"Space Brewers" work on Cut-and-Paste Cities

Drawing heavily from the maker movement, inspired by urban spaces and deploying artists' sensibilities, James Tichenor and Josh Walton of Rockwell Group Labs just may be working on the first drafts of the late 21st Century city.

By taking what is "native" to physical spaces (intimacy, sociability) and screen-based culture (cut-and-past ease, endless variability) they are blending reality, an idea that challenges the idea of "space" altogether.

Their work is still in its infancy, but it strikes me as the next frontier in urbanism, a way to not only make the social graph more interesting, but to continually foster new encounters, the social currency that has made cities such economic powerhouses.

The two also draw inspiriation from ealy "home brew" computing clubs, and plan to release similarly-themed "space brew" models for the blended realities they envision. One can only wonder how architects, interactive artists and progressive urban governments might use these kits, but it's an attractive idea that pulls from digital prototyping and modeling, perhaps the last great gift of the 20th century.

Wayne

James Tichenor & Josh Walton. Rockwell Group from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

The truth about dishonesty: Dan Ariely gets RSA Animate treatment

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely gets the RSA Animate treatment.

Known for his work on human motivation, or as he puts it in this video, our "flexible cognitive psychology," his most recent book, "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty," goes beyond simple admonishments against corner-cutting to point out the ways cheaters - that would be you and me - can rationalize what we think (as long as we're thinking it!) and how cheating can be discouraged.  

Prior to his most recent book, Ariely wrote the best selling "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions."

His blog is here.

Wayne

Ray Bradbury: '''Science Fiction' the art of the obvious"

Finally back from a vacation that featured ample time spent by the Atlantic beaches and salt marshes of South Carolina armed with a Kindle loaded with essays, profiles and other Longform editorial picks, I want to share this interview with the late Ray Bradury, who appeared as a holograph (yes, really!) at the 2007 IdeaFestival. 

It was a night of magic. He talked about his life as a boy, of how Mr. Electro made everything seem possible, of the very early professional years pounding away at a typewriter as a writer of pulp fiction. He described a mind still restless, still searching, still writing many decades later - a mind, moreover, unconcerned with popular opinion.

One got the feeling he said exactly what he wanted to say.

And along the way he shared intimate details about how the Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 came to be, of his pulse-pounding love for libraries, and, despite still showing the effects of a relatively recent stroke, he captivated the audience with a passion and zest for life that could hardly have dimmed. Some of the stories he relayed that night also appear in the Paris Review piece, but it was the riff below on the nature of creativity, of possibility in "Ray Bradbury: The Art of Fiction No. 203" that grabbed my attention. I don't recall him addressing "science fiction" as "the art of the obvious" in Louisville, but because the following paragraphs go to the very nature of discovery and the importance of ideas, and thus, to the IdeaFestival, I had to share them with you. Are you ready?

Everything can change in an instant. Bradbury:

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again....

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career I had thought to write as story about woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women's liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I'd lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

Catch the entire interview at Paris Review, or grab it Longform.

What "obvious" things do you see today that might change everything?

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Watch Record Breaking Leap from Edge of Space

Rising roughly 7,000 feet higher than his targeted 120,000 feet, watch Felix Baumgartner shatter the records for highest crewed balloon ascent then, preposterously, take the short cut back to Earth.

This video begins well into his capsule egress checklist, which incidentally, was called out by the man who set the prior record in 1960, Joe Kittinger, and shows his exit and dramatic tumbling footage of a man free falling from the edge of space while breaking the speed of sound.

Baumgartner was in freefall for nearly four and one-half minutes before opening his chute at around 6,000 feet, and steering to a safe spot in the New Mexico desert.

Red Bull Stratos' epic leap advanced the state of the art for space suits - human exposure at the altitudes Baumgartner reached would flash boil all bodily fluids - as well as escape systems' design that will be useful to other explorers.

It also transfixed an estimated eight million pairs of eyeballs during the live-streamed event yesterday afternoon, a number I'm pretty certain pleased the sponsor of this historic event.

Waye

The IdeaFestival Is About This Too

I recalled this older blog post while talking with Kevin Smokler, Cariwyl Hebert and Jeff Rider at IdeaFestival 2012 last month. Because it expresses why I think the festival is so important, and perhaps to put rhetorical bow on what just went down, I thought it worthwhile to re-post a lightly edited version.

The blog will go silent next week while I take a few days away to recharge - be back soon.

Three years ago in a fit of exquisite timing I left a full time job with some pretty sweet benefits to start my own business. The IdeaFestival was my first client. At the time, I had learned from long exposure to information technology professionals that we were all publishers. One constant complaint in the rather large networks they managed revolved around the unauthorized use of those resources - given the means and opportunity, people did a lot of talking, and some of it not at all welcome.

Well that was just perfect. I had some things to say.

About that time, I had the good fortune to meet Kris Kimel, who founded the festival, and I explained that it might also want to talk out loud about ideas and their importance to "innovation that matters," its core purpose. And even though I'm sure he didn't quite understand this blogging business, to his credit he agreed.

In truth, there are people who understand social media far better than me, who know how to search-engine optimize digital nits down to the last file and meta-ID, who can program a web site to reach out and grab people by their Google-ad loving throat. I'm not one of them.

No, what I wanted more than anything was to be involved with an event where all kinds of people celebrated all kinds of things interesting and new. We introverts are like that. Appeals to our minds can bring our feet to a stop. And as the son of a pastor who has lived in quite a few different places from Louisiana to Minnesota, Kentucky was my home.

It's a place that I've come to appreciate over the years. It once was the first frontier, known for an expansiveness of thought, the belief that over mountains and in the fog-shrouded valleys on the Cumberland plateau a new beginning could be had. Descending the gap and buoyed on the Ohio, these visionaries and technologists built kilns and furnaces, they stacked trees, one over the other, to build walls to keep the cold at bay. They wrote letters to the public in Boston and Philadelphia.

Today I often wonder whether its descendants know that engineers are inspired by birds to design flocks of machines, or in a time gripped by so much fear, whether they really believe that the next step will not be the last - never mind if that belief calls on the extra-natural or not - or that our self-aware biology is still one gaping, breath-taking mystery to philosophers and biologists alike, or that 500 other worlds and counting orbit distant suns beside the yellow dwarf we know so well. Do they know that golden ages lie ahead? Do they know that doughty robots have sighted fountains near Saturn, or that oceans may spread across the deep below Enceladus or Europa, and that life clings to sulfur vents in the crushing depths of our own oceans, or that lately, some think that life may loiter in the thick orange atmosphere of Titan? 

Similarly, do people outside Kentucky know about the contentment found in fitting seashell-ed limestone rock wedged from soil inches deep? Do they know that these sturdy dry laid walls still line fields in the bluegrass with nought but gravity for an assist, the same implacable force studied by physicists? Do they understand that story and music runs thick as a washed July night in these southern highlands, because, far from the conventions of Boston and Philadelphia and safe in their redoubts, of course the explorers would send up sound and story? It's the normal respiration of any society able to recognize its good fortune.

Sadly, for many people thinking about the future delivers one punch to the gut after another. Science makes its best always-subject-to-revision effort to describe reality, and much too often ordinary people will lodge their complaints against it before beating a retreat in this wired, wired world to whatever and whomever will offer solace. And the art! Can't the meaning be clear? It's all just so much to digest, these changes.

I've learned from many people at the IdeaFestival. From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I learned history will occasionally deliver overwhelming news from the clear blue. It just happens. I learned from Jane McGonigal that games can be used to make a better reality rather than as a means of escape. I learned from Teller that knowing secrets behind the curtain didn't diminish the joy of staring slack jawed at dancing golden spheres. I learned from Burt Rutan that with supreme imagination and determination, we can trip to space in safety and return in comfort. Someday, I'll do that. The elfin and poised Daniel Tammet argued during the most recent IdeaFestival that when we think in similes and puns, we're thinking not unlike a savant. I learned that his prodigious mathematical and language abilities are not so far removed from yours or mine.

I learned that there isn't a mind to waste, that when these explorers, these visionairies, these westward-movers describe new truths, their language touches - just touches - a single whole that in some sense will always be beyond reach. It's not because what's real is unknowable. On the contrary. It's because what's real is mind-bendingly big, and the mirrored snap, crackle and pop that occurs in my brain one week every fall in Louisville is merely a vanishing, if thrilling, approximation. I've learned, most importantly, that the festival is not an "either, or" after all.

It's about "this too."

Wayne