WOW IDEAS #9 Myths, Holland, FunTheory
- EAST VS. WEST -- THE MYTHS THAT MYSTIFY - An eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/devdutt_pattanaik.html
- CREATIVE “ANIMATED CATALOGUE” FROM HOLLAND
http://producten.hema.nl/
- THE WORLD'S DEEPEST BIN - THEFUNTHEORY.COM -
We believe that the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw&feature=related
- HUBBLE IMAGES CAPTURE UNIVERSE’S BEAUTY
http://www.wired.com/science/space/multimedia/2009/04/gallery_hubble?slide=12&slideView=2
- VINE SEEDS BECOME 'GIANT GLIDERS' - Remarkable footage has been captured of falling Alsomitra vine seeds, which use paper-thin wings to disperse like giant gliders.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8391000/8391345.stm (1,24 min)
- PLANET-EARTH FLAG using Ying-Yang (Article)
- LICENSE TO WONDER (Article)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- EAST VS. WEST -- THE MYTHS THAT MYSTIFY
Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.
We all search for meaning in our work and lives. Devdutt Pattanaik suggests we try a tactic of our ancestors -- finding life lessons in myth, ritual and shared stories. As the Chief Belief Officer at Future Group in Mumbai, he helps managers harness the power of myth to understand their employees, their companies and their customers. He's working to create a Retail Religion, to build deep, lasting ties between customers and brands.
Pattanaik is a self-taught mythologist, and the author (and often illustrator) of several works on aspects of myth, including the primer Myth = Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology and his most recent book, 7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar Art. He writes a column called "Management Mythos" for Economic Times that juxtaposes myth onto modern leadership challenges. His newest area of inquiry: How is traditional management, as expressed in old Indian cultural narratives, different from modern scientific management techniques?"
http://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik.htm (18 mins)
- LICENSE TO WONDER
One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science ” as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote ” creates an expanding frontier of ignorance, where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier ” this peering into the unknown ” is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.
The second misconception that comes from this facts, facts, factsmethod of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical creep; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. (This raises the interesting question of when speculation is more likely to generate productive lines of enquiry than deductive creep. I don’t know the answer ” I’d have to speculate.)
Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery in London Rosalind Franklin in 1950.
There are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, from Archimedes in his bathtub, to Newton and his apple. But there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration ” or lack of it ” in the history of science. Among the most famous is the story of Rosalind Franklin and her non-discovery of the structure of DNA.
Franklin was an expert at getting x-ray diagrams from crystals of molecules. The idea is that the array of spots in the diagram will reveal how the atoms in the crystal are arranged. When Franklin started working on DNA, she obtained superb x-ray diagrams; one of her contemporaries described them as among the most beautiful of any substance ever taken. Indeed, it was from one of her diagrams that James Watson and Francis Crick deduced what the correct structure of DNA must be. (The picture was shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge.)
She had the data. Why didn’t she reach the solution? There are several answers to this; but one is that she had a fixed idea about how the problem should be solved. Namely, she wanted to work out the structure using the methods she had been taught. These methods are intricate, abstract, and mathematical, and difficult to use on a molecule as complex as DNA. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, were building physical models of what the diagram suggested the structure should be like ” an approach that Franklin scorned. What’s more, their first model was ludicrously wrong, something that Franklin spotted immediately. But they were willing to play; she wasn’t. In other words, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, adopt a more intuitive, speculative approach.
Our ability to make scientific discoveries is limited in a number of fundamental ways. One is TIME: it’s hard to do good experiments that last for more than a few weeks. Experiments that run for years are rare; as a result, we know relatively little about long, slow processes. Another constraint is MONEY (no surprise there); a third is ETHICS (some experiments that would be interesting to do are ethically impossible). Some questions remain uninvestigated because no one stands to profit from the answers. Still others are neglected because they have no obvious bearing on human health or welfare, the areas of research are unfashionable, or the appropriate tools haven’t been invented yet. Some problems are just overwhelmingly complex.
But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Notes:
Why Rosalind Franklin didn’t solve the structure of DNA when she had the data has been much discussed; see, in particular, Maddox, B. 2002. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA Harper Collins. See also, Judson, H. F. 1996. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in BiologyExpanded Edition. Cold Spring Harbor Press; and Watson, J. D. 2001. œThe Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.Touchstone Press.
Many thanks to Daniel Brockert, Dan Haydon, Horace Judson and, especially, Gideon Lichfield, for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/license-to-wonder/
New Flags & The Dance Of Mutual Enhancement
Further Explorations Of The Yin-Yang Symbol
By Elizabeth Reninger, taoism.about.com/od/basicprinciples/a/Lanterns.htm
Pledging Allegiance
If someone were to sponsor a competition for the design of a planet-Earth flag, I would, for sure, submit the Taoist yin-yang symbol, as an emblem of relating with joyful sanity to pairs-of-opposites. Each time we gazed with devotion upon our planetary insignia, we could be pledging allegiance to the knowing that pairs of opposites exist – only and always – interdependently, in relation to each other, and that each always contains within itself the essence of the other.
This would include, for example, physical characteristics: big/small, long/short, young/old, beautiful/ugly, fat/skinny.
As well as moral attributions: right/wrong, good/bad, victim/tyrant, saint/sinner.
Directional distinctions: up/down, front/back, inside/outside, right/left.
And the biggies: attraction/repulsion, existence/non-existence, presence/absence, birth/death, self/other.
Posturing & In-Dependency
The way these pairs of opposites function is that one half has no meaning whatsoever – perceptually, cognitively or experientially – without the other half as its (conscious or unconscious) point of reference.
Why does this matter? Because we humans tend to spend a lot of time positioning ourselves: creating separate “me’s” and then positioning these “me’s” in relation to “others” – comparing and contrasting in terms of all sorts of categories, i.e. pairs of opposites. In other words, we invest a lot of energy in the placing of ourselves here rather than there – or in wishing ourselves to be there instead of here.
This habit/impulse is not inherently good or bad, right or wrong. Yet it seems to me that it can be engaged in, in more or less skillful ways -- which brings us back to our new planetary flag. This dance of choosing positions, striking a posture and then dissolving it, etc. can, potentially, be a playful, joyous manifestation of our creative impulses. It can express the insight represented visually in the yin-yang symbol: that each side only exists in relation to, and actually contains, its opposite. We can then allow the categories, the positions, and our “selves” to be what they necessarily are: fluid and relational.
A Dance Of Mutual Enhancement
Such a view makes all the difference in the world in terms of how we relate to the “others” (including past and future versions of our “selves”) who are currently occupying the “opposite” positions. Does our “success” depend upon someone else’s “failure”? Does our being “good” require someone else’s being “bad”?
At a purely linguistic level, the concept of “success” does indeed depend upon the concept of “failure”; as does the concept of “good” depend upon the concept of “bad.” They are interdependent, and because they are interdependent, it’s never an either/or situation. Either both are present, or neither is.
Yet to the extent that we develop and maintain a flexible mind -- in allegiance with the insights of our new yin-yang flag -- we can dance with these pairs of opposites in a way that is both individually empowering and mutually beneficial; which allows for each of us to be improving our individual circumstances, while at the same time remaining rooted in a paradigm of cooperation instead of competition. How does this work?
Lucky!
In terms of individual empowerment, moment by moment we can notice, for instance: If I’m feeling unlucky because I have a slight headache, or because I’m ten pounds overweight, it’s only because I’m comparing myself (consciously or unconsciously) to someone who doesn’t have a headache, or who is at their ideal weight. If instead I compare myself to someone who suffers from a migraine, or who is fifty pounds overweight, I could instead be feeling very lucky indeed!
A Continuum Of Devotion & Compassion
This might seem like an insignificant or obvious point, but in terms of generating a momentum of positive energy within our bodymind, it can be an extremely useful practice. Eventually, as we become more attuned to paradigms of cooperation and mutual enhancement, we’ll also be able to feel good about the good fortune of others. We’ll learn that:
(1) In relation to those who are currently occupying more desirable positions than our own, we can cultivate feelings of devotion, inspiration and sympathetic joy; rather than resentment or jealousy.
(2) In relation to those who are currently occupying less desirable positions than our own, we can cultivate feelings of compassion and a dedication to somehow share our good fortune; rather than repulsion, judgment or arrogance.
This is possible because we understand that the positions are not fixed, forever -- prisons within which we're perpetually trapped -- but rather are just playful (or playful-serious) points of view. And not only is change possible, but it is both inevitable and, in a sense, has already happened -- if we translate the spatial metaphor implied by the yin-yang symbol into its temporal equivalent.
One Body
We can be continually inspired by and devoted to (in the sense of appreciation and sympathetic joy) those who we see as somehow “better” than we are now. And at the same time, continually compassionate toward and willing to support those who we see as somehow “worse” than we are now. In this way, a continuum of energy – the life-blood of our shared Body of Truth (in which all pairs of opposites have found ultimate satisfaction in their mutual extinction) – flows and flows, supporting each of us in our unique and ever-unfolding manifestation.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/devdutt_pattanaik.html
- CREATIVE “ANIMATED CATALOGUE” FROM HOLLAND
http://producten.hema.nl/
- THE WORLD'S DEEPEST BIN - THEFUNTHEORY.COM -
We believe that the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbEKAwCoCKw&feature=related
- HUBBLE IMAGES CAPTURE UNIVERSE’S BEAUTY
http://www.wired.com/science/space/multimedia/2009/04/gallery_hubble?slide=12&slideView=2
- VINE SEEDS BECOME 'GIANT GLIDERS' - Remarkable footage has been captured of falling Alsomitra vine seeds, which use paper-thin wings to disperse like giant gliders.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8391000/8391345.stm (1,24 min)
- PLANET-EARTH FLAG using Ying-Yang (Article)
- LICENSE TO WONDER (Article)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- EAST VS. WEST -- THE MYTHS THAT MYSTIFY
Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.
We all search for meaning in our work and lives. Devdutt Pattanaik suggests we try a tactic of our ancestors -- finding life lessons in myth, ritual and shared stories. As the Chief Belief Officer at Future Group in Mumbai, he helps managers harness the power of myth to understand their employees, their companies and their customers. He's working to create a Retail Religion, to build deep, lasting ties between customers and brands.
Pattanaik is a self-taught mythologist, and the author (and often illustrator) of several works on aspects of myth, including the primer Myth = Mithya: A Handbook of Hindu Mythology and his most recent book, 7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar Art. He writes a column called "Management Mythos" for Economic Times that juxtaposes myth onto modern leadership challenges. His newest area of inquiry: How is traditional management, as expressed in old Indian cultural narratives, different from modern scientific management techniques?"
http://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik.htm (18 mins)
- LICENSE TO WONDER
One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science ” as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote ” creates an expanding frontier of ignorance, where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier ” this peering into the unknown ” is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.
The second misconception that comes from this facts, facts, factsmethod of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical creep; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. (This raises the interesting question of when speculation is more likely to generate productive lines of enquiry than deductive creep. I don’t know the answer ” I’d have to speculate.)
Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery in London Rosalind Franklin in 1950.
There are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, from Archimedes in his bathtub, to Newton and his apple. But there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration ” or lack of it ” in the history of science. Among the most famous is the story of Rosalind Franklin and her non-discovery of the structure of DNA.
Franklin was an expert at getting x-ray diagrams from crystals of molecules. The idea is that the array of spots in the diagram will reveal how the atoms in the crystal are arranged. When Franklin started working on DNA, she obtained superb x-ray diagrams; one of her contemporaries described them as among the most beautiful of any substance ever taken. Indeed, it was from one of her diagrams that James Watson and Francis Crick deduced what the correct structure of DNA must be. (The picture was shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge.)
She had the data. Why didn’t she reach the solution? There are several answers to this; but one is that she had a fixed idea about how the problem should be solved. Namely, she wanted to work out the structure using the methods she had been taught. These methods are intricate, abstract, and mathematical, and difficult to use on a molecule as complex as DNA. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, were building physical models of what the diagram suggested the structure should be like ” an approach that Franklin scorned. What’s more, their first model was ludicrously wrong, something that Franklin spotted immediately. But they were willing to play; she wasn’t. In other words, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, adopt a more intuitive, speculative approach.
Our ability to make scientific discoveries is limited in a number of fundamental ways. One is TIME: it’s hard to do good experiments that last for more than a few weeks. Experiments that run for years are rare; as a result, we know relatively little about long, slow processes. Another constraint is MONEY (no surprise there); a third is ETHICS (some experiments that would be interesting to do are ethically impossible). Some questions remain uninvestigated because no one stands to profit from the answers. Still others are neglected because they have no obvious bearing on human health or welfare, the areas of research are unfashionable, or the appropriate tools haven’t been invented yet. Some problems are just overwhelmingly complex.
But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Notes:
Why Rosalind Franklin didn’t solve the structure of DNA when she had the data has been much discussed; see, in particular, Maddox, B. 2002. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA Harper Collins. See also, Judson, H. F. 1996. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in BiologyExpanded Edition. Cold Spring Harbor Press; and Watson, J. D. 2001. œThe Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.Touchstone Press.
Many thanks to Daniel Brockert, Dan Haydon, Horace Judson and, especially, Gideon Lichfield, for insights, comments and suggestions.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/license-to-wonder/
New Flags & The Dance Of Mutual Enhancement
Further Explorations Of The Yin-Yang Symbol
By Elizabeth Reninger, taoism.about.com/od/basicprinciples/a/Lanterns.htm
Pledging Allegiance
If someone were to sponsor a competition for the design of a planet-Earth flag, I would, for sure, submit the Taoist yin-yang symbol, as an emblem of relating with joyful sanity to pairs-of-opposites. Each time we gazed with devotion upon our planetary insignia, we could be pledging allegiance to the knowing that pairs of opposites exist – only and always – interdependently, in relation to each other, and that each always contains within itself the essence of the other.
This would include, for example, physical characteristics: big/small, long/short, young/old, beautiful/ugly, fat/skinny.
As well as moral attributions: right/wrong, good/bad, victim/tyrant, saint/sinner.
Directional distinctions: up/down, front/back, inside/outside, right/left.
And the biggies: attraction/repulsion, existence/non-existence, presence/absence, birth/death, self/other.
Posturing & In-Dependency
The way these pairs of opposites function is that one half has no meaning whatsoever – perceptually, cognitively or experientially – without the other half as its (conscious or unconscious) point of reference.
Why does this matter? Because we humans tend to spend a lot of time positioning ourselves: creating separate “me’s” and then positioning these “me’s” in relation to “others” – comparing and contrasting in terms of all sorts of categories, i.e. pairs of opposites. In other words, we invest a lot of energy in the placing of ourselves here rather than there – or in wishing ourselves to be there instead of here.
This habit/impulse is not inherently good or bad, right or wrong. Yet it seems to me that it can be engaged in, in more or less skillful ways -- which brings us back to our new planetary flag. This dance of choosing positions, striking a posture and then dissolving it, etc. can, potentially, be a playful, joyous manifestation of our creative impulses. It can express the insight represented visually in the yin-yang symbol: that each side only exists in relation to, and actually contains, its opposite. We can then allow the categories, the positions, and our “selves” to be what they necessarily are: fluid and relational.
A Dance Of Mutual Enhancement
Such a view makes all the difference in the world in terms of how we relate to the “others” (including past and future versions of our “selves”) who are currently occupying the “opposite” positions. Does our “success” depend upon someone else’s “failure”? Does our being “good” require someone else’s being “bad”?
At a purely linguistic level, the concept of “success” does indeed depend upon the concept of “failure”; as does the concept of “good” depend upon the concept of “bad.” They are interdependent, and because they are interdependent, it’s never an either/or situation. Either both are present, or neither is.
Yet to the extent that we develop and maintain a flexible mind -- in allegiance with the insights of our new yin-yang flag -- we can dance with these pairs of opposites in a way that is both individually empowering and mutually beneficial; which allows for each of us to be improving our individual circumstances, while at the same time remaining rooted in a paradigm of cooperation instead of competition. How does this work?
Lucky!
In terms of individual empowerment, moment by moment we can notice, for instance: If I’m feeling unlucky because I have a slight headache, or because I’m ten pounds overweight, it’s only because I’m comparing myself (consciously or unconsciously) to someone who doesn’t have a headache, or who is at their ideal weight. If instead I compare myself to someone who suffers from a migraine, or who is fifty pounds overweight, I could instead be feeling very lucky indeed!
A Continuum Of Devotion & Compassion
This might seem like an insignificant or obvious point, but in terms of generating a momentum of positive energy within our bodymind, it can be an extremely useful practice. Eventually, as we become more attuned to paradigms of cooperation and mutual enhancement, we’ll also be able to feel good about the good fortune of others. We’ll learn that:
(1) In relation to those who are currently occupying more desirable positions than our own, we can cultivate feelings of devotion, inspiration and sympathetic joy; rather than resentment or jealousy.
(2) In relation to those who are currently occupying less desirable positions than our own, we can cultivate feelings of compassion and a dedication to somehow share our good fortune; rather than repulsion, judgment or arrogance.
This is possible because we understand that the positions are not fixed, forever -- prisons within which we're perpetually trapped -- but rather are just playful (or playful-serious) points of view. And not only is change possible, but it is both inevitable and, in a sense, has already happened -- if we translate the spatial metaphor implied by the yin-yang symbol into its temporal equivalent.
One Body
We can be continually inspired by and devoted to (in the sense of appreciation and sympathetic joy) those who we see as somehow “better” than we are now. And at the same time, continually compassionate toward and willing to support those who we see as somehow “worse” than we are now. In this way, a continuum of energy – the life-blood of our shared Body of Truth (in which all pairs of opposites have found ultimate satisfaction in their mutual extinction) – flows and flows, supporting each of us in our unique and ever-unfolding manifestation.
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