This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of an ancient imperial pilgrimage called the Kumano Kodo. I took along a powerful camera, believing, as I always have, that it would be an indispensable creative tool. But I returned with the unshakeable feeling that I’m done with cameras, and that most of us are, if we weren’t already.
genetic synecdoche
Together with philosopher David Wasserman, Asch wrote in 2005 that using genetic tests to screen out a fetus with a known disability is evidence of pernicious “synecdoche.” Ordinarily, synecdoche is a value-neutral figure of speech, in which some single part stands for the whole—as in the common use of “White House” to stand for the executive branch of government. But Asch and Wasserman’s meaning was more loaded: prenatal genetic tests, they argued, too often let a single trait become the sole characteristic of a fetus, allowing it to “obscure or efface the whole.” In other words, genetic data, once known, generally become the only data in the room. Taking a “synecdochal approach” to prenatal testing, Asch and Wasserman warned—in the era just prior to consumer genetic sequencing—allows one fact about a potential child to “overwhelm and negate all other hoped-for attributes.”We won’t know what Asch would have made of 23andMe, designer babies, or broader claims for personal genomics. But her intellectual legacy only grows more relevant in the era of ever-cheaper, personalized genetic data. Asch understood that there are plenty of things technologies like prenatal genetic testing can tell us. But the choices and challenges in defining a life worth living, and living well—it may be that these aren’t technological problems at all.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet’s biggest oil producer and Russia as the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we’ve begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
Parlement of foules, every morning in the H-E-B parking lot. A cacophony of grackles. A raucous convocation.
the dangers of simplification
help wanted again
So I’m taking the advice of Austin Kleon and others to “own my own turf,” which means that I’m moving as much of my online stuff as possible to my own domain. This will — eventually — mean that I’ll move my tumblelog over to the blog side of that domain — so I’m looking for an attractive WordPress theme. Here are the features I’ll need:
- It should be clean and simple;
- It should have elegant typography;
- Its formatting should clearly distinguish between text posts and quotes;
- It should present images attractively.
Any suggestions? Replies on Twitter would be welcome.
The key to being creative, in any field, be it scientific, technical, or business, in the 21st century definitely requires a certain comfort level in technology. But the best way to harness the power of computers doesn’t reside in coding – it resides in letting computers do the grunt computational work that humans are bad at, so that humans can focus on the creative, problem solving work that computers are bad at.And if you want to foster those creative, problem solving skills, the solution isn’t learning to code – it’s learning to paint. Or play an instrument. Or write poetry. Or sculpt. The field doesn’t matter: the key thing is that if you want to foster your own innovative creativity, the best way to do it is to seriously pursue an artistic endeavor.
In the history of the Nobel Prize, nearly every Laureate has pursued the arts. According to research by psychologists Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein, “almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be a visual artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer.”
