power – Page 2

On creativity. And Space Ace Jase.

October 6, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Nautilus — Illustration by Leslie Dean Brown. © 2015. All rights reserved.

What is the strangest thing you have ever heard?

When I was growing up, by far the funniest, most preposterous thing I had ever heard anyone say was this:

“I can kick a soccer ball to China”.

As kids, I can remember us all standing in the middle of the street. And we simply erupted with laughter.

Air, friction, gravity and power aside… it was the silliest thing I had ever heard anyone say. So forever afterwards, he was known in our circle as “Space Ace Jase”.

He had said something that none of us had ever heard before. What he said… he had said the impossible.

Looking back, you have to hand it to this kid – he was certainly creative.

And I can remember wondering, how did he think up such things? Kick a soccer ball to China… that’s ridiculous! Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

But then later in life, we realise we have lost a lot of that creativity we were inherently born with. It has been slowly eroded from us.

We are taught what to say. How to say it. When to say it. Why to say it. Where to say it. Which people to say it to. So we eventually lose that sense of silliness.

I think it’s because people seem to assume you dont need to be ‘clever’ to be creative. It all starts around high school. All the nerdy, intelligent people do maths and science to get a higher tertiary entrance tank score. And science, engineering and maths don’t at first appear to be very creative, do they? They always rank higher than music, literature and art.

I used to get paid quite a bit but I found it all rather boring after several years. So you need to ask yourself: what does compensation matter if you /really/ don’t like doing it?

And then sooner or later we want to get some of that creativity back again…

So how do we become more creative?

I think creativity is simply doing something in some new way with something that has never been done before. Creativity is after all… simply creating something new!

Creativity simply means taking two things that have never been put together and just… whacking them together.

First off, have you noticed that parents often tell their children: “don’t be silly!”? They say something completely new and then they are promptly told it is silly. “Don’t be silly” you hear parents say straight afterwards.

Well I think in order to be creative, you have to be prepared to take risks like that. You have to be prepared to say something wrong. Just like kids. They are always making mistakes, but they are naturally very creative.

For me, being creative, maintaining my creativity —or better yet boosting it— usually means doing something differently. And doing something completely different each and every day.

Going somewhere I have never been. Seeing something I have never seen. Listening to sounds that I have never heard before. Or reading something I have never read before. Even feeling things I have never felt before. I’ll skip the sense of smell just to throw you off my sense-track-pattern.

So my best advice to you, if you want to be more creative, to do that, is to start doing things differently. If you have a choice, choose the option you don’t normally choose. Don’t go to the same old cafe. Don’t walk the same route.

Why do creative careers pay less anyway?

Being creative uses your intelligence in a different way. We should all be paid the same. The same as ‘clever’ people. Because I’ve noticed that clever people can actually be very uncreative. That’s why nerds are drawn to all sorts of comics. Becuase they can’t come up with that shit themselves. Am I right? Of course I’m right.

I am slowly becoming more creative and it has taken about 1-2 years to build that skill. I could argue that there is much more actual work involved in creating one of my illustrations than pressing a button and getting the results from a scientific experiment. What I mean is that there are many more minute decisions that have to be made. I should be getting paid more for illustration. But I get paid much, much less.

Unfortunately the world doesn’t seem to work that way. “Like anyone can be creative.”

I would say that if there is a theoretical basis for undervaluing creatives, it is because to be creative, sometimes you have to be prepared to make mistakes (you can’t please everyone). And people that make mistakes are sometimes not seen as being ‘creative’, they are seen as being ‘wrong’. And being wrong or silly doesn’t pay.

So creatives always get paid less. Or do they? If you think about it, professional actors and musicians are some of the most highly paid people on the planet. I’m talking way, way more than 200k salaries.

Well that’s it from me today,

Take care,

Les.

Some perspective about colonising the planet Mars.

August 29, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2019. All rights reserved.

Imagine if 7 billlion people had always lived on a dust-bowl Mars-like planet with no life outside of the base stations. Imagine if that’s the way it had always been. Imagine if that was humanities’ entire existence, on the red planet…

With that in mind, I’d like to do a little thought experiment. I want you to imagine what would happen if we were to start exploring the solar system, from our home Mars.

The closest other world, Earth, looks very promising. We’ve spent a hundred trillion dollars on this latest space mission, okay. It’s been 30 years in the planning stage alone…

So we go to this new place called ‘Earth’.

And we don’t find another dust-bowl freeze-your-arse-off planet with no oceans, a toxic atmosphere* and a severe lack of oxygen. We don’t find it to be uninhabited. We don’t find the gravity extremely off-putting. We don’t find a desolate, barren wasteland devoid of all life like the home planet. No.

Instead, what we encounter is another world no unlike this one, the one we already know as ‘Earth’, exactly the way it is now, but without all the humans. Without any civilisation.

Imagine if we found 60 amur leopards, 400 Sumatran tigers, 880 mountain gorillas, 1826 giant pandas, 4080 snow leopards, 4848 black rhinos and 10000 blue whales!

Impenetrable jungles! Countless species of insects! Fish! Crustaceans! Molluscs! Birds! Frogs!

“Frogs? What an unusual name. What are they? Oh they’re slimy but harmless critters –amphibians– that thrive both on the land and in the water and use jumping as a form of locomotion.”

Lakes containing fresh water! Glaciers! Too many animal species to list!

“They’ve got a whole interconnected web-like thing scientists are calling an ‘ecosystem’ over there on that other planet. We’ve been trying for close to a millenium to get something like that going over here.”

Meanwhile back on Mars inside our dry and dusty base station, we get a breaking news report about the existence of all these weird and wonderful creatures on the new world. That’s right. Millions upon millions of new species that had never been seen or even reported before and now, as if by magic, all of a sudden they existed! Imagine what the news media would say if that was what we discovered when we weren’t even expecting the most modest and basic life-forms!!

Don’t you think we’d want to “swap planets”?

“No? What do you mean she is still not convinced of going?!

Because on the new planet they have oceans! Water falls from the sky! Food is abundant!

“Mate! You sure you still don’t want to leave here? They’re saying that not only could you breathe without a respirator, but everyone could literally walk outside, without ever having to wear a space suit. Your body would never be at risk of ‘exploding’! No airlocks required. A-fucking-mazing. I’d like to live there. Fuck this Mars shithole I say.”

But they’re not on that other planet, they’re right here on this one, now.

So just imagine if, miraculously, we materialised over there on the new and way cooler planet Earth with lots of life. Yes. Imagine if we didn’t even have to travel through space to get there; no need for a mass-exodus from planet Mars to get over to planet Earth.

“I’m telling you it turns out we don’t even have to travel anywhere Duncan! We’ve all been part of a cruel social experiment. Everyone has been living in a dream world. Just step outside and take a look for yourself. Its all out there”.

Imagine if we just found out about all that’s here, today. Imagine if it was only yesterday that we were totally ignorant and only today that we all just found out about all these new and never-before-described animals.

Giraffes, chameleons, snails, dragonflies, bees, grasshoppers, stick insects, jellyfish, toucans, macaws, catepillars, hermit crabs, barnacles, sharks, barracuda. Not to mention flowers.

Wouldn’t that be incredible? Wouldn’t that thought give you an unbelievable feeling inside? Do you think that would give us some sense of hope that “all is not lost”?

Next, I’d like you to imagine if we were given a second chance at everything. A chance to do things right. Imagine if, despite all the well-documented mistakes we’d made in the past, we were somehow expunged of all of our “conservation inaction guilt”. Imagine if we had a chance of recolonising this planet Earth. Do you think we’d be so naive and myopic as to make the same mistakes all over again on the new planet? No I don’t think so.

I think we’d all say something like:

“no hang on, we tried internal combustion engines on that other planet Earth and it didn’t go so well”.

I think we’d probably be a little more prudent the next time around don’t you think?

What you’d like to hear me tell you is what we could and should be saying:

“Yes we already know from our land survey data that there are plenty of coal & oil reserves on this new planet Earth. But knowing what we know about the alternate timelines, sooner than dig all of these fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them, we’d be better off building massive solar power stations instead. Better to utilise electric cars and have them recharged with renewable energy…”

Wouldn’t you agree that the new Earth colony could very easily put a government mandate in place that prohibits the use of fossil fuels and other toxic materials?

But that’s precisely what we are not doing, isn’t it?

Because we’re waking up every single day hoping that this problem will all just somehow “go away” all by itself.

We’re waking up every day with this second-chance-option, every single day, and we’re not taking it.

We already know that many animal species are threatened with extinction. Many people find this news very depressing/distressing (myself included). But they’re not extinct yet. No not just yet. I don’t mean to say that they won’t ever become extinct. I’m not saying that at all.

Last of all, imagine if we learned that instead of thriving on this new planet, the survival situation for quite a few of those species was more than a little precarious. Many of them are doing okay and still breeding fine but some niche species aren’t coping very well at all.

Now imagine we’d spent all that money to get to this other planet, one hundred trillion dollars, and then imagine we’re too fucking stingy to save even a few of the thousands of endangered species. What do you think would make news headlines on that day?

My point is, we haven’t even spent a hundred trillion dollars on some ridiculous space mission. Not yet.

Rather, it’s more a case of “they’re already here and we’re already there”. That new planet is this planet.

So to me it looks like the majority of humans are either stingy, lazy, stupid or a combination of all three. Most people have this “can’t be fucked attitude” about a problem we ourselves created.

We’re not stingy when we’re buying the latest generation mobile phones though are we? No, it seems we all have plenty of money for that.

See, I think we’re acting worse than a typical teenager who doesn’t want to clean up their own mess. They expect that someone else will do it for them.

But we’re not teenagers. We’re adults. And you’d think that we would have more responsibility for our own actions.

Instead, we’re treating dear planet Earth a bit like our first proper girlfriend or boyfriend —the one we used to hold on a pedestal, the one we looked up to, the one we tried so hard in the beginning for, the one we never imagined would end— and by foolishly and repeatedly not respecting the others’ limits and boundaries, we inevitably lost them. We then suffered the unimagineable heartbreak of the completely avoidable relationship breakup.

So in this rather unusual post, I’d like to remind everyone that we are taking what we have here for granted. Massively so.

We’re making the same mistakes we always make. And it really makes me rather sad. I feel like I shouldn’t even be living in this timezone…

Because scientsists are warning everyone, the entire world, that we might not even be able to recover from this particular “relationhip breakup”. It’s going to be far worse than our first-ever divorce. It’s going to be that hard and way harder still.

I don’t think we can make it on our own. I don’t think we’re ‘smart’ enough.

We still need this world. And I hope this blog makes people aware of that.

The way I think of it is this. Mars is just another example of a ‘shithole’ (meaning uninhabitable) planet in our the solar system. Why do I say that? Well I don’t see too many 5-star resorts being built in the middle of a deserted wasteland thousands of miles from civilisation. No. See, we already know that there’s this consensus that the nicest places to be and more importantly stay at are generally the ones where there’s either a city, a river, a lake, an ocean, a beach, a mountain or a forest. Or preferably combinations of them.

Mars has none of that. Who the fuck is going to want to voluntarily live there? Slaves? Miners? People with no imagination for what it’s actually going to be like living there on a day-to-day basis, sign some contract and get stuck there? Poor people who can no longer afford to live on Earth. Probably the latter. Maybe this is what this is all about. An ultra-rich class of people wanting to find a new home for all of us poor people.

Forget Mars. Earth is where it’s at. We’re already on the good planet Elon. If you want to go and live there, by all means, go. I think you’ll be back. You’re realise it was a bad invesment

In the future we will engineer termites to build skyskrapers.

July 24, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Yes. In the future, I can confidently predict that we will engineer termites to build skyskrapers.

Because in the future, we will start to realise the power of “bottom up” systems of engineering. Currently, we do everything from a “top down” perspective. What does that mean? We start with a mine, dig that up, we then crush and grind the ore down, melt it, form it into large slabs of metal which then get progressively smaller as they are processed. Yes, we even obtain the metallic powders that are used in 3D printing this exact same way. This is a most inefficient process.

Nature does it the other way around. It uses local materials obtained from trace chemical elements and is then able to organise, redirect and assemble those individual atoms and molecules to build its own structures, in situ. It does this without any “larger scale” instructions or guidance. And it is able to replicate itself on top of that. So the more I think about it, the more evolution amazes me.

I read this fascinating book in 2014 called “Emergence”. And one of the traits of nature is that it has “emergent” properties. What does that mean? It means that complex systems or behaviours can arise from relatively few simple rules. In other words, it is “self assembling”. Organisms can do their own thing seemingly without any intererence from the outside world. Wouldn’t we like to be able to do that? Here is where we are currently at:

The other marvel of nature is that everything is an “ambient temperature process”. Think about that for a moment. Practically every synthetic material we produce today requires some form of heat to manufacture. Metals must be smelted. Ceramics must be fired. And plastics must be obtained by “thermal cracking” of crude oil. Sure there are a few exceptions, such as sol-gel technology.

Imagine for a moment a “homogenous” material with different chemical, thermal, electrical and physical properties along its length. In other words, a single material that was flexible at one end and rigid at the other, without being formed from two separate raw materials. If we could get that to happen, spontaneously, then I think we would be quite a clever species. Because an invention like that would literally change the world.

Imagine tyres that increased their coefficient of friction and gripped more in the wet. Or indeed, slicks that morph into treaded tyres in the presence of water. You see, from what I have read, I think all of that is ‘theoretically possible’, but the more biodiversity we lose, the less chance there is that it will happen. That is why protecting biodiversity is so important, so we can understand how genes work to create any morphology and material properties we desire.

Is a ‘circular’ electronics industry possible?

July 20, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I think one of the biggest problems that humanity will face in the not–too–distant future is a lack of synthetic biodegradeable semiconductors.

Okay, so I’ve put that thought out there into cyberspace and now I suppose I should explain it. Why do I think this is going to be such a problem?

As we are all too much aware, human civilisation is fast becoming dependent on technology. You might say that the 1st world is already highly dependent on technology. And a big part of current technology includes electronics devices. Electronics drive everything from robots to computers. Without electronics, we go back to the analogue era. I’m sure that I don’t even need to explain that any further, do I? Without electronics, we’re screwed.

So earlier this year, I asked two questions on Quora:

It doesn’t make any sense to totally rely on something that we can only make in limited quantities, yet we are doing just that. Because the trouble is this: the way in which we produce electronic devices today is completely unsustainable. We mine the Earth for new minerals and the only element we recover from all of our electronic waste is gold (well, okay, we do sometimes also recycle lead and copper). But what about recycling all of the other elements that are used in electronic components?

Are we recycling tantalum? No. Are we recycling indium? No. Are we recycling gallium? No. Are we recycling arsenic? No. Are we recycling cadmium? No. Are we recycling selenium? No. Are we recycling tellurium? No. Are we recycling germanium? No. Are we recycling samarium? No. Are we recycling neodymium? No. Are we recycling niobium? No. Are we recycling antimony? No.

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Who am I going to vote for in Australia?

June 14, 2016 — leslie dean brown

A friendly reminder to both labor and liberal parties: without the environment, there IS no economy.

The world is changing and I think politics needs to change along with it. I think both labour and liberal are great at doing one thing: stalling.Maintaining the status quo. That’s it.

“The big risk in this election is that we would end up with an unstable, chaotic, Labor-Greens minority Government as we’ve seen before.”

Actually, I think the really big risk is that we’ll end up with a chaotic planet. I’m sure most people don’t care, but I’ll be voting for the GREENS. Because the price of labor/liberal winning –forever– is simply too great now.

The planet does not care whether or not liberal or labor is in power. Science does not care about politicians and the way they play their games. Atoms do not care. Reactions and interactions and natural forces simply do not care. And what I mean by that is that the consequences of not changing fast enough will happen —whether labor is in power or liberal.

This world is fast getting beyond the point where the green parties could make a difference… even if they won many elections all over the place.

I hate to be all doom & gloom and everthing, but my analogy is that I suppose it doesn’t really matter who is or was driving the car when the accident happens.

I think we need to hand over the control to more people that actually know what they are doing and can think longer-term. I think prevention is better than cure. That’s why I’m voting for Greens.