Month: December 2008

Vilayanur Ramachandran shares some neurology lessons. Particularly synesthesia (starts at 17:50). The mixing between senses, i.e. colour and numbers, tone and colours, etc.

Synesthesia is 8 times more common among artists, poets and novelists and other creative people then in the general population. Why would that be?…

He continues to note some other interesting aspects:

• A heredity in genes. It’s passed down!
• The linking in metaphorical thinking.
• The ability to connect “seemingly unrelated ideas”.

Let me repeat. “seemingly unrelated ideas”

Maybe we are all (as he put) synesthedes. I wonder if we could do the same brain tests on renaissance, generalists, and scanners, that there might be something similar?

^{Source: https://www.youtube.com/}

After posting Faith in the Process I came across Richard Dawkins.

He uses the term faith synonymously with religious and that surprises me. I use that word a lot, but I don’t think of it in the same way.

Dawkins has said

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Is that with a capital “F”?

I don’t mean religion when I say it. I mean a deeper sense of trust.

What else do you call that driving feeling when going against the grain of the world?

The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean / when boredom seems the very stuff of life.

Something that I’m always looking for are my tools. What do I need to be creative? I have a few tools I use:

• Scrivener – for writing on my laptop. I love it because there is a full screen mode which blocks everything out. Plus I can choose the background colour depending on my mood.
• Moleskine(s) – a reporter style for tasks, regular lines for creative writing and journals, and a blank paper for mind mapping and brainstorming. ( it maybe excessive, but needed )
• Office – I never had an office, but now that I have it, I’m in love. You might consider this more of a place. But what’s the difference between a place and a tool? Do I use it? Hell ya. Sometimes I fight using it, because I know if I just sit in it, I’ll get something done. Sometimes I like being lazy.
• Creative hat – (see photo) not always needed, but oddly helpful. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s the orange? They say it’s a creative colour.

Now these are just some of my tools. And chances are they won’t do you a lick of good. The Moleskine might be handy, but I bet you’ll use it differently then I do.

My teacher, Dari, needs a classic style keyboard with weight to the keys. One that goes “clunk” and pushes back. It’s chunky and heavy. They way it needs to be for her. I’ve tried to help her on her computer from time to time, and then thing drives me nuts! But she loves it.

How do you find new tool?
Something that might happen from time to time, is your tools might need to change. What worked yesterday, might not work today. And so we need to be on the look out. I haven’t yet perfected this art. Generally I get to a point where I know I’m not doing something, and have to stumble through the process of elimination to figure out, “well, I need a smaller pen.”

How do you find your tools? How do you know they are still working for you?

A performance to aspire to.

^{Source: https://www.youtube.com/}

I knew there was a lot of porn on the web. It’s a given. But I wasn’t aware of the impact of the industry until reading this little article, 12 ways porn has changed the web.

Case in point. #7: Broadband

In the 1990s, Penthouse magazine gave away 2400-baud modems with the periodical’s logo on them, according to Gerard Van Der Leun, former director of Penthouse.com and current contributor to American Digest. At the time these modems offered the fastest way to access the magazine’s popular XXX bulletin boards. Clearly, in the early years of the Net, nobody had a greater need for a bigger, fatter pipe than the adult industry and its customers.

Though the evidence is largely anecdotal, various authorities believe that “acquiring higher resolution pornographic images faster promoted broadband connections,” as Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M, put it in a 2006 paper on the nature of computer-based porn PDF.

So the military made the web, and porn made it better. Hmmm, interesting.

As you’ve seen from my observations on Avatar, I’m a cartoon lover. There is something in the art of teaching our children that bring out things that are “deceptively simple.” Stories that are to the point, and yet, when watched again have a beautiful complexity.

Case in point – Wall-E ( yes, it’s taken me long enough to get around to actually watching it )

On one hand, you have a love story.

On the other, you have a robot, logical in nature, who is inquisitive and is a catalyst for change. Simply by his curiosity for people and things; simply by doing something different: things happen around him. If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend you watch it.

Remember when you watch it chaos = change. change = creativity.