End 2011 with these Great Reads

If, like a lot of people, you're feeling particularly lonely in the office today, or are just looking forward to some time off between now and the New Year, Longform.org has posted its best of 2011 in non-fiction. It couldn't be easier to transfer them to your Kindle, or take in clean, uncluttered text with Readability right there at Longform. 

For other curated lists, check out the selections from the editors of Mental Floss, Salon's Best Books of 2011 and the 10 Best Books from the New York Times.

The IdeaFestival blog, like many of you, will be taking a short break until Jan. 2. But please follow us @ideafestival on Twitter, or on our Facebook page for a few links between now and then. We'll see you next year!

Wayne

Gladwell: Innovators "take social risks"

Innovation may not require a big bank account, but it surely demands a different kind of personal capital - a willingness to disregard criticism. Malcolm Gladwell, speaking in advance of a book due out in 2013:

In all the instances he cited, innovation came from people who are on the fringes and that enabled them to make this difference. Gladwell's theory seems simple, the way he explains it. While most people dwell on the genius of innovators, the real risk they take is social, he said.

'Innovators need more than idea; they need a thick skin,' he said, illustrating the point with anecdotes spanning breakthrough in cancer treatment, the sub-prime crisis and the making of furniture retailer IKEA. 'Being an outsider gives you the motivation. I see this time and again in periods of innovation,' Gladwell said.

His upcoming book will also address the "unexplored dangers to elite education," according to the linked piece. The thick-skinned essayist and former Yale associate professor William Deresiewicz has written on the same topic, wondering if answering all the little questions equipped his students to ask the big ones.

A bit off topic, but when you're done with that read Deresiewicz's Solitude and Leadership.

Wayne

From Borges to the Borg Queen: Prototyping a future

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, 
imagination points to all we might yet discover and create - Albert Einstein

Has science and technology come to a point where what we can create is only constrained by our imagination?

Produced at the Creative Science Foundation conference last July, this video explains how cross-disciplinary thinking, and in particular "science fiction prototyping," may help supply a positive context for technology and a technology-suffused future that we'll all share.

Because science and technology do not exist in isolation, the point is not to free associate, but to tease out the implications of current and near-future technologies, and to put a story to them.

Related, creatively approaching the future was also at the top of IBM tech evangelist David Barnes' mind at IdeaFestival 2011, and while he discussed literature and the arts as a method for thinking about positive change, he also recommended an unusual approach that IBM regularly encourages its employees to take to nurture their individual creativity - unplugging.

If you like this kind of thinking, check out the interviews with Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) and Will.i.am at The Tomorrow Project.

Wayne

Video: Kris Kimel describes IF origins, hints about 2012

Renee Blodgett from We Blog the World turned her camera on Kris Kimel late in the afternoon on the last day of the 2011 festival to interview the IdeaFestival founder on the origins of the nerdocalypse. Give it a watch.

At the end of the brief interview, Kris hints at one of the presenters for next year, who, as it happens, appears on a very popular television show and has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. I'd say more. I also really like what working with the festival.

Wayne

What Possible Difference Could Kepler 22-b Make?

You are living in a golden age of discovery.

In its short tenure in Earth-trailing orbit staring unceasingly on the stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way and looking for the tell tale blink-blink of other worlds momentarily blotting the star light reaching its open aperture, Kepler has expanded to 2,326 the number of candidate planets known to us. Of those, it's believed that 139 may circle their parent suns in orbits compatible with the presence of liquid water.

Over time, ground based scopes will conduct follow up observations to confirm the finds.

Isn't it amazing that in the short period of time that we've been able to detect these new worlds with improved astronomical techniques - a mere dozen years or so - information pointing to their existence now routinely pops up in the data?

Even if we find Earth-like worlds with watery surfaces, what is the real world, practical application of knowing that another planet like ours orbits in the habitable zone of its parent sun? After all, at distances ranging from tens to hundreds of light years away, no one from this period in our history will ever see them at close range. Still, as physicist Brian Cox explains to the BBC in response to the discovery of the most Earth-like of the most recent batch candidates, Kepler 22-b, it's one of the great questions ever. "Are we alone?"

The answer is illuminating either way.

For if we can find life elsewhere, let's say microbial life in the irradiated soil of Mars or beneath the ice of Europa or in the methane seas of Titan, to take three examples, then life may be a common feature of the universe. On the other hand, if we find no evidence of primitive life nearby, or locate terran hosts like ours with instruments like Kepler and, should it be flown, the Hubble successor, the James Web Telescope, would knowing we are alone in this vast and unreachable darkness then change how we behave?

Give the linked audio a listen.

Wayne

Image Credit for Kepler's field of view: Carter Roberts / Eastbay Astronomical Society.