Ariel Waldman: Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy

At the heart of something good there should be a kernel of something undefinable. And if you can define it, or claim to be able to define it, then in a sense you have missed the point. John Peel

Ariel Waldman announces that she has fallen in love with an image of the Milky Way. It was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, an instrument that records in the infrared.

The view of the Milky Way she displays is edge-on, and Spitzer is able, in effect, to reach into the center of the our galactic home. Pointing to a picture of the Earth, she says, "Hi, I'm Ariel Waldman, I live about 27,000 light years" from the center of that image.

Charming.

As recently as 1924, people thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy in existence. Now we know there are billions. At the center of our galaxy is a super-massive black hole. "I'm fascinated by these because they're the hackers of the universe, they take raw material and make derivatives."

NASA employees, engineers and astronauts were, she says, the original hackers. They were enthusiastic, and in the age of Mercury and Gemini, of the right stuff and Apollo, they were young, averaging 25 years of age. "They were amateurs," she adds, and shows a picture of other amateurs in the history of science like Albert Einstein. That combination convinced Walldman that she too could do space. "I was amateur," she realized. Today the average NASA employee is decidedy middle aged with - my parenthetical - aspirations to match.

Segueing into Science Hack Day, an event for which she is probably more well known, she says that its mission is to regain a bit of the old excitement, of sheer possibility. The people who show up at one of those events are amateurs. They don't HAVE to know where their idea or project is going. She describes several hacks - building a wind tunnel to test a series of letters that will make a new typeface; or a lamp that lights up each time an asteroid passes the Earth; or a mask that would simulate synesthesia, aptly named, given the creepy image she display, "syneseizure;" or a cocktail made with DNA. On the latter she issues a warning - "it tastes disgusting."

What if, she continues, one could listen to mapped sounds of high energy particle collisions? And in fact, she points out, one such instrument has been created, "particle wind chimes." There's more: given license to roam freely, to make new and maybe unorthodox connections, the creator of the particle wind chimes may have created something with real diagnostic potential in the hands of physicists. Formerly abstract concepts have been made available to the senses of researchers.

Returning to the theme of space, she goes on to question our assumptions about Mars rovers - why should they be car-like and not tumbleweed-like? By treating science as a creative act, hackers, makers and amateur scientists like Waldman understand that the creative act is an act of courage, and that failure, as Lance Hosey pointed out earlier in the week, is just information.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman

Beth Comstock: The Next Industrial Revolution

"What we've seen change so far is nothing compared to what we're about to see," says Beth Comstock at IdeaFestival 2013. Comstock, currently the Chief Marketing Officer at GE, has been the creative force behind marketing some big initiatives at NBC, CBS, and even helped with the formation of Hulu.

Comstock is referring to the "meshing of two worlds," software and hardware, and how that's going to bring about a "next industrial revolution." 3-D printing, she says, is opening doors, "making things that were previously unimaginable." The "industrial internet," connecting machines, has huge economic implications -- it means that "a machine doesn't need service. It can get a software upgrade anywhere in the world."

Businesses, Comstock says, care more about being socially responsible, and "need more creative brains," even though they're "scared of them. They just don't know what to do with them."

She discusses the power of "open challenges," or a "Match.com for creative ideas." It's kind of like crowdsourcing for innovation. Can we design sleeker, lighter products? Can we help save airlines money by trimming time off of a plane's descent? "People want to be part of a challenge that helps mankind."

"When you have this global brain," Comstock says, "it's about giving inventors the ability to access intellect in new ways." It's the idea of "industry improv."

"What it means for all of us," Comstock says, is that "the future of data is going to change."

#IF13 #staycurious @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Image: Meagan Jordan

Farmacology: Daphne Miller Can't Stop Thinking About Dirt

Daphne Miller can't stop thinking about dirt.

Miller, doctor and author of "Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health & Healing" is interested in the connection between farming ecosystems and medicine. She wants us to be "medical ecologists." Instead of thinking about our human bodies in the same way that we once thought about farming -- solely in terms of productivity, fixing individual problems as they arise -- we need to think of our bodies as whole, complex systems.

Miller has become frustrated with the way that modern healthcare often employs "diagnose and conquer" strategy, prescribing medications that may solve a single issue while ignoring root causes. She wanted to find a holistic approach to medicine. And to learn more about the human body's ecosystem, she visited sustainable, bio-dynamic farms all over the country to see how they were faring.

"If you look at farming methods and get more holistic than organic, which is bio-dynamic, you get more microbes," Miller says, "which means more nurients."

Farmers who turn away from conventional farming in favor of holistic methods, Miller has learned, have seen incredible results. Not only can there be a higher financial reward, but there are healthier, happier plans and livestock as a result. And children living on farms hardly ever get allergies. The secret? Raw milk.

"That's what's so interesting," Miller says. "As we lose contact with biodiversity, allergic diseases increase around the world."

Just like we heard from guerilla gardener Ron Finley, (hyperlink here?) Miller believes in the power of urban gardening. But it's not just the product, the vegetables, that are important: the physical act of gardening has a profound impact on those who do it. Urban farming is part of a holistic approach to health -- sunlight, social connection, a sense of purpose, have incredible positive effects on communities.

Last lesson -- chicken stress is similar to human stress. Pastured hens that can run free are able to "form bonds," and "have control." "What's good for the hen is good for us," Miller says. Low-grade, constant stress that even occurs in "free-range, organic" farms is incredibly harmful. 

"It's all part of the same system," Miller reminds us. "We are soil."

#IF13 #staycurious @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Photo: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman

Architect Lance Hosey - What Do We Love?

Beginning by dryly saying that "he'll just ramble" and then, pausing - "see if you can pick up the pieces" - architect Lance Hosey procedes not to ramble at all, but to build a case for design as properly belonging to ordinary people not the designer, to the natural sciences and not necessarily art.

Design is everywhere, he says, but it's too often driven by ego. Good design should not be whatever the designer says it is. The reason is relatively straightforward: how can we, the designers, be responsible for making truly great design if we can't say what it is we're trying to make?

Appearing in New York Magazine, Hosey says that "When Buildings Attack" is his favorite piece on architecture. Among the flawed designs, it describes one building in London, which Hosey says reflects enough light to "melt cars" and fry an egg on the adjacent sidewalks.

Dispensing with the idea that green design is boring design, Hosey says it can call forth an emotional response as well. He discusses the golden ratio, fractal geometry as having a natural appeal because our biology has been shaped to respond to those forms. "We relax" in the presence their presence. As a bonus, they can offer an enormous amount of information to the human eye, and, in fact, many consumer and everyday objects use the Golden Ratio to ensure a certain appeal.

"Environmental design is redundant because all design takes place in an environment."

Just by using fabric in fluid-shaped concrete pieces, designers and architects should, but generally don't, see concrete forms as a place to innovate. Speaking about that, Hosey also talks about what designers can learn from the latest findings in neuroscience, which quickly adds, "architects are barely aware of." But now we have the "mechanics" to study the science of emotional response.

The question: to whom does architecture belong? Near the end of his presentation, Hosey throws up this conclusion, "In the end, we conserve only what we love" - Senegalese poet Baba Dioum

The question for designers: what - or who - do they love?

Wayne

Image: Amber Sigman

Rafe Sagarin - What the Octopus Teaches Us

What can an octopus teach us about learning?

Kicking off the mid-afternoon session at Day 1 of IdeaFestival, Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist, congressional advisor and author talked about how nature's symbiosis has implications for human-made heirarchical structures (think government operations, or college syllabi). Octopuses have different "brains" in each tentacle, with sensory abilities. 

Humans, Sagarin advises, should think about how to move away from the "central brain" system and think about how we can break down walls. 

This idea has been echoed in educational communities -- it's now acknowledged that in-class time can be used most effectively by saving the lectures as homework and engaging students in "homework" with the class time. Kind of a reverse-teaching model.

Sagarin keeps a syllabus for his class, but only because it's required by the Dean. At the beginning of class, he tells students to tear it up.

"There's more risk that way," he says. But in the end, it's worth it.

#staycurious #IF13 @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

@hope_reese