The occasional light expression

Slideshare continues to be one of my favorite experiences on the web. They just released the results of the World’s Best Presentation Contest. Each one of the 3 finalists has created a visually compelling and thematically powerful slideshare presentation.Two of the presentations are on the Water crisis and the Zimbabwe crisis. A third is a lovely take on our very own two feet as seen by an intriguing travelista…

This July, I finished reading two excellent sci-fi pieces – Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular and Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi graphic novel – Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Both novels are freely downloadable from the above links. (Quite a stellar business model - fans like me are very likely to buy most of their books at some point).

Both books have been as refreshing as a splash of cold fresh spring water - made me feel how constrained my own vision of the future may have been. They also made me reflect on the smallness of the typical techno-utopian vision for the future shared by technologists and designers alike.

Postsingular is a novel breathtaking in its expanse of thought and scale of execution. You will find nano-scale intelligence and malintent, Californian street kids and geeks figuring out the Planck frontier, crossing between dimensions, futuristic interfaces and political marketing and a sweet twist on the traditional view of Nature and Gaia and post-human intelligence. I’m a fan and am waiting eagerly for Rucker’s next novel ‘Hylozoic’.

I also mentioned my inspiration via Rucker and Postsingular in a recent presentation on Design Inspirations from Science Fiction at Dcamp 2.0 Bangalore which I recently organized through UPA Bangalore.

via Popular Science, a vintage 1878 piece by Charles Peirce on ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’.

The article ends thus…“How to give birth to those vital and procreative ideas which multiply into a thousand forms and diffuse themselves everywhere, advancing civilization and making the dignity of man, is an art not yet reduced to rules, but of the secret of which the history of science affords some hints”.

I’m looking forward to Pangea Day - a striking and timely concept in a fragmented and scattered world.
Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire Pangea Day program will be broadcast in 7 languages  to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow one see the world through another person’s eyes.

Pangea Day was conceptualized by Jehane Noujaim after she won the annual TED prize.

70%Inspired by Vilayanur Ramachandran’s pioneering research on synesthesia and creativity (shown brilliantly in one of his TED lectures), this website created its own version of measuring your creativity through a quick-n-dirty synesthesia.
I also took the Apple addiction challenge and found that I was 26% addicted to Apple - and I don’t even own an iPhone or a Macbook Air yet!