I found this over on the AdaFruit blog where they have neat stuff you can build and also cool ideas to infect your mind with.
Peter Coyote is perhaps best known by the mass audience as the guy with the jangling keys in E.T. but he’s got an incredible body of work and a life that embraces significant cultural and political issues - so when he talks about art and creativity - you listen:
The folks at AdaFruit were especially tweaked by Coyote’s statements on how important the integration of the arts and sciences are - that they are not and should not be isolated endeavours. It’s well known that music and math are inextricably linked - so why do we constantly see music programs being cut from schools while pressure is brought to bear to produce better math students? It’s insane. It’s misguided. It’s dumbass cracker dogma and it’s gotta stop.
Art is life - we must infuse every aspect of our lives with artistic and creative purpose. This makes us better people and makes for a better world.
So anytime some ignorant yahoo smug-faced know-it-all politician tells you the arts aren’t important and need to be cut back - you stand up and tell them to fuck off.
I’ve posted an earlier version of this before but it always seems to make the rounds and resurface again and again - and with good reason. It’s Carl Sagan’s ode to the planet Earth - this time jazzed up with a bit of music and a montage of clips from iconic films. The images never fail to touch us in our hearts but it’s Sagan’s words that provide the greater force, reminding us how insignificant and at the same time how significant we all are.
The spacecraft was a long way from home.
I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.
It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.
So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.
The pale blue dot.
Cheers.
P.S. I found this over at Gizmodo where they also included these credits:
John Boswell at Symphony Of Science has released another wonderful music video featuring Carl Sagan and 11 other scientific minds celebrating how science changes our point of view of the world and universe we live in - or, as Richard Dawkins croons: “Science is the poetry of reality.”
Temple Grandin talks at the recent TED conference about how the world needs all kinds of minds. Fascinating stuff.
We inevitably seek to shape, categorize, reform and alter the way our kids (and ourselves) think, behave and interact with the world. We do this because we want our kids (and ourselves) to be perceived as normal, to fit in, to be a part of the world instead of being apart from it.
I am all too aware of the role bipolar behaviour influences the arts. Autism, in all its many forms, has often been regarded as a strange dysfunction or aberration of the brain instead of as a possible evolutionary step for our species. Doubtless if the grand scientific minds of the 1800’s were to see how most of behave today we’d all be locked up in Bedlam.
While some forms of brain difference are manifestly disabling there are many many traits of the human mind that allow some of us to become an Einstein, Newton, Gould, Rainman, or even Temple Grandin.
I’m no flippin’ expert - I only have my own experience to bring to bear upon this - and I don’t want to go all Jerry Mander and Neil Postman on you but I suspect the rise in autistic symptoms within our younger population may indeed be in response to the overwhelming deluge of unmediated information. Unlike Postman and Mander, I don’t see this as a bad thing - it just is - and, as in times past, the brain will find a way to survive, to protect itself and ultimately thrive.
I don’t know. I just think she gave a really cool talk. Lemme go think about it.
Cheers.
P. S. Although Postman and Mander can come across as intensely pessimistic luddites they do have some good thoughts on the media cesspool we are drowning in. I remember reading Mander’s The Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television when I was working for Henson on Fraggle Rock. During a break in shooting I was half-in / half-out of this round foam blob creature that ate Doozers and poring through the pages when Jim asked me: “What are you reading?”. I gleefully held up the book and he snorted: “That’s a bit inflammatory, don’t you think?” to which I replied: “Not if you keep paying my salary!”
This is the second in a series of fucking awesome music mash-ups featuring Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Stephen Hawking and the sublime Richard Feynman. The first one was great but this one is just fucking awesome.
They speak of great cosmological concepts - but it’s all been set to a beat and their voices have been auto-tuned to craft a melody which assists in imparting the joy and vision they share in the knowledge they have reaped from their studies of our planet and it’s place in the universe.
You can find the lyrics assembled on the YouTube page or you can visit the Symphony Of Science pages where you can learn more about this John Boswell project.
Rebecca Saxe is a neuroscientist at MIT’s Saxelab and she is making remarkable discoveries about how our brains function when regarding other minds. While still an undergrad at MIT, Saxe identified a very specific portion of the brain which is wholly devoted to thinking about other people’s minds and thought processes. Her subsequent research has been focusing on the development of this brain region, how humans form moral judgements and how to influence this process.
Be sure to watch the whole thing. Around the 11 minute mark Saxe starts discussing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation where a magnetic pulse is used to disrupt the functions of that part of the brain, causing it to reorganize itself - sort of like rebooting a computer. To her credit she shows herself first testing the butterfly coil apparatus on her own remarkable cranium.
It’s funny and spooky all at the same time.
As with all things that have the potential to change how people think and behave the Pentagon has expressed interest in her work. I love her at the 14 minute mark where she says: “They’re calling - but I’m not taking the call.” Pentagon wankers will still find a way to play with this shit but it’s important we all pay attention to developments like this and not just from a tin foil hat conspiracy perspective - although one has to wonder if a chapeau d’aluminium would thwart such a device.
Tech like this is worthy of our attention because it affects us directly - for good and for bad - and it behooves us to be aware of the consequences of applying technologies which affect our thinking. The light bulb, automobiles, radio, telephone and television are but a few examples of ubiquitous technologies which have profoundly affected our society, our culture, our economy, our politics and our minds. We’re still discovering all the ways movies and televised information have changed us and continue to shape our world even as we pick up speed with our use of the internet and absorb those media as content within the disruptive frontier of the world wide web.
I wrote earlier about the emerging tech and culture of Augmented Reality and how it will likely change how we see the world, change how we think and change how we behave. Discoveries like those of Rebecca Saxe will also play a role in this merging world of humanity and technology. As we explore ways to extend our senses through our tech we will also find ways to implement these embellishments more directly with our bodies and our minds.
Setting aside thoughts of mind control by some uber-authority (political or corporate) - which is not beyond contemplation and certainly something to be watchful for - it’s just really fucking cool to consider how deep inside our individual minds we will be able to reach as we simultaneously reach out with our minds to each other.
Kevin Kelly’s A New Kind Of Mind seems downright tangible now - and it makes this Nokia promo video, which I found over on Bruce Sterling’s blog seem positively quaint by comparison.
I think the future is coming to us - and out of us - faster and faster and that it will be extremely cool.
I’ve been having a series of email discussions with my friend Bryan that has become a wide-ranging exploration of how humanity is likely to evolve alongside our rapid technological advancements. I do intend to distill those emails into a one big fat ass blog post but I’m a bit too busy at the moment to get that done for you.
Instead, I found this fascinating talk by Juan Enriquez at this year’s TED conference where he touches on some of the same territory Bryan and I have been treading; and I thought I’d share it with you.
This kind of stuff has been consuming me lately because I think it is really fucking cool and pant peeingly scary. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination and have no problems envisioning a future where we and our machines are one. The idea of the Borg makes for good storytelling but it’s not a frightening future in my eyes.
Bryan and I are not profound scholars when it comes to this shit - we just like to think up the most fucked up possibilities and then extrapolate them further to see if we can glean a sense of where the human race is heading - or maybe just scare ourselves like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire. Each time a new article or news report is published we start kicking it around like a big blob of silly putty just to see if it’ll bounce off the walls or leave dents in the ceiling - metaphorically, of course. I do have large quantities of silly putty - I know where to buy it in bulk - and when you drop five pounds of that shit you better protect your kidneys ‘cuz it comes hurtling back at you like a motherfucker.
But I digress.
I’ll come back some other day with all our notes and pimp it up with pretty pictures and links to all the crap that was inspiring us. In the meantime, enjoy Enriques and don’t be afraid of the future. Just keep your eyes on the assholes in charge right now.
