There is no good reason why the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of good reasons why it should. I am tempted to say — in order to be maximally provocative — that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely. I ask you: How are you preparing for the future that could be yours and mine? We — I mean the world in general — don’t need a lot of bad writing. We need some great writing.
From the archive:
Dyson: I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. ... Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so.
They planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones.
That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.
Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.
Over the past decade, voters have had many legitimate worries: stagnant wages, corruption in Washington, terrorism, and a botched war in Iraq. But we believe that when Americans look back years from now, what will shame us most is that our country abandoned a bedrock principle of civilized nations: that torture is without exception wrong.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Topic: Business
7:22 am EDT, Mar 17, 2008
When Herb Kelleher was brainstorming about how to beat the traditional hub-and-spoke airlines, he grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers.
Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply “get”. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw.
Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools – tools that take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show.
THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.
From an interview with the author:
The interesting thing now in business schools, you hear the phrase “the MFA is the new MBA.”
The dwarfing, Lilliputian qualities of some large urban screen genres could be avoided by these less common configurations and new technologies, their size and resolution instead causing the technology to start to open up, as though walking around inside a giant TV set and getting to know its structural components. This particular aesthetic possibility was given further impetus by the work of Jim Campbell – an American artist whose LED sculptures were another highlight of the Outside the Box exhibition. His ‘Ambiguous Icons’ series, produced around 2000 to 2002, are all based on DIY low resolution matrixes of red LED lights, often as few as 10 by 15, on which surveillance style footage of street scenes are softly rendered at the limits of recognition. The difficulty in reconciling the illusion of continuous moving figures with the rigidity of the discrete LED’s turned the video screen into the site of an alchemically charged tension. When the individual pixels are scaled up into light bulbs you can directly handle then we become simultaneously aware of the electronic moving image as a phenomenon and of its materiality as an open construction – a mysterious medium that is nevertheless within our grasp, our understanding and our participation. It was also tempting to allow it to suggest an image of the Big Screen Network as a disconnected matrix across which one occasionally infers the ill defined scurry of our national media policy. But on a more practical level it is an image of how public screens might turn into a space for both criticism and to motivate active experimentation, a lure to pull the viewer closer into its politics of scale and distance. There should be no remote control for urban screens ...
The quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little.
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
From the archive:
To be sure, time marches on.
Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
NIH Scientists Offer Explanation for Winter Flu Season
Topic: Science
7:21 am EDT, Mar 17, 2008
A finding by a team of scientists at the National Institutes of Health may account for why the flu virus is more infectious in cold winter temperatures than during the warmer months.
At winter temperatures, the virus's outer covering, or envelope, hardens to a rubbery gel that could shield the virus as it passes from person to person, the researchers have found. At warmer temperatures, however, the protective gel melts to a liquid phase. But this liquid phase apparently isn't tough enough to protect the virus against the elements, and so the virus loses its ability to spread from person to person.
Using linewidth and spinning sideband intensities of lipid hydrocarbon chain resonances in proton magic angle spinning NMR spectra, we detected the temperature-dependent phase state of naturally occurring lipids of intact influenza virus without exogenous probes. Increasingly, below 41 °C ordered and disordered lipid domains coexisted for the viral envelope and extracts thereof. At 22 °C much lipid was in a gel phase, the fraction of which reversibly increased with cholesterol depletion. Diffusion measurements and fluorescence microscopy independently confirmed the existence of gel-phase domains. Thus the existence of ordered regions of lipids in biological membranes is now demonstrated. Above the physiological temperatures of influenza infection, the physical properties of viral envelope lipids, regardless of protein content, were indistinguishable from those of the disordered fraction. Viral fusion appears to be uncorrelated to ordered lipid content. Lipid ordering may contribute to viral stability at lower temperatures, which has recently been found to be critical for airborne transmission.
Theo Jansen is the Dutch creator of what he calls "Kinetic Sculptures," where nature and technology meet. Essentially these sculptures are robots powered by the wind only.
Engineering and the Advancement of Human Welfare: 10 Outstanding Achievements 1964-1989
Topic: Technology
7:12 am EDT, Mar 16, 2008
This popularly written booklet contains nontechnical descriptions of 10 major engineering achievements selected by the National Academy of Engineering on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, December 5, 1989. The achievements are the moon landing, application satellites, the microprocessor, computer-aided design and manufacturing, computer-assisted tomography, advanced composite materials, the jumbo jet, lasers, fiber-optic communication, and genetically engineered products.
