Historic Pluto Flyby Tomorrow!

Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

You may have heard about New Horizons.

Hurtling toward tomorrow's flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft has returned unprecedented images of the dwarf planet and its five(!) moons. In the picture of Pluto and Charon above, which was taken five days ago from a distance of several million miles, Charon is the darker of the two bodies.

The spacecraft's primary missions are to characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and Charon, the surface chemical compositions of the two bodies and briefly study the minimal, seasonal atmosphere Pluto is believed to have.

It's expected to pass within several thousand miles of the surface of the dwarf planet tomorrow morning at 7:50a EDT. The Planetary Society has all the information you'll need to learn about the mission and tomorrow's historic encounter.

After its flyby New Horizons will fly on towards the Kuiper belt, where mission controllers have been able to identify further objects for close ups. The spacecraft is is expected to leave our solar system sometime around 2047.

I suspect Astronomy magazine editor and IdeaFestival 2015 speaker Bob Berman will have something to say about the mission in October. Don't miss it!

Stay curious™.

Wayne

"Complex" Rule: Simple is Better

Some rights reserved by oriolsalvador

Treat others as you would be treated.

Writing at Farnam Street, Shane Parrish offers up a mini review of a new book, "Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World." If you're a manager or just sometimes feel paralyzed by the sheer number of choices or the indecipherable nature of a particular situation, you'll find his post - and the book - helpful.

Describing why simple rules, according to the book's authors, offer decision makers the freedom to apply context-specific solutions and avoid problems like "overfitting," Parrish also outlines three heuristics for decision making pulled from the book: "boundary," "prioritizing" and "stopping." When we "satisfice," or find an answer to a question that's good enough, we're using an information heuristic for stopping.

It's perfect for the Internet.

We use rules of thumb all the time, of course. Without them, we'd be overwhelmed with the effort to process every stimuli and by the sheer volume of daily information. Poets and other artists use a highly developed sensing heuristic to express buried truths. By quickly excluding unworkable or unpleasing ideas, architects and studio furniture makers use experience to guide them to useful forms.

At the IdeaFestival we think one simple rule works exceptionally well in these complex days: stay curious.

Give Parrish's post a read after the jump.

I hope to see you at IdeaFestival 2015!

Wayne

Innovator? Don't "Solve Past Problems"

Some rights reserved by e-magic

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it - Albert Einstein”

I loved an idea expressed in this post on LinkedIn, "5 Common Innovation Road Blocks." While "fear of failure" makes its obligatory appearance in the list - and yes, courage will be required - the idea that, consciously or not, we might be trying to fix past problems while trying to realize a vision or execute on a product or service fascinated me.

After giving it a little more thought, here's why I believe it grabbed my attention. It's so easy to fall back into old habits of thought or frames of reference. But if that vision or offering is truly original, no one can tell you now whether it will work. The truly original idea has scant precedent.

It stands to reason that its implementation will ask of us different questions.

Stay Curious.™

Wayne

Turn "The Box" Inside Out

“ErraZuriz says his intention is to elicit curiosity and cause viewers to do a double-take when looking at a recognizable object that suddenly behaves in new ways.”

— Colossal

Ordinary studio makers might create an appealing and functional piece of furniture working at the margins - perhaps by using a new material such as aluminum or steel, or through the application of a new wood finish. But artist Sebastian ErraZuriz sees something that might zipper open and close.

As an exercise in imaginative thinking, I loved it. ErraZuriz doesn't just think outside the box. He transforms the box.

Stay Curious™

Wayne

Zoom, Zoom Universe

Image: Some rights reserved by Crowbared

Bob Berman, author of the book "Zoom" and an editor at Astronomy magazine, will be on hand at IdeaFestival 2015.

From Brian Greene to Michio Kaku to Sean Carroll, the festival has a long history of bringing acclaimed physicists and science authors to the stage to describe why our universe is indeed stranger than fiction.

"Zoom" has been reviewed by the New York Times, which praises the author's "talent for toying productively with received reality."

Part of that received reality is the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't-nature of quantum physics, the science of the impossibly small. In an improbable twist, experimental physics can pinpoint the place or direction of these specks of matter, but never place and direction, simultaneously. Bell's theorem raises problems for our received notions of cause and effect, which depend on knowing the local variables that would determine any single outcome. Quantum experiments show us that we can't know the starting conditions. There is no context-independent starting point, no "cause" knowable by us.

This tension between perception and reality can be documented as far back as the Greek philosophers Paremenides and Zeno, who "toyed with reality" by arguing that our senses aren't reliable. Motion, they said, is an illusion. And Zeno cleverly created paradoxes to prove it. You've undoubtedly encountered his dichotomy paradox at some point in high school or college.

Motion is an illusion? Hardly. Everything moves Berman will point out at the IdeaFestival. Zoom, zoom.

Don't miss it.

Stay curious.

Wayne