• How to pick a new cell phone. Looking for a new verizon phone and this is the first useful website I’ve found.
• The inventor of my favorite phone. I love the old, solid, you can kill a person with it AT&T corded phones (Known as the Model 500). This is the guy who designed them.
• My favorite NYC bookstore is out of business. Was back in NYC recently and was sad to hear Gotham book mart is gone. At least landmarks 2nd avenue deli and shopsins made it back from the dead (Check out the design of shopsins amazing menu - pdf).
• History of the Brannock foot measuring device (you know the one).
• Man flies with jet powered wing. Straight from the sci-fi movies, this 48 year old man built a wing, that looks almost like a kind of jetpack and flies him around at almost 200mph.

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A recent New Yorker had another excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell, this time about simultaneous invention, the core topic of chapter 5 of The Myths of Innovation. Much of his coverage is spot on - we underestimate how many inventions and discoveries were achieved independently, despite how specific and isolated the credit we give often is.

It’s an excellent article and I recommend it. One highlight for me is this:

Stigler’s Law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

A law which Gladwell points out also applies to Stigler’s law :)

My critique begins with his coverage of Nathan Myhrvold and his company, Intellectual ventures (IV). A firm dedicated to creating what they call “an invention economy”. He never asks any questions about the conflicts between a patent system designed centuries ago to protect individual inventors, and a well-funded company created, as best I can tell, to dominate entire domains of Intellectual property through massive patent fillings and then selling them. Who is best served by “an invention economy’?

It’s not his job to raise every question - that’s my job as the reader. But since the article focuses on Myhrvold & IV, it literally begins and ends with him, the fact that he never questions his company’s place in all this paints them as a positive evolution in how invention will be done. They are loosely portrayed as heroes, an idea which I couldn’t help but find personally depressing - Not entire sure why yet, but I did feel that way.

But more important is his overstatement of artistic creations. He writes:

A work of artistic genius is singular, and all the arguments over calculus, the accusations back and forth between the Bell and the Gray camps, and our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong.

Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.

If you talk to most writers or artists they’ll tell you about specific influences for specific pieces. Picasso said “bad artists borrow, great artists steal”. We’re pretty sure Shakespeare based Hamlet, and many of his plays, on stories and plays he’d heard before. Reading Joseph Campell or Karen Armstrong on mythology reveals the incestuous nature of stories: they breed like rabbits and steal like thieves, and to claim any creative work as Sui generis (means, roughly, something uncategorizable) usually means there’s a kind of ignorance at work about that particular kind of art, or a lack of imagination about what a category is.

And as a kicker, what is one to say about amazing song covers, Like Johnny Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch nails song “hurt”? The fact that an idea can be both deriverative and creative means our definitions aren’t that good (For reference, Cash’s version - you really should see this).

Michelangelo’s David and Picasso’s Guernica are masterpieces, but an analysis of these works by people in the field can point out influences, progressions, and connections to other works the creator knew of or was deliberately trying to emulate. Sometimes, like simultaneous invention, artists pursue similar ideas at the same time: they’re called artistic movements. It’s not the same as simultaneous invention, but it’s close enough. I’ve studied art for years and I still have trouble telling Picassos from Braques, despite works by both being considered masterpieces.

I totally grant there are differences between artistic creation and engineering invention. And Gladwell’s piece had me thinking about them for the better part of a plane flight, a gift which I’m thankful for. But his cut at the differences isn’t quite right.

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• PBS miniseries: Carrier. Fascinating 10 hour show that explores what life is like on the U.S.S. Nimitz. A carrier off the Persian gulf in 2005. Hits on management, morale, morals, work, design, you name it.
• Interview with Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet. Note his dispelling of an innovation myth.
• You’re an author, me too! On the increase in authors and decrease in readers.
• List of 50 best cult books. Surprised Ender’s game didn’t make the list. That was the underground book only the hip geek kids (is that an oxymoron?) were reading in college in the early 90s.
• The best advice I ever got. List of short interviews with Tina Fey, Larry Page, Tony Robbins, and more.

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The more I learn about creative thinking and about teaching, two subjects of great interest, the more depressing organized education in the U.S. becomes. I’m familiar with Montessori, Waldorf and various other well known private school brands, as well as public school programs here and there, but it’s all vaguely disappointing. I’m often left feeling there is no substitute for parents and extended family: they are the best hopes young minds have for learning what it means to think free. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

Two bright spots I’ve found are these two programs, aimed at giving kids exposure to creative problem solving in team environments. I’ve yet to see these things in action but I’d love to visit and maybe even help out with a local chapter.

Odyssey of the Mind - An international program that focuses on creative problem solving projects. It’s a world-wide competition with regional finals and programs.

Destination Imagination: Similiar to Odyssey of the mind, but offers 5 different tracks each with a different creative focus, from technical, to artistic.

If you know of other resources for parents who want to augment their kids exposure to creative thinking and problem solving skills, or have experience with either of the above programs, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear more.

Posted in Teaching/Training, creative thinking | 9 Comments »