TO THE LEFT

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.html

This is a truly phenomenal TED presentation by Dr. Charles Limb.

This talk really excited me. I have often pondered to what extent jazz innovation truly reflects the 'creative spark'. I often find myself closing my eyes when I sing or solo on sax, perhaps to 'shut down' those parts of the cortex that 'interfere' (admittedly, harder to do that on a piano solo, but would have been awesome to test that as well). I understood from an interview with Dr. Limb that he only studied right-handed musicians, which is okay for a start, but would be great to see to what extent their scans differ from the right handed. The reason I say this is that, as a left handed musician, I wonder what it would have been like to have learned to play piano 'backwards' as a child with the lower notes on the right. How would my bass accompaniments be different? How would my solos be different if I were using my dominant hand? The reason I say this is because you can hear the left-handedness of Bill Evans.

He is one dude I would definitely like to jam with (but perhaps not in his machine)

Ready to listen?

Sarah Kay

"If I should have a daughter"

 

The folks at TED who invited a twenty-two year old nymph to recite and discuss spoken poetry sure went out on a limb here. The crowd seemed to like her presentation and gave her two standing ovations, and the talk-backs are generally positive. So if you're in a touchy-feely mood this 18 minute sweet sermon will do it to you.  If you're looking for hard core speakers spouting core technology, move on.  I found her engaging, but kept thinking to myself how many standing ovations she would have received from the predominantly male crowd had she been dowdy and middle aged. That after all, is when most poets who started writing in their teens begin to receive their recognition (or not). 

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html

175 salad dressing options......

Malcolm Gladwell is a funny person as well as a great writer!!  He is much more famous than Dr. Howard Moskowitz, the scientist he talks about the whole presentation. Dr. Moskowitz did all the work, and reached the conclusions. But because of Gladwell's journalistic and presentational skills, more people have now heard of Dr. Moskowitz than ever would have.  By the way, Malcolm also grew up in small city Ontario (makes me proud just to know that), just like Gordon Lightfoot and me

.http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Malcolm talks about Moskowitz' discovery that there is no 'one best Pepsi sweetness', that our preferences are clustered, rather than universal, and that often our mind can't express our taste preferences (e.g., chunky tomato sauce) until we actually do the tasting.  As a result, there are now many kinds of  tomato sauce and mustards* on supermarket shelves, too the happiness of Americans everywhere.

But hold on a minute. What about the equally stimulating presentation by Barry Schwartz?

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Barry makes the opposite argument, i.e. that having 175 salad dressing options in the supermarket (and too many other choices in picking jeans, stereo systems, a mate, a career, a pension plan) causes us to become paralyzed and unable to make key decisions. He further thinks that having all these choices, options, tastes and fits, actually makes us unhappy, because our expectations have risen to the extent that they cannot be fulfilled. Something like waiting for a Mr. Right who either doesn't exist, or is unlikely to pass by in one's lifetime.

It is titillating that these two talks, presented a year and a continent apart, should contain two such conflicting views.  Do I have to choose one over the other?  That might lead to paralysis of thought. They are both lovely.  Perhaps too much choice is daunting, perhaps too little is limiting. I've decided not to decide. Now is that a decision? You decide.

*By the way, if you do like mustard, you might enjoy the Commandments' rendition of  'mustard sally' .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpmVt9POOoU

Pause for a moment .....

Definitely worth watching for all us workaholics.

This is an enlightening talk out of Sydney by Nigel Marsh, who maintains that our employers (particularly the commercial companies) try to suck as much energy out of us as possible, leaving little for the most important things in our life, our family, our wellbeing, our inner selves, and sex. He describes spending an afternoon with his youngest child, only to learn that this was the happiest day of his son's life.

Indeed when we remember our fond family moments as children, it is the small things that stand out. Going for walks together, card games, fishing, golf, the beach, rather than spectacular events and shows.

As adults, it is too easy to get into the spiral of running after professional success. Money, gold cards on airlines, hobnobbing with rich and famous. Or, in the case of scientists, key speeches at major conferences, articles in Nature and Science, invitations from Harvard and Oxford.  

As someone who has been in this race for over thirty years, I have made my share of mistakes. Too much travel when my kids were growing up, for example. My now adult son recently told me that as a child he used to sleep with my t-shirt when I would fly (frequently) abroad.  Had I known, would I have done it differently?

As my colleague Dr. Cal Torneck (University of Toronto) once put it, "At the end of the day, it's family that counts".  "They're the ones who really miss you when you're dead and gone".  And I hasten to add, "No one has their CV on their tombstone."

Has anyone invited Paul Simon to speak at TED? They should. I am reminded of  some of his finest lines from Slip Sliding Away:

"And I know a father who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he'd done
He came a long way just to explain
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
Then he turned around and he headed home again

God only knows, God makes his plan
The information's unavailable to the mortal man
We're workin' our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we're gliding down the highway, when in fact we're slip sliding away"

 http://www.ted.com/talks/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work.html

Cartoons

Patrick Chappatte is a very talented cartoonist. His idea of bringing people on both sides of a conflict together to draw cartoons is noble. But aren’t political cartoons supposed to be, at least to some extent, opinionated and provocative? His notion that the internet exercises a higher degree of censorship than newspapers is, to say the least, debatable. So keep drawing Patrick, and go easy on the lecturing.  With the exception of a couple of cute cartoons, this one isn’t worth the paper it isn’t written on.

 http://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_chappatte_the_power_of_cartoons.html

Potential

Listening to Richard Feynman explain the world is phenomenal. TED has done us the courtesy of adding amazing non-ted talks and interviews, so that you can get even more laterally bewildered. This happened to me this morning, after listening to Dimitar Sasselov (below).  After hearing Sasselov’s talk, there was this link to Feynman on BBC, and hey, it just doesn’t stop. So if you want to invest even more of your time to check out one of the greatest connected and connecting minds of the past century, stay tuned. Your atoms will jiggle, guaranteed.

I read on Wikipedia that Feynman was denied acceptance to Columbia because he was Jewish. We think of Europeans as being the great anti-semites of the western world, but if you were a Jewish student in North America in the 1920s to 1940s it was almost impossible to get accepted to some of the famous ivy-league universities.

I remember reading once that Feynman at one stage shunned music because it kept his mind off thinking, but there is a great segment on youtube of him playing bongos during the period of his terminal illness. So right I now have both of the segments running simultaneously: Feynman explaining how atoms bang into each other, and Feynman banging on the bongos.  Some musical geek (or Person, perhaps) should do a segment.

As I mentioned, I connected with Feynman after watching Dimitar Sasselov  describe the likelihood that somewhere, sometime, somehow, there is a solar system like ours with a planet like ours, with some alien being, perhaps typing out a similar blog. Check it out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_potential_earth_like_planets.html

As an undergraduate student, I wrote (1973)  a term paper on the theory of how life began as a sac of chemicals in a bilayer membrane, citing Alec Bangham’s research

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20430797

and thus subsequently started out my graduate research on bacterial membranes as a result.

 http://www.ted.com/speakers/richard_feynman.html

Outlets

John La Grou has a terrific idea for communication between electrical plugs and outlets that will prevent house fires, save lives and electricity.  They have applied for over 400 patents (one wasn’t enough?).  This won’t fly until someone (governments?) forces manufacturers (China?) and housebuilders (everywhere) to make it standard.  That may take a while, considering how much trouble it is plugging an American electrical device into a European outlet (or verse vica). All this in four minutes. Makes you wonder whether all TED talks should have a short four minute version. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1.html