Crossroads Dispatches

whenever a mind is simple - Emerson

"Whenever a mind is simple and receives divine wisdom, old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Sharing a short and sweet excerpt as I'm running out the door. Finished this week, Rocket Boys--now on my short list of favorite books. It's a first person account of a group of high school kids inspired by Sputnik to learn rocket science on their own in a small mining town.

This passage below takes place Thanksgiving weekend 1959 in Coalwood, West Virginia. (Yes, it's a true story.)

And happy gratefulness to all of you today. (Bonus, I'm launching--nope, not a rocket--a pop-up art project Penny for your Charms that urges you to also walk on water. Hope you can join in over the next month as it unfolds.)

I used up almost all of my [propellant material] zinc dust loading the Auk XXIII. Getting more was a problem. The BMCA [the boys' rocket club] treasury was bare. Still, I wasn't terribly worried about it. I just had this belief that whenever I needed anything to build my rockets, somehow it was going to be there, provided by the Lord or whatever foolish angels had taken on the BCMA as a project. O'Dell said he'd think about a way to get us some money.

. . . I was tense as I began the coundown. Although Quentin was confident, I was a little afraid of the big rocket. I took a deep breath and turned the firing switch on the professional-looking console Billy and Sherman had built. 

. . . There was no sign of our rocket at all. It had simply vanished. Quentin rang up and reported the same result downrange. A towering funnel of smoke gradually drifted over us. Auk XXIII was up there somewhere. What if it came down on the crowd or on us? What if it went uprange and landed in Coalwood again?

"I see it!" Billy yelped. Good old sharp-eyed Billy!

"Where?"

"There!"

It was just a dot, but it grew, and it was downrange, although veering toward Rocket Mountain. It hit the top of a big tree, which shivered from the impact, as if to let us know it had caught our rocket. Picking up our shovels, we ran down the slack, the crowd cheering us as we went past.

"Forty-two seconds," Roy Lee cried breathlessly as we ran.

"Seven thousand fifty-six feet," both Quentin and I called out at about the same moment, both of us capable now of working out the calculation in our heads. It was our highest rocket yet, but it wasn't what my nozzle design had predicted. "What happened?" I worried as we pounded down the slack. "According to the equations, it should have gone three thousand feet higher."

"Don't know," Quentin puffed. "Have to look at the rocket."

Billy led us up the mountain, weaving through the trees and bursting through a line of thick rhododendron into a green glade beneath a ridge. Auk XXVIII was buried there, up to its fins in soft, wet loam. O'Dell looked around and held up his hand. "Stop, boys," he ordered. "Don't trample this place!"

We pulled up short. "Why?"

He dropped to his knees beside a big oak and dug carefully with his shovel, pulling up a gnarly root. "You know what this is?" 

When we all shrugged, he smiled. "Money."

"Not another crazy scheme," Roy Lee groaned.

"No, this one's for real. It's ginseng. This glade's full of it. I've never seen so much!"

"What the hell is ginseng?" Roy Lee asked.

"Indian medicine. People over in Japan and places like that think it cures everything."

"How much is it worth?"

"Well," he said as he dug up another root. "I don't think we're going to have to worry about zinc-dust money for a while."

I had vaguely heard of the stuff being dug around the county, but had never actually seen any of it before. I looked at the dirty ginseng specimen O'Dell handed me, thinking of God and whatever angels He had assigned to BCMA. "The Lord preserves the simple," was Mom's response when I mentioned this to her.

Another favorite excerpt from Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, Jr. in my Footnotes blog.

Photo credits: Rocket lighting (and explanation of rocket lightning) from Gizmodo.

it represents infinite potential - j. j. abrams

“Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.”– Margaret Shepard

I'll be in Los Angeles Friday attending Transmedia, Hollywood 2 at UCLA. If you're in the LA area, I'll be there for about a week afterwards as well--contact me if you'd like to meet up.

Going to LA completely on a hunch. Originally, I was going to wait until I had enough resources for this trip, but I could die waiting. Instead, I vowed as soon as I had enough for one-way fare, I'd commit. Booked April 7th 'randomly.' And, later, learn that the yearly Transmedia conference would be the following day.

Random? Risk? Or 'twas it inspired?

Well, we'll see. Let the chips fall as they may.

The word hazard features prominently in the title of the participatory storyline, I'm working on. (It's partly set in L.A.) The actual etymology of hazard is interesting, with Spanish and Arabic undertones: a game of chance. So it seems fitting that I take the first "chance." (Does chance actually exist?)

"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" - William Butler Yeats

This so-called "Hazard" story may unfold to become something immersive along the lines of this Vanished participatory 'game' (partnership of MIT and the Smithsonian) launching today, April 4th.  

Vanished invites middle-school kids to explore a make-believe mystery in a narrative setting as they participate by doing science.

Science in the classroom is a far cry from the exploratory nature of science in the field. Same goes for our own lives--it's not exactly found in books, blogs or workshops. I want to do Life and expand its mysteries, not be lectured at.

“Current science instruction relies too heavily on memorization and activities with predetermined outcomes causing many kids to lose interest in science and have misconceptions about what it means to be a scientist,” said Scot Osterweil of MIT Education Arcade. -- via ArtDaily.org

Reading The Art of Immersion, by Frank Rose, I was quite taken by the snippet where J.J. Abrams (for a person that doesn't own a television set, I was pretty hooked on Lost) is talking about infinite possibility.

". . . Abrams described his lifelong infatuation with Tannen's Magic Mystery Box, a $15 cardboard box he had bought at a New York magic shop as a kid. He never opened it, though it sits even now on a shelf in his office."

"I realized I haven't opened it because it represents something important to me," he explained at TED. "It represents infinite potential. It represents hope. It represents possibility. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do whatever it is that I do, is find myself drawn to infinite possibility and that sense of potential."

Mystery, he went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. What are stories if not mystery boxes? What is Lost if not a mystery box? Star Wars? What creates mystery if not the deliberate withholding of information?

... "I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you," Abrams said, "because ultimately, you know, the mystery box is all of us."

I must admit, I know I would have had to open the Magic Mystery Box--especially when I was a kid. And then go find another treasure to open.... one box leading to the next.... surprise after surprise.

p.s. All new (and current) Encanto newsletter subscribers are gifted with their very own Magic Mystery Box via snail mail through April 24th... a melange* of tailor-selected found objects and handmade inspiration from moi. You are highly encouraged to OPEN the box!  Infinite possibility is infinite--so there's so much more where that came from.

* Definition of MÉLANGE: a mixture often of incongruous elements

ART CREDITS: Pandora by John William Waterhouse. Pandora’s name means “all gifts.” Psyche Opening the Golden Box, (detail) also by Waterhouse.

really FREE free association (or why Charlan Nemeth rocks)

"Too much agreement kills a chat." - Eldridge Cleaver

Most people assume that dissenting viewpoints squash utopian visions of collaboration and teamwork. (Beware that compromise is not collaboration.)

I watched bits and pieces of an animated movie last night as I was cooking called, Happy Feet. In it, a young penguin dares to contradict the tribal elders and the wisdom of the crowd (funny, his name is Mumble yet he speaks up) to claim that the dwindling fish supplies are caused by the "aliens" he's seen (i.e. humans).

Oh, and he loves to tap dance, which I guess is a definite no-no where this young Emperor penguin hails from. One of the chiefs declares forcefully, "Dissent leads to division and division leads us to doom!"

Typical. The young penguin is immediately exiled.

Typical. "Many deal with conflicting opinions by shutting off the conversation" and "people assume that truth lies in numbers," I'd just read that earlier...

... in a research paper titled, Rogues and Heroes: The Value of Dissent, by University of California at Berkeley's Charlan Nemeth. Her research shows that "majority [viewpoints] induced compliance," while "minorities [views] stimulate more originality."

One of Nemeth's most cited studies on free association is the one that evokes a lot of intrigue around the question how do we get beyond rote, reactive, predictable--how do we grow fresh and creative?

"In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word "blue," chances are your first answer will be "sky". Your next answer will probably be "ocean," followed by "green" and, if you're feeling creative, a noun like "jeans". The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches." - Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex blog

And by "chances," we're talking roughly 80% of folks take the predictable road, blurting "sky" to a prompt of blue, or "grass" in reply to green.

"How do we escape these cliches? Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, has found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of "yellow," or a blue slide would lead to a reply of "green". After a few minutes, the group was then asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: Groups in the "dissent condition" - these were the people exposed to inaccurate descriptions - came up with much more original associations. Instead of saying that "blue" reminded them of "sky," or that "green" made them think of "grass," they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that "blue" might trigger thoughts of "Miles Davis" and "smurfs" and "pie". The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that a similar strategy can also lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks, such as free- associating on ways to improve traffic in the Bay Area.

The power of such "dissent" is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer - this is the shock of hearing blue called "green" - we start to reconsider the meaning of the color. We try to understand this strange reply, which leads us to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so our comfortable associations - the easy association of blue and sky - gets left behind. Our imagination has been stretched by an encounter that we didn't expect." - Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex blog

The beauty of this is not that we're converted over to another view: "We believe that the minority [viewpoint] “influenced” individuals, not so much on the perception of color but, rather, on the importance of saying what you believe, says Charlan Nemeth in her paper, http://bit.ly/rogueheroes.

By the way, by the finale of the movie Happy Feet, that young exiled penguin named Mumble, yep... Typical: He's the hero.

I first heard of Charlan Nemeth's research through the chapter on Error (my favorite chapter) in Steven Johnson's new book (recommended), Where Do Good Ideas Come From? So many people drown out voices that don't agree with them, not realizing that they don't have convert over to allow another their expression. Here Johnson sums up why one of his SIX keys for an environment conducive to good ideas is encouraging, rather than shutting out errant, "noisy" thoughts:

"When one of our peers calls the blue painting green, or [in a jury deliberation] comes to the defense of a suspect who is clearly guilty, he or she is, technically speaking, introducing more inaccurate information to the environment. But that noise makes the rest of us smarter, more innovative, precisely because we're forced to rethink our biases, to contemplate an alternative model in which blue paintings are, in fact, green." - Steven Johnson, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Here's a Charlan Nemeth's take on "diversity" for a speech to the National Bar Association. The first two Powerpoint presentation slides open like this:

The usual approach

• Most talks on diversity deal with legally protected categories e.g. race, age,
gender, sexual orientation and

• the dream is to “imagine” a world where categories don’t matter and where
differences are submerged

An immodest proposal

• I suggest to you that the differences will always exist and, moreso, they SHOULD
exist

• Instead IMAGINE a world where they are celebrated and utilized

Bravo! That's precisely my dream, too. "IMAGINE a world where they are celebrated and utilized."

Why? Because I think that is the type of world where each person can freely share their gifts and be thoroughly creative blooming towards the widest outskirts of their potential, never shuttered if they don't "fit" in. Who wants to outlaw all flavors of ice cream but just one.

Here's a related observation, I stumbled across while searching on LeWeb:

"Rush Limbaugh, a conservative syndicated radio host, became popular because he’s a credible voice that confirms people’s existing beliefs. This is exactly how I felt about Chris Pirillo’s presentation about community. Better known as preaching to the choir, my sentiment was evidenced by the number of tweets that echoed “I agree with him” rather than “I learned something.”" - David Spark, "The Cool and Not-So-Cool of LeWeb"

So, you see, I don't want you to agree with me. I want you to agree with you. Yet, let's keep learning and growing and glowing from each other.

p.s. In comments below, do you mind sharing how you include more dissenting views into your life? Or your organization?

Bonus: A good summation of Charlan Nemeth's Rogues and Heroes: The Value of Dissent paper from the paper is: "Our own experimental studies have found that minorities stimulate a search for information on all sides of the issue while majorities stimulate a search for information that corroborates the majority view (Nemeth and Rogers, 1996); minorities stimulate the use of multiple strategies in problem solving whereas majorities stimulate the use of the majority strategy (Nemeth and Kwan, 1987); minorities stimulate the detection of solutions that otherwise would have gone undetected whereas majorities stimulate adoption of the majority solution, right or wrong (Nemeth and Wachtler, 1983). Further, minorities stimulate more originality while majorities stimulate more conventionality of thought (Nemeth and Kwan, 1985). As a consequence, those exposed to minority views come up with more creative solutions to problems (Nemeth, Brown and Rogers, 2001)."

art credits Spice Market, Orchha, India by Stanislaw Urbaniak; Yves Klein (I'm not sure name of this painting; Klein serendipitiously found he liked how the natural sponges he sued to dab on blue added texture to the canvas, and so his tools became his raw material); and even though if this is tempting scrumptious, I wish to be spared from a world where latte e mirtilli (blueberries and milk) is the only choice of gelato flavor on earth. 

hunches messes serendipity accidents research & where do good ideas come from

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein

I'm not sure when it happened. It might have been one of the museums in New York City, which one isn't important as I packed in the Guggenheim, the Met, the MoMA, New Museum, PS 1, and a few others into the last two weeks of September. It hit me that I was not an artist, by any strict definition. What I actually care about is inspiration, improvisation, infinity, and innovation at the broadest levels. Levels that may not be confined in a particular artifact such as book or painting. Add ideas. I care about encouraging a diversity of inspirations in all manner of fields that may not fit the "art" category.

I also realized around the same time (someone else's epiphany which I just re-stumbled upon) that art is putting ideas in form. So I ended up coming full circle. As that is what I want to do... put ideas into this formscape we call reality.

I don't care if it fits in a museum, or on an iPad. Maybe it's a spaceship. Many it's a new way to exchange resources. Maybe it's a business. Maybe it's a new way of wellness (prefer that word to health). Maybe it's a new method of agriculture.

"Thomas Edison didn't tinker with building a better kerosene lamp; he abandoned the use of fire--the only human-generated source of light since prehistoric times--and broken through to a new source. That was a quantum leap in creativity. If you are the creator of your body, what is the quantum leap awaiting you?" - Deepak Chopra, Reinventing Your Body, Resurrecting Your Soul

In a nutshell, what I want to do is a lab for exploration and uncompromised inspiration.

"Lab" sounds dry, so sometimes I use the word atelier instead. Mostly it's a space for people to mingle at the hazy hunch stage of ideas. A place to discover and be bewildered by other hunches that may at first seem opposed to yours or plain odd or not particularly relevant. It's not necessarily a magnet for "like-minded" people (as often I find that limits my imagination to more of what I already know rather than exploring what I don't know that I don't know).

"There's nothing we really need to do that isn't dangerous." - John Cage

It's actually a real, geographical place too. Even with all my Internet experience (in the industry from 1995-2005), I cannot find the "form" or format that this would work online (yet?).* Although I am itching to do something right away.... so at least here on the blog, I will share wild nuances from a variety of sources, intriguing possibilities, and open-ended (not leading) questions that let you unfurl your own self-created outcomes.

      "Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something." - Thomas Edison

"Messes can also be beneficial in presenting unexpected connections and juxtapositions. These often lead to new ideas, explorations, combinations, and solutions." - Keri Smith

Steven Johnson asks a most intriguing question: "What are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation?" (Short 4-minute video with author of "Where Do Good Ideas Come From?" here.) I was really struck with the idea of richness of diversity as important factors to "good ideas". In fact, page one of Where Do Good Ideas Come From? starts with a narrative of Charles Darwin being mesmerized by the profuse bounty of species supported by the coral reefs around the Keeling Islands. Another story shares how if Johannes Gutenberg hadn't mingled outside his context with the vintners of Rhineland, Germany the trained metallurgist would "merely be a pioneering typesetter making an incremental improvement on Pi Sheng's moveable type," rather than the inventor of the printing press.

"The natural state of ideas is flow and spillover and connection. It is society that keeps them in chains." - Steven Johnson, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

"Ideologies exclude openness, diversity, resiliency, and multiplicity, the very qualities that nourish life in any system, be it ecosystem, immune system, or social system... Ideas are living things; they can be changed, and adapted, and can grow." - Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest

I was looking for a gift for my 5-year-old cousin yesterday, and was surprised to see one of Keri Smith's journals in the children's book section (mind you, not even the independent reader part of the kiddies or YA section). I guess only one as a child would think to purposefully wreck their pristine journal, or explore the world. I plop down in an armchair with Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes. (And already cradling The Accidental Billionaires among a hefty pile in my arm. When I open The Accidental Millionaires, it falls to beginning of Chapter 21: Serendipity. Serendipity is also a chapter in Steven Johnson's book, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?)

"In the film ["Broken Fall"], there is an interview with an old Dutch sailor that sums up [Bas Jon] Ader's work perfectly. He speaks indirectly about the process of improvisation, but the connection made from it is that point of Ader's "falls" is not the falling but the moment (1/10th of a second) where he makes the decision to let go. That is the moment of transcendence when you leave everything behind and leap into the unknown.

As improvisers, artists, or experimenters, we are trying to re-create that moment--when you leave everything behind and leap into the unknown. Because we've done it before and it's addictive--that seductive release, a sense of giddyness mixed with fear [note: like a roller-coaster!]. For an instant you get a feeling that you are really doing something worthwhile, living out on the edge of something big, yet unnameable. A kind of opening (with all the vulnerability that comes with that).

We all know what it feels like to fall, but how many of us have experimented with gravity as a medium? Isn't falling or breaking things something we only do by accident? What does it feel like to throw yourself off balance on purpose?

Definition of "mistake" or "accident" (for the purposes of this book): Happenings or occurences by which the creator does not have complete control over the final outcome (end result) that result in conclusions the creator did not predict. We might also call them "experiments."" - Keri Smith, Mess: The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes

* Online, folks tend to share ideas that are already fully formulated, or something they already know pretty well (in an educational or consultative manner, a how-to). Rarely do we share wisps of half-baked visions, yet it's precisely hazy hunches colliding with one another that Johnson says is important to breakthrough creativity. Here's that short vid:

 

Bonus: Another video. In my opinion, this TED video doesn't do the book justice. But anyhow, at 7:23 there's a picture of a "messy" (and fruitful!) co-mingling of ideas where Johnson states: "The spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this--This is Hogart's famous painting the kind of Political Dinner at a Tavern--but this is what the coffeeshops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions--people from different backgrounds... This is what your office should look like--that's part of my message here." And if anyone can tell me the name of the painter and the painting, I'd be grateful. I thought I heard Hogart, but a search yielded zip.