Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.
This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about:
enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International Space Station. Technically, he IS out of our atmosphere and orbiting in space, though, he is only BARELY off-world. Consider the resources and history it took just to get him THIS far.
Meanwhile, he engages in this arguably “unproductive” act of pure beauty, playing a sonata written by a composer who’s been dead almost 200 years.
Ever so slowly but surely, this clip seems to make it all worth it:
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I’d take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney’s with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it’s not really possible to cherry pick like this—mainly because a city’s qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place’s cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who believed that “new technology can never substitute for human values.”
…means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out.
Inspired by McLuhan, Neil Postman founded the Program in Media Ecology at New York University in 1971. He described it as:
Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
I was reading Michael Dahn’s blog the other day and found this particularly worth re-posting here:
“We can only lose what we cling to!â€
– Buddha
Many of us live by a set of beliefs accumulated over the course of our lifetime. We use these rules to navigate the possibilities of life. Some of them are positive rules that save us (e.g. “Don’t touch a hot stoveâ€) but some of them are limiting (e.g. “I can’t do it. It’s too hardâ€). Sometimes we have to stop and ask ourselves if the limitations in our life are self-imposed or actual. I believe that many times the rules by which we find ourselves constrained are self-imposed.
When life appears to be unfair, when bad things happen to good people, this is when you have the opportunity to give up or to change the rules of the game. It’s these game changing moves that enable you to conquer your fears in new and creative ways. You can change the rules of the game in several ways, here are but a few:
1. Change your beliefs: I live by the mantra that “nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes longer.†Why is it that we limit ourselves by what we think is impossible? Why do we obey the rules of our belief when our opponent does not? Why is it that we enable others to walk over us? Only by changing your belief can you break down the barriers that you have constructed and consider the possibility of out-of-the-box innovation.
2. Change the rules: In life many of us abide by a path that we feel has been laid our for us or is predestined to occur. We get frustrated when we feel deviations from that path in the same way we feel the rumble strip on the edge of the road. These path barriers move us in a direction that we “feel†is the “right path.†We cling to our path because it has been a part of us for so many years. Only when you accept variance in your path are you free and open to new possibilities. By accepting change and alternative outcomes we free ourselves to new futures and alternative happiness.
When we stop clinging to self-imposed beliefs and prescriptive paths we free within ourselves the possibility of the impossible.
Here are a few new rules that you may want to consider.
1. “Be the change you want to see in the world.†– Mahatma Gandhi
2. Do Something
3. “To thine own self be true.†– Shakespeare
4. Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves.
5. Don’t live by anyone else’s rules, go make your own.
If you’ve ever fumbled around with ffmpeg and other tools, there is a superior alternative I was turned onto today by Paul Gregoire via his blog: Xuggler!
The Media Tools are particularly of use to folks like me – how suhweeet is this?
Clicking on the thumbnail below or here or there will activate JTrack3D and it will appear in its own window and begin loading a database of over 900 satellites.
What you will see (presuming the system you’re on supports Java) is a plot in 3-dimensions showing the position of these satellites. Choose them all from the pull-down menu.
If your system isn’t currently supporting Java, skip the conniption, there are also some satellites that can be viewed without it:
David Byrne is spot on with his thoughts for a perfect city:
I was reading Michael Dahn’s blog the other day and found this particularly worth re-posting here:
Are you a human? Do you like to swim? How about free-diving? How about static free diving?
