The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/the-internet-of-us-and-the-end-of-facts
Episode 40: Thinking Out Loud 104: Yours, Mine, and Ours – Thinking.FM
How many writing projects are you working on? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about their joint writing project, individual projects, and ghost writing projects and how to keep them all going at the same time. They also ask the question, “Can you make it as a loner writer?” No!
So, join Elisabeth and Merianna for the first ever Thinking Out Loud Writers’ Conference.
Mentioned:
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 104: Yours, Mine, and Ours appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Episode 39: Thinking Religion 70: “And you never ask questions when God’s on your side” – Thinking.FM
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss the religion of college football, Rip and Dip vs Common Cup vs Shot Glasses, Rubio’s odd theological farewell speech, the power of professing God’s Will, and why the Republican Party enabled Trump.
Mentioned:
- With God On Our Side | Bob Dylan
The post Thinking Religion 70: “And you never ask questions when God’s on your side” appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
“Because now you have designers, who instead of being encouraged to come up with their own, new, crazy ideas, are being encouraged to do the things that have been proven by the data to deliver results. A lot of times, in thriving marketplaces, a lot of ideas come from the bottom up. You see new consumer behaviors, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, look at what these kids are doing.” But as you end up with more predictable, controlled consumers, you end up with a less innovative society.”
Source: Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight
Don’t you wonder sometimes, ’bout sound and vision?
Be weird. Be different. Don’t let your own expressions be drowned out by “what has worked in the past” or be restricted by “the data.”
Round pegs, square holes and all that.
Episode 38: Thinking Out Loud 103: Feast or Famine – Thinking.FM
Will I be able to afford groceries this month? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about the peaks and valleys of the publishing and writing world and how it’s hard to predict what each month or each day is going to look like. How exciting!
Show Notes:
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 103: Feast or Famine appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Reverse Engineering Humanity
“We believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, ‘reverse engineer’ the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them,” they write. “These values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces.”
Source: Robots could learn human values by reading stories, research suggests | Books | The Guardian
Our stories are important. Our ability to have, interpret, and produce intuition is seemingly something very human. However, we’re finding out that’s not necessarily the case.
Of Siri and Hesiod
There’s a very subtle but very real history behind Siri (and Google Now and Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana) having a female voice and persona…
“But because the creatures in these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.”
Source: The Robots Are Winning! by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
“Random” prime numbers and human projections
“So just what has got mathematicians spooked? Apart from 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7 or 9 – they have to, else they would be divisible by 2 or 5 – and each of the four endings is equally likely. But while searching through the primes, the pair noticed that primes ending in 1 were less likely to be followed by another prime ending in 1. That shouldn’t happen if the primes were truly random – consecutive primes shouldn’t care about their neighbour’s digits.”
Source: Mathematicians shocked to find pattern in “random” prime numbers | New Scientist
Math, philosophically, is spooky.
Does it “really” exist in the cosmos or is it (like most things we consider to be intrinsic to the universe) a human projection based on our finite nature?
Experience Designing
“In the old days you were either cool and a bit flakey or on it and a nerd. What we need today is cool nerds. People and agencies that can fathom the deep jumbled soup of networked technologies and surf the rich broth of culture. And help their clients to do the same. Experience design is on the frontline of this reconciliation of left and right brain for organisations. The smartphone was the catalyst, yet is only one piece in the puzzle. What is certainly true is we’re no longer looking back and instead start to shape our industry to better serve our clients and customers in this new world.”
Source: The forgotten language of experience design | Marketing Magazine
True whether you’re marketing a product, a church on social media, or an idea in a classroom.
Redundancy is not helpful
“Each additional link places an extra load on users’ working memory because it causes people to have to remember whether they have seen the link before or it is a new link. Are the two links the same or different? Users often wonder if there is a difference that they missed. In usability studies, we often observe participants pause and ponder which they should click. The more courageous users click on both links only to be disappointed when they discover that the links lead to the same page. Repetitive links often set user up to fail.”
Source: The Same Link Twice on the Same Page. Do Duplicates Help or Hurt?
Very true.
Episode 37: Thinking Religion 69: Act Like You’ve Been There Before – Thinking.FM
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss m
Mentioned:
- Sam’s new phone
- Wahhabism | Wikipedia
- The Invention of Religion in Japan | Amazon
- The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluarlism | Amazon
The post Thinking Religion 69: Act Like You’ve Been There Before appeared first on Thinking.FM.
The “Mystery” of Good Schools
“The authors of these two books demonstrate that grand ideas cannot be imposed on people without their assent. Money and power are not sufficient to improve schools. Genuine improvement happens when students, teachers, principals, parents, and the local community collaborate for the benefit of the children. But a further lesson matters even more: improving education is not sufficient to “save” all children from lives of poverty and violence. As a society, we should be ashamed that so many children are immersed in poverty and violence every day of their lives.”
Digital Repatriation or Theft?
“I would point to some of the recent trends in 3D scanning as potential new sites for digital colonialism, not just repatriation. Is prosecution of stolen code related to contested heritage objects a form of digital colonialism? Is keeping the code private, accessible only to the museum or scholars who obtain access a form of colonialism? Is publicly releasing the code while holding tight to the physical object reinforcing colonialism? As this episode tells us, the materiality of these cultural heritage objects holds meaning that cannot be extracted into bits and bytes.”
Source: The Nefertiti Hack: Digital Repatriation or Theft? | Early Christian Monasticism in the Digital Age
Amazing piece of performance art and a very needed conversation…
You Are Becoming Obsolete
I was born in 1978. The C2-8P with its futuristic dual floppy drives was cutting edge tech.
My oldest child was born in 2007. This had just been released and some of the first pictures I have of her were taken with it. She will never know a world without it.
LC was born in 2010, the same year as this. It is revolutionizing how we do everything from teaching and learning to making a medical diagnosis.
And now I have a four month old son who was born the same time this went on sell. He will never know a world that doesn’t include widely available and affordable VR (or AR).
I imagine that we’ll see a similar revolution in our society in the way that iPhone has changed us since 2007 because of virtual reality devices going “mainstream.”
Similarly, things we didn’t think could change are changing rapidly.
We’re seeing our political system transform seemingly overnight. We’re teaching our children with tools such as Coursera and Khan Academy that are replacing the need for highly skilled teachers of content. Even our religious landscape looks very different than it did 10 years ago.
Churches, schools, and politicians are all clamoring to stay relevant and not show signs of aging or becoming obsolete.
However, our bodies age and decline. When we pass mirrors, we still see ourselves in our mind’s eye at the height of our physical (and maybe spiritual) beauty. The wrinkles and scars don’t always register right away. Some of us seek out surgery or vitamins or juice cleanses or yoga to delay the inevitable. Most of us want to delay death.
Yeats would remind us,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things fall apart. You will die. Your church will not look the same in ten years as it does today. Your child’s school will teach math differently than you learned math. Donald Trump may become our country’s president.
You will contribute some verse, however. Even after you are long gone as a corporal being, perhaps distant family will think of you or a depiction of you in some not-yet-invented VR machine will allow a great-great-grandchild to interview you for a project.
What about our churches, our schools, and our political system? What will our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren say about them? Will they be comforting thoughts or will they react like teens in the video above reacted to Windows 95?
You are becoming obsolete. Embrace that and the decay and work for justice and peace in all that you do and with those you choose to worship, learn, or legislate with while you’re here. Worry less about the details that your obsolete brain is telling you matter.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Classical Inscriptions, Fonts, and Avatar
“The Renaissance was chockablock with copyists who learned and then duplicated Latin epigraphic scripts for various purposes. This imitation game had a great amount of influence on the Renaissance antiquities market at the time (forgeries could be bought all over Italy), but it is also revealed in the fonts we use today–particularly Roman fonts. The invention of fonts by various printers and typesetters in the 15th and 16th centuries was often inspired by lapidary inscriptions from the catacombs or pulled from manuscripts recording antique stones. After all, these inscriptions were increasingly displayed in the houses of the Roman elite, by popes, in churches, and in newly established museums.”
Source: Times New Roman: Classical Inscriptions, Epigraphy Hunters, and Renaissance Fonts – SARAH E. BOND
Episode 36: Thinking Out Loud 102: Flipping the Switch – Thinking.FM
Can you trust book reviews? Are they all paid for by authors looking for five stars? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about where to find their next book to read and what sources you can trust and what sources you can’t.
Join the Thinking Out Loud Book Exchange (and get awesome books in the mail!):
Show Notes:
- Foot Pedal Transcriber
- LA Review of Books
- Sword and Laser
- Marginalia
- Chicago Review of Books
- Book Riot Harder Read Challenge
- Speaking Down Barriers Book List
- Writing Excuses Book of the Week
- Little Alchemy
- Sam’s Suggestions
- Thomas’s Suggestions
- The Force Awakens
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 102: Flipping the Switch appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Metaphor for Looking Ahead By Looking Back
By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.
Source: Hubble Team Breaks Cosmic Distance Record | NASA
Our eyes, like the (still) incredible Hubble Telescope, are time machines. We see things as they happen in the past, whether they are right in front of us or 13.4 billion light years away. We are a curious and amazing species that can process signals to make inferences about our own future.
Whether it’s looking into deep space or contemplating the future of your life or business, don’t ever stop visioning. Our brains are built for such duties.
Episode 35: Thinking Religion 68: There Is No Such Thing as Christianity – Thinking.FM
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss
Show Notes
The post Thinking Religion 68: There Is No Such Thing as Christianity appeared first on Thinking.FM.
A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon
Fantastic read on many levels. Even a nod to Stainless Steel Rat for Wayne Porter…
The Millennium Falcon underwent a long and arduous number of conceptual iterations before its final iconic shape emerged; the one we now once again see blasting its way across the big screen. In fact it wasn’t even known by its famous name until well into production, having up until then gone under the much mundane moniker: Pirate Ship.
Source: A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon — Kitbashed
Episode 34: Thinking Out Loud 101: Coming Into the Light – Thinking.FM
Elisabeth talks about how she might want to hide in the shadows because she’s not ready to be considered a writer but the really amazing things that happen when you do finally step into the light. You have to be who are you without wanting the affirmation of other people or fulfilling contrived notions of beauty standards. Be true to yourself and to the other people living in this cosmos with you.
Sign up for the Thinking Out Loud Book Exchange!
Show Notes:
- Little Alchemy
- We Are a Work in Progress
- Author spotlight for Debut Collective
- What Happened When I Didn’t Shave for a Year
- Amanda Palmer’s Post
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 101: Coming Into the Light appeared first on Thinking.FM.
The Gospel of Consumption
“Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.
Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.”
Source: Orion Magazine | The Gospel of Consumption
A good read from 2008. We’re in even worse shape with our mobile devices forming our core communication identities.
Sometimes, I don’t know how / why I try to work in marketing.
Episode 33: Thinking Religion 67: A Little Gnod to the Gnostics – Thinking.FM
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss Dan’s
Show Notes
- Sam’s New Pen
- Are We Seeing the Fall of the Religious Right? | Dr. Thomas Whitley
- Thinking.FM on Patreon
The post Thinking Religion 67: A Little Gnod to the Gnostics appeared first on Thinking.FM.
An honest thief
Fascinating read…
“The conclusion is inescapable: we must live our lives to promote the most overall good. And that would seem to mean helping those most in want—the world’s poorest people.
Our rule demands one do everything they can to help the poorest—not just spending one’s wealth and selling one’s possessions, but breaking the law if that will help. I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars.”
Source: An honest thief
The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
“It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.”
Episode 32: Thinking Out Loud 100: You Brought Your Whistle – Thinking.FM
Elisabeth and Merianna celebrate their 100 episode! They relive how it all started and all their best soapbox speeches and conclude if you are adding your voice to the mix, don’t just be a part of the chorus. Stand out!
Sign up for the Thinking Out Loud Book Exchange!
Show Notes:
- Celebrate
- Thinking.FM on Patreon
- Harper Lee’s Death
- Chuck Wendig
- Huffington Post Bloggers Actually Do Want To Get Paid
- Huffington Post Refusing to Pay Writers Is Wrong
- Camp Nano
- 100 Day Challenge-#writeeverydamnday
- Star Trek Transporter
- Navel-Gazing
What are Elisabeth and Merianna reading?
The post Thinking Out Loud 100: You Brought Your Whistle appeared first on Thinking.FM.