This week, I've been overwhelmed with other writing assignments and pinot-shaded distractions. I could take the easy route and just post links to Wendy's Training Rap videos and catchy 8-bit surrealism, but I'm waiting to consolidate the madness into a fresh hyperlink sequence (gamma!) for all you faithful readers.
For now, enjoy the Buckminster Fuller commemorative stamp (father of synergetics) and keep yer eyes peeled for new stuff tomorrow morning.
[thanks, Paul!]
Seventh Gift: Triangular and Quadrangular tablets of colored paper.
The Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring just completed a brilliant exhibit titled "Inventing Kindergarten." It traces the 19th century origins of this revolutionary education system back to a scientist named Friedrich Froebel, a visionary guy whose influence extended beyond pure pedagogy and into art and architecture.
Froebel's unique, holistic approach to educating children was based on the model of the crystal. And as curator of the Mineralogical Museum at the University of Berlin, he had a professional (some might say multidimensional) grasp of the crystal concept. From the Institute's site:
"Philosophically, kindergarten was grounded in Froebel’s belief in the Unity of all things and in the existence of simple laws and principles underlying nature’s apparent complexity. As Froebel saw it, the crystal was the archetypal form from which we could derive a model for all of nature. The child herself could be seen as a crystal... Froebel wrote that the role of education was to guide the development of the nascent, crystalline mind from “one-sidedness, individuality and incompleteness” toward “all-sidedness, harmony and completeness."
Part of his trailblazing efforts was the creation of "occupational gifts," known as "educational toys" in today's parlance. Made of paper, blocks, and string, the gifts were tools to encourage the "exploration of form." Check out this beautiful gallery of Froebel's gifts. Incredible, hand-made stuff that any kid would be excited to get (no batteries necessary).
Many more artifacts can be found at the Institute's gallery of archival materials. The students' paper weavings and geometric patterns oddly resemble modern designs and digital art. I can't wait to try some of these exercises with my own kids.
"Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered
impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy.
Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire
web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and
not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's
refusal to bow to Authority.
We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man's Original Virtue."
I really need to remember this the next time Max (my 2-year old) throws his granola on the sofa. He's getting at something deeper.
It's not just about the granola. His annoying little rebellious gesture of defiance, his nonverbal yell of "Screw you, Dad!", is perhaps the essence of what this site is all about.
I love ya, kiddo.
Essential reading for futurethinkers worldwide: the New York Times Magazine's 6th Annual Year in Ideas.
Steven Johnson and others chime in on topics ranging from taxation of virtual economies, boomerang spycams (they're invisible! and fit in your backpack!), indie sitcoms and the wheelchair car.
Each of the dozens of entries conveniently spans no more than 5 or 6 paragraphs. They're tasty, bite-size info chunks perfect for those of you too busy living your life in 2006 to pay any attention to all the blathering crap on the blogs. Enjoy.
Located in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is America's premier resource for freezing your head and/or body for possible reanimation in the distant future.
Alcor currently boasts 74 "members" who have undergone the postmortem vitrification process. Cooled to sub-zero temperatures, they're stored in liquid nitrogen cylinders (see below), patiently waiting for science to catch up with their transhumanist fantasies.
Alcor found itself in embroiled in a star-studded PR nightmare a couple years back. From the Wikipedia:
"In 2003, Sports Illustrated published allegations by an Alcor employee that the company had mishandled Ted Williams' head by drilling holes and accidentally cracking it. The story also reported that some of Williams' DNA was missing, possibly in connection with his son's desire to sell some of the DNA. Alcor denied the allegations, and explained that microscopic cracking can result as part of the process of freezing the head."
For a behind the scenes look at the facilities, check out the Things Magazine photo essay from a recent trip to Alcor HQ. I like the shot of the bookshelf: a collection of fairy tales, Catch-22, and Michio Kaku's Hyperspace all make an appearance. Delightful.
Visualizing higher dimensions doesn't have to be an exercise in rooty-tooty, fresh-n-fruity New Age navel gazing. It's a scientifically-valid effort with a colorful history, full of creeping tangents into Princeton baseball, Boolean algebra and the work of Salvador Dali. Hang with me here.
The morphic tesseract shown on the left is a handy way of revealing the fourth dimension. The Wikipedia describes it as "the 4-dimensional analog of the (3-dimensional) cube, where motion along the fourth dimension is often a representation for bounded transformations of the cube through time."
I'm no theoretical physicist, but I can appreciate that illustration. Credit for the discovery of the tesseract goes to 19th century mathematician Charles Hinton. In 1880, he published an article called "What is the Fourth Dimension?", effectively launching the multi-dimensionality craze throughout the western world. He suggested that the fourth dimension is time, which was later confirmed by Einstein's theory of relativity.
Of course, Hinton didn't have the luxury of animated GIFs to showcase his hypercubical ideas, so he turned to an available resource: colored cubes. This caught on with fin de siècle spiritualists who occupied themselves (pre-TV, remember) by mentally rotating the cubes. At least one individual is rumoured to have gone insane due to the tesseract. But just when his ideas were gaining traction, Hinton was kicked out of England on polygamy charges: in addition to his first wife, he also married the daughter of George Boole, founder of Boolean logic. He was soon hired in the states at Princeton, where he invented a gunpowder-powered machine capable of pitching baseballs at Princeton's team up to 70 mph. (From cubes to spheres... how geometric ;)
As Michio Kaku points out in Hyperspace, Hinton's contribution may be
"...his popularization of higher-dimensional figures using three methods: by examining their shadows, their cross-sections, and their unravellings. Even today, these three methods are the chief ways in which professional mathematicians and physicists conceptualize higher-dimensional objects in their work. The scientists whose diagrams appear in today's physics journals owe a small debt of gratitude to Hinton's work."
Hinton later showed up in a Borges short story, and his tesseract/hypercube appears in a typically weird Dali painting, Christus Hypercubus. Hinton's just one of those visual thinkers whose ideas overlap the spiritual and the scientific and whose research—later confirmed by the mainstream—continues to engage our media-soaked, 21st century minds.
[Animated tesseract via Miqel]
Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe (1973)
Paul Laffoley is a visionary artist from Boston.
He created the hybrid painting/illustration/diagram above. View a 5-page gallery of his work and bask in the hypnotic, multi-dimensional glow of clustered polyhedra that actually signify something. Fascinating stuff, full of mystery and speculation.
It's said that he explores possible, but not yet provable phenomena. Primordial vegetation, consciousness, matter, time vs eternity... no concept is off-limits. Makes sense that he was dismissed from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. (He studied architecture there in the 70s.) Laffoley eventually became an architect, and went on to design floors 15 to 45 in the north tower of the World Trade Center.
He parallels his day job with some serious moonlighting as a cosmic vortex painter. A self-diagnosed autistic, he lost his brother to autism a few years ago. Uh, and his father was a clairvoyant. (Here's a movie where he explains some of this stuff.) His transdisciplinary research is inspiring, his imagination seemingly boundless. His weirdness, delightful.
I’m less than halfway through McKenzie Wark’s playful new book, GAM3R 7H30RY, yet I’m already firing off neurons and activating those frontal lobe spaces normally roused by Serious Critical Theorists of the Late 20th Century.
GAM3R 7H30RY is basically an experimental book about computer games. Katamari Damacy, Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City, The Sims... Wark uses each game as a microscope to examine our increasingly media-saturated lives, and the results are pretty stellar.
For example, Wark suggests that we're living in "gamespace" -- his word for our social reality governed by a "military-entertainment complex." He examines the furtive power relations present in games and their effect on gamers' perceptions of reality. And he kicks off the Katamari Damacy chapter with a laser-guided reference to Sisyphus, the mythological stone-pusher, which totally makes sense if you've ever played the game.
The "book" itself is formatted in sets of cards, arranged by chapter, with a running sidebar of useful (and often critical) commentary. Book-as-blog, sort of. A networked text exploding with ideas and fractal possibilities. Just go read it. Dive in anywhere. Comment on it. People will be writing/talking about this one, I promise, even if -- like me -- they rarely play the games.
When you're done with that bit, check out Klosterman's killer new piece in Esquire, The Lester Bangs of Video Games. Wark might just fit the bill.
