Archive for the 'Science and Technology' Category

The Power of Ambiguity

Published on 18 October, 2009 in Personal Growth and Science and Technology. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Have you ever looked at a traffic accident and asked yourself, “How did that happen?”

The other night, I was playing pool and sunk a ball that I didn’t expect to sink – in fact, it was so surprising that I asked myself, “How did I do that?!”

But it’s even more obvious when I look at a website that I like. Sometimes, I’ve been known to look at the source code to try to figure out how they did that.

And the cool thing is that when you ask that question, you get smarter.

Maybe you’ll actually figure out an answer, maybe not. I still have no idea how I sunk that ball in the corner pocket at the other end. But the experience of being exposed to uncertainty – The Power of Ambiguity – helps you get smarter.

A recent study published in Psychological Science had people look at the surreal work of author Kafka and film director David Lynch, and found that afterwards, people were better at seeing subtle patterns. Read more about this in Science Daily or the NYTimes.

This is another great reason to visit the art gallery. Another good reason to watch art house movies. And a great excuse for me to continue staring at the complex building sites around here.

Experience the surreal. Have a look around. And when you see something strange, or someone does something unexpected, be grateful – it’s an opportunity to make you smarter.

And thanks Kellie for tipping me off to this :)

Cracking iPods at 22

Published on 13 February, 2009 in High Performance, Purpose and Science and Technology. 3 Comments Tags: .

This kid is a genius. When he was 15, he cracked the copy protection on DVDs, allowing millions of people to make backups and share DVDs around the world. Now, at 22, he’s cracked the Fairplay code that Apple have been using to try to preserve their monopolistic position in the music player market… it’s even better than an anti-trust suit against them!

You have to wonder what drives this kid… but you can be sure that it’s not the money!
Great work, DVD Jon!!! For the full story, have a look here…

Daniel Smith

Risks

Published on 9 February, 2009 in Innovation and Science and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

“Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do or what not to do.” Jonas Salk

As I was reflecting on the state of science in the modern world, I was called to remember these words. Bearing in mind that Salk went directly against the conventional wisdom of the age in order to produce his great achievement, I am prompted to ask what might inspire him. Such resilience and determination; one might question how he managed to do what everybody around him had told him was impossible and even wrong. Perhaps it is an example of how only unreasonable people are the only ones who change the world…
Really, he wasn’t that creative. He saw something that was working in one domain and simply applied it by analogy to another domain. What distinguishes him to me was that he saw possibility where others didn’t, and he had the tenacity to make that vision real.

Let us be grateful that most kids today don’t even know what polio is…

Daniel Smith

Beautiful Basics

Published on 8 December, 2008 in Innovation, Personal Growth and Science and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I spent a year or so picking up an MBA a few years back. It was great fun and I learnt heaps, but there was a lot of wasted time. At one point, it occurred to me that it would be great if you could get a “key learnings” information dump – a collection of the most useful concepts, models and information… key learnings from an MBA or MFA or PhD or whatever.

After all, it’s the learning that we need, not the sheet of paper!

As I thought about the ‘key learnings’ concept more generally, I heard yesterday that a Creation Science Museum had been established in the USA. While I have great respect for religious beliefs, I really have a hard time accepting that blindly accepting an arbitrary and unnecessarily complex explanation for the world is really ‘holy’.  It was reassuring to come across The Canon, a book that expresses basic science that we should all know. (Dworkin might go too far for my liking, I think he’s misled rather than deluded.)

If we’re going to compete in the real world, we need to know something about it!

There’s a lot of information that intelligent and informed members of the modern world need. Our schools are trying to disseminate some of that information, but with the acceleration in knowledge creation, we need to keep learning… fast! I guess it’s another reason to visit The Genius Project’s Zone.

Daniel Smith

The real iPhone

Published on 1 December, 2008 in Innovation and Science and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

By releasing the iPhone, Apple seems to be trying to undertake a minor transformation in the way that we use smartphones. To me, they’ve essentially packaged together little more than the state-of-the-art equipment set in a pretty (and probably user-friendly) box. This is a good thing in principle – though it’s really not that much of a revolution.

My Motorola A1000 isn’t a great system. It’s small enough, is 3G, and has space for a TransFlash (now microSD) memory card for a gigabyte or two of memory. It uses the clunky Symbian operating system. And it’s not quite as sexy-looking as the iPhone. But it’s mostly the same. The W950 has 4Gb of ram (same as the iPhone) if you’re really after a walkman with phone functionality. The large touch-screen is probably a little better than my A1000 (or the A920 that I had before), but it’s still just a big touchscreen with the same resolution (320×480) as the Tungsten T3 that I bought years ago. Sure, it has WiFi and Bluetooth… but there’s nothing revolutionary there.

Maybe the design teams at Dopod might just need to tweak a few things, and we’ll have a great challenger on style, and I’m sure at a fraction of the price.

But to give Apple their due, they’ve done something that I really admire. They’ve focused. They haven’t produced a whole swag of versions, just two (only different in memory quantity). And while they haven’t done anything too revolutionary, they’re taken everything that’s available and (from first glance) put it together in a single, simple, satisifying parcel. Great work to the fast follower!

Daniel Smith