It's snowing in Kentucky this morning and my mind turns toward this kind of slip and slide.
Don't you wish you could fly?
Have a great day, wherever you are.
Wayne
Sometimes you just feel small
Sooner or later it happens. You find yourself hopelessly outmatched by that uber-talented/energetic/bright soul who effortlessly connects the dots. I can relate. Working with the IdeaFestival, feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard - that's why I liked the advice recently handed out by Ben Casnocha on his blog, pointing out a letter from a high school senior applying to MIT who was discouraged by the sheer brainpower at that institution. A comment on Reddit, where those misgivings were expressed, tells the student that what he's approaching, irrespective of intelligence, is a decision about feeling inadequate. In other words, buck up.
Casnocha says it's not enough to simply resolve to do better. Much more important - and a lesson, I might add, that I've learned much later in life - is to think honestly about what makes each of us unique. There are many, many kinds of intelligences. For some, logic and reason are predominate. Others can think visually and spatially. Others have an effortless emotional intelligence, and can pick out the tiniest social cues and respond with the right words. They're invaluable friends. "No one," as Casnocha, " is smarter than you in every possible way."
Wayne
One marshmallow now, two if you wait
Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.
Writing about those New Year's resolutions, Jonah Lehrer asks why human will power is so feeble:
Consider this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, a behavioral economist at Stanford University. He recruited several dozen undergraduates and divided them into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then, they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.
Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Shiv, is that all those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain – they were a 'cognitive load' – making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.
What's limited, as Lehrer explains, is not willpower, but attention. Direct it elsewhere and the odds that you will forsake that extra piece of cake go up significantly. Read more about this willpower trick here, and check out that first kid's expression in the video above. He's a gonner.
Wayne
Stunning! Painting Goldfish, layer by layer, in resin
In addition to just being beautifully created, this film posted at the art site Colossal, illustrates how one Japanese artist layers up his work in resin and compares his painting - and he is painting, the Goldfish are not real - to the process of 3-D printing.
Wayne
Are you using the Internet correctly?
Are you using the Internet correctly? The winner of Nicholas Carr's sentence of the week, the suggestion that there is a correct use of the network drew a predictably acerbic response from the author of The Shallows.
The problem of course is that the network is too big to know. Information has always been part of a larger whole, so it's curious to me that anyone might be fooled by the network's enervating presence into believing it can be used this way to produce serendipity or that way to generate bound knowledge. Such claims only make a fool of the claimant. Yes, more than ever, what's knowable may be known. But it's never complete. It's that sort of in these pixelated times that divides today's popular culture between the solemn and the sarcastic, and makes plausible The Onion's claim to be "America's Finest News Source." It's that sort of - my view - that makes artists and conceptualizers more important than ever.
Carr's post is titled "The serendipity machine is low on oil" and brought to mind the commercial here for the Nissan Leaf.
Wayne