. . . that this is post #501, I thought I would do something about genes:
Experts ponder link between creativity, mood disorders
There have been more than 20 studies that suggest an increased rate of bipolar and depressive illnesses in highly creative people, says Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and author of the “An Unquiet Mind,” a memoir of living with bipolar disorder.
Experts say mental illness does not necessarily cause creativity, nor does creativity necessarily contribute to mental illness, but a certain ruminating personality type may contribute to both mental health issues and art.
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Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings — colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don’t worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.
“The arts are more dangerous [than other professions] because they require sensitivity to a large extent,” he said. “If you go too far you can pay a price — you can be too sensitive to live in this world.”
Tell me about it.
OK, so it’s not exactly about genes. But I couldn’t resist the joke.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Government, Politics, Predictions, Society, Terrorism, Travel
A thought experiment for you: Consider, if you will, at what point the absurdity of “security theatre” crosses the line from the merely annoying to the actively dangerous (to our civil liberties). How would you detect such a point?
How about with a simple American flag?
Metal plates send messages to airport x-ray screeners
One of my favorite artists, Evan Roth, is working on a project that will be released soon – the pictures say it all, it’s a “carry on” communication system. These metal places contain messages which will appear when they are X-Rayed. The project isn’t quite done yet, Evan needs access to an X-Ray machine to take some photos and document. If you have access to an X-Ray machine he’s willing to give you a set of the plates for helping out.
There are two such plates shown at the site, made up as stencils carved into an X-ray opaque plate about the size of your average carry-on bag. One says “NOTHING TO SEE HERE”. The other is an American Flag.
Now, consider, what do you think the reaction would be from your friendly local airport authorities upon seeing such an item in your luggage?
Would you (reasonably, I think) expect to be given additional scrutiny? Have your bags and person checked more thoroughly? Be ‘interviewed’ by the security personnel? Perhaps miss your flight? Have your name added forevermore to the ‘terrorist list’, meaning hassles each and every time you’d try and fly in the foreseeable future?
For having a stencil of an American Flag in your luggage?
I’d say we’ve reached that point.
Perhaps we should reconsider this.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
(Seriously – this guy is brilliant on several levels. When he shuttered his blog in January ’07, it was depressing as all hell. Catching his stuff at various other locations now and then was enough to keep hope alive. Rejoice! It is the Second Coming of Bérubé !!!)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Google, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, Jeff Greason, movies, Paleo-Future, Peter Diamandis, Phil Plait, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Space X, tech, TGV Rockets, XCOR
Last night I watched a movie made before I was born. By coincidence, the timing was perfectly in sync with the news yesterday.
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Over a year ago, I wrote this, about Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace (one of the speakers at the Heinlein Centennial):
Yes, dependable reusable rockets is a critical first-step technology for getting into space. But as Greason says, he didn’t get interested in space because of chemical rockets – he got interested in chemical rockets because they could get him into space. For him, that has always been the goal, from the first time he read Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein when he was about 10. It is somewhat interesting to note that similar to the setting and plot of the book, XCOR Aerospace is based on the edge of a military test range, using leased government buildings…
Anyway. Greason looked at the different possible technologies which might hold promise for getting us off this rock, and held a fascinating session at the Centennial discussing those exotic technologies. Simply, he came to the same conclusion many other very intelligent people have come to: that conventional chemical rockets are the best first stage tech. Sure, many other possible options are there, once the demand is in place to make it financially viable to exploit space on a large enough scale. But before you build an ‘interstate highway’, you need to have enough traffic to warrant it. As he said several times in the course of the weekend, “you don’t build a bridge to only meet the needs of those who are swimming the river…but you don’t build a bridge where no one is swimming the river, either.”
And this, in a piece about Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets:
And there was a lot of thought early in the development of rocketry that such capability could be used for postal delivery. It doesn’t sound economically feasible at this point, but there’s nothing to say that it might not become an attractive transportation option for such firms as UPS or FedEx if dependable services were provided by a TGV Rockets or some other company. In his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein had his characters adapt a retired “mail rocket” for their own spacecraft, used to fly to the Moon.
I find this notion of private development of spaceflight more than a little exciting. When I wrote Communion of Dreams, I was operating under the old model – that the enterprise of getting into space in a big way was going to mandate large governmental involvement and coordination. I’m not going to rewrite the novel, but I am reworking my own thoughts and expectations – this is probably the single largest change for me from attending the Centennial.
Well, yesterday a Falcon 1 rocket from the Space X corporation made it to orbit. From Phil Plait:
Congratulations to the team at Space X! At 16:26 Pacific time today (Sunday, September 28, 2008), their Falcon 1 rocket achieved orbit around the Earth, the first time a privately funded company has done such a feat with a liquid fuel rocket.
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As coincidence would have it, about the time the Space X rocket reached orbit I was watching Destination Moon, a movie I had added to my NetFlix queue after the Heinlein Centennial, and which just now had floated to the top.
What’s the big deal? Well, Destination Moon was about the first successful private corporation launch, not to orbit, but as a manned mission to the Moon.
It’s not a great movie. But it was fascinating to watch, an insight into those heady post-war years, into what people thought about space, and into the mind of Robert Heinlein, who was one of the writers and technical advisors on the film (with connections to two of his novels: Rocket Ship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon). Interesting to see the trouble they went to in order to explain what things would be like in space (no gravity, vacuum, how rockets would work, et cetera) because this was a full 8 years prior to the launch of Sputnik. We’ve grown up with spaceflight as a fact, with knowing how things move and function – but all of this was unknown to the average viewer when the movie was made and released. They did a surprisingly good job. And the images provided Chesley Bonestell are still breath taking, after all these years.
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It may yet be a while before any private corporation wins the Google Lunar X Prize, let alone sends a team of astronauts there and gets them back, as was done in Destination Moon. But it’ll happen. When it looks like it will, I may need to schedule another viewing of the movie, and not just trust to coincidence.
Jim Downey
An academic buddy of mine and I like to joke that this time of the year is called “Pass-over.” No, not Pesach – that happens in the spring. Rather, this is the time of year when the MacArthur Foundation announces their annual Fellows, the so-called ‘genius grants’ given each year to a group of particularly brilliant (though sometimes obscure) researchers, writers, academics, artists, and performers. This year 25 such Fellows were announced, and each will receive $500,000 over the next five years with no strings attached – in order to help facilitate whatever they do.
Man, who wouldn’t want to win that??? Nah, it’s not just the money and prestige – it’s the vote of confidence that they so believe in you that they’re willing to turn you loose with that sum of money, just to be creative.
And of course, we call it “Pass-over” because, well, we get passed-over for such each year. Like this year. Again.
Hey, I’m an artist! I’m a writer! I’m obscure! Depending on who you talk to (and how much I’ve paid them), I’m brilliant!
Ah, well. So it goes. Congrats to all the 2008 winners – go, and make the world a better place.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Artificial Intelligence, BoingBoing, Book Conservation, General Musings, movies, Science, tech
An earlier version of Communion of Dreams had one of the minor characters with an interesting hobby: building his own computer entirely by hand, from making the integrated circuits on up. The point for him wasn’t to get a more powerful computer (remember, by the time of the novel, there is functional AI using tech which is several generations ahead of our current level). Rather, he just wanted to see whether it was possible to build a 1990’s-era desktop computer on his own. I cut that bit out in the final editing, since it was a bit of a distraction and did nothing to advance the story. But I did so reluctantly.
Well, this is something along those lines: video of a French artisan who makes his own vacuum tubes (triodes) for his amateur radio habit:
It’s a full 17 minutes long, and worth watching from start to finish. Being a craftsman myself, I love watching other people work with their hands performing complex operations with skill and grace. I have no need or real desire to make my own vacuum tubes, but this video almost makes me want to try. Wow.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing.)
Think you know geography?
Well, National Geographic is a great resource for expanding your Earth-based horizons a bit. No surprise there. But one thing my wife has been playing recently, and which has also sucked me in, are the puzzles that they have using maps. You can set the difficulty level, making them appropriate for about any skill level. And you might actually learn a bit more about our world. A bit of fun – enjoy!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Comics, Humor, Marketing, Science Fiction, Society, Space, UFO
. . . the Masons, Greys, Studebaker, Coast to Coast, Bigfoot, and Evil Tofu have in common?
From his merchandise page:
Studebaker had contracts to make aircraft engines during the second world war as well as making the weasel and a duce and a half truck. So , Studebaker was already part of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower talked about. When the UFO crashed in Roswell in 1947, Eisenhower signed the treaty with the aliens 1954, who better to use back engineered technology to produce UFOs than a struggling automobile company who had a record of government contracts going back to the Civil War and was already in the “inside”? Besides that, the design of Studes were much more aerodynamic than any other marquee and UFOs should be “slippery” when traveling through the air shouldn’t they? So once again, Studebakers come to the front of the line. A logical progression?
Indeed. I came across this web comic a week or so ago, and shared it with a few friends. But I wanted to wait until I had a chance to get through all the current strips (about 160) before I posted something about it. It’s quite good, very funny and well drawn (no surprise since the artist/author has a solid resume of work as an animator/director). Bugsport is done in a classic style, drawing heavily on adverising motifs and pop culture (there’s all kinds of visual and textual references – more than I am probably catching). You can probably just dive right in with the latest strip, but then you’d be missing all the wonderful stuff that he has already done.
Give it a try. And someone please put up a Wikipedia article about Bastien and/or Bugsport, OK? I mean, seriously, if I have one this guy certainly deserves one.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 