page-news mistake—the story isn't over.

Wes Moore Is Going to Be President
I'm not going to try to put into words the hold Wes Moore had over the room. Let's just say it was total. The guy has a riveting story—you should read it for yourself. Or just wait until, say, 2028, when he's campaigning for the White House.

We're Not Alone
Here's a challenge: condense the entirety of humanity's understanding of physics into a 50-minute lecture, use that knowledge to make the case for infinite universes, and try to have anyone in the crowd understand what you're talking about. That was what Suketu Bhavsar tried to do, and while he wasn't entirely successful—an embarrassing amount went right over my head—I latched onto one part of his talk. The laymen's version: OK, so say the universe is infinite. (Just give me and Suketu the benefit of the doubt.) That means there is another world exactly like ours. There's another you. There's another me. And, while I know this sounds kinda ridiculous, I've found myself taking comfort in that idea over the last month. Particularly when I screw up. There's something comforting about knowing that, even if I put my foot in my mouth or bungled a presentation or missed a deadline, there's another me out there who knocked it out of the park.

Louisville Is a Foodie Paradise
A short list of things I loved about Louisville: the bourbon, running by the river, the bourbon, the Muhammed Ali Museum, the bourbon. But the hands-down highlight of my non-Festival activities was a dinner at the Brown Hotel hotel prepared in the kitchen by executive chef Laurent Geroli. I'll avoid the details—no need to make you jealous—but, trust me, folks in Louisville know how to cook and they know how to eat. It was a meal I'll never forget.

Same goes for the IdeaFestival. See you there in 11 months.

Max Linsky

Report: 65 percent of near-future jobs not yet invented

If you're living through the Great Recession and thinking there are larger forces at work, you're right. Squeezed in the middle by relentless automation, employees are feeling the pinch. The link between technology investment and employment growth seems to have been permanently severed, according to Chris Jablonski at ZDNet. Then there's this:

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of today’s grade school kids will end up at a job that hasn't been invented yet. It may behoove educators, academic institutions, and policy makers to prepare them for tomorrow’s challenges by harnessing the power of computing, collective intelligence and human ingenuity.

Frankly, I don't know how "educators and policy makers" as a group can react nimbly enough to make useful suggestions, and, contrarian that I am, I'm not sure I'd take their advice in any case. But if 65 percent of jobs twenty or thirty years hence haven't even been created yet, the way I see it, there is still time to get the world's first space-based art-science collaborative - ahem - off the ground.

Jablonski links to Douglas Rushkoff's piece, "Are Jobs Obsolete?" And for some really big-picture perspective, Rushkoff links to the dreadlocked digital-skeptic, Jaron Lanier.

Like many of you, I feel the pinch. I wonder whether I'm still useful, and work harder than I ever have to remain so. Jablonski ends his piece on a positive note: "thinking, dreaming, learning, communicating and feeling" are human, not machine, skills. So take heart. Like you, I don't know what those new jobs will be, but whether employed or self-employed, entrepreneur or entry level, meaning making will always have a place.

Wayne