Off Course-On Target

Snowflakes: Regular camera; extraordinary results

 

As most of you know I’ve been using snowflakes as a metaphor for everything becoming deeply personalized and “just right”.  My dear friend Erik Duval and I have been writing and working on The Snowflake Effect for over ten years as we the exponentially growing transformation of our world from a society based on mass production ideals to one based on mass personalization.  This continues to be the single biggest meta pattern and trend for the future I see.

But today I was struck by these photographs of real life snowflakes which Alexey Kljatov took by ingeniously flipping an old SLR lens and shooting the snowflakes with a simple point and shoot camera.  The slide show includes some shots of his camera setup.  In spite of the initial appearance that these snowflakes are so symmetrical, closer inspection reveals that while they do have many common elements of their crystalline structure, each one is actually very different.

I’m on my good ship Learnativity and currently floating in wonderfully warm Fiji (33C as I write) so snowflakes remain quite virtual for me, but for those of you in the Northern hemisphere where winter is rapidly approaching or perhaps already there, perhaps this will inspire you to try out this neat camera trick.

No matter your location or vocation I hope we will all take the time to live in life’s moments in large part by enjoying the awemazing examples which Mother Nature surrounds us with on a daily basis.  And while we are at it, let’s be equally grateful that she created each one of us as a truly unique snowflake and that we are surrounded by over 7 billion other equally unique snowflakes!

Stones and String are Snowflakes too!

Fascinating to watch the snowball effect (sorry couldn’t help myself!) of how things are happening around the upcoming introduction of the neat little “Pebble” wrist watch I wrote about last month.

I wrote about how it is an example of the mass personalization of financial models with the super successful funding which the Pebble watch received on Kickstarter.  Today brings this announcement that Pebble and Twine have joined forces to enable the cool Twine device and app to talk to the Pebble watch and alert you to almost any event you want via your wrist.  This video will quickly show you how this works.

 

Twine for those not familiar with it is a small little box that connects via WiFi to internal and external sensors and sends alerts out via Twitter, Email and the like. 

 

As nicely summarized on their site this lets you :

 

Listen to your world, talk to the Internet

Want to monitor things and environments remotely without a nerd degree? Maybe you want to get a tweet when your laundry's done, an email when the basement floods, or a text message when you left the garage door open.

Twine is the simplest way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. Focus on your idea instead of installation or technical stuff. A durable 2.5" square provides WiFi, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that last for months. A simple web app lets you give Twine human-friendly rules — no programming needed.

Yet another great example of how our world is rapidly evolving into one of mass personalization as The Snowflake Effect continues its exponential growth and influence.

Snowflake Effect on Financial Industry set to Double in 2012

Many of you were intrigued by some of my former postings such as Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes  about how the Snowflake Effect of mass personalisation is affecting the financial world and in particular with loans and investments.  Some wondered if this was just a few random examples but I think this recent overview on TechCrunch shows that this is already building into a full fledged snowstorm with what they refer to as “crowdfunding” having reached 1.5 Billion dollars already and set to double this year.

The funding of projects by individual snowflakes is another example of both the Snowflake Effect on financial matters such as the example of the “Pebble” watch I wrote about in Snowflake Wrists?.  When I wrote about this Pebble watch that is one of the projects on Kickstarter two weeks ago they had already blown past their $100k goal by raising $2.6 million, as of today (May 8) they are about to pass the 10 million dollar mark!  Kickstarter is “a funding platform for creative projects” and their blog recently had this “Blockbuster Effects” article which highlighted two other projects and answered the questions “Do more projects mean competition for the same dollars?” and “Are these projects stealing backers from other worthy projects?” by showing that in fact these have the opposite effect as both the overall funding and project numbers continue to grow dramatically.  The full and abridged versions of the “Crowdfunding Industry Report” are available at the bottom of the TechCrunch article.

These are but a few examples that confirm what Erik Duval and I have been evangelizing for many years now, that The Snowflake Effect is a profoundly pervasive revolution which is affecting almost all parts of our lives on a global scale.  There are over 7 billion of us snowflakes on the planet and as each one of us takes on the responsibility and control of our lives, love and learning, the results are going to be staggering.

Snowflake Wrists?

I wonder; will “wrist watch” become as quaint and oddly unrepresentative of the device as “phone” has become?

In a previous post I wrote about Kickstarter as an example how “Snowflake Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes”and more recently about how the Snowflake Effect is being used to augment our human capabilities such as with “Snowflake Eyes?”.  And today both of these effects get combined into the creation of wrist watches which can be infinitely personalized to display almost any data you want, receive notifications and control other digital devices. 

In particular I’m referring to an about to be funded Kickstarter project for what is being called a “Pebble Watch”.  Check out the short overview and photos on this Kickstarter page.

I’ve already sent in my $115 pledge and support and can’t wait until the first production run ships to me in September.  Well my dear friend John will actually get to try it out first as it will be shipped to his address as I ‘m not sure just where in the world I’ll be in September,  

** see http://learnativity.typepad.com if you’re interested in my whereabouts and sailing around the world. 

But John and I will find a way to link up and he will get to have fun with it first.  He is also the best technical reviewers I know so I’ll get the next best thing to using it myself and share more with you then.

Of course I am particularly susceptible to this one as I will admit to having a life long love of clocks and watches so as soon as I learned about this cool new “Pebble” watch was being proposed via the Kickstarter project, it was a no brainer for me to jump in.  But then again and as a testament to what I wrote up previously about how powerful this form of funding can be, this Pebble project had a goal of $100,000 that needed to be reached before these watches could start being made and they reached over $1 million in the first 28 hours, and as of this writing (April 14) they were over $2.6 million so the project is more than fully funded and will close on May 18th, 2012.

While I hear some say that watches are “so yesterday” and are declining in use as we have so many other sources for knowing the time on everything from our phones, to cameras, tablets, TV’s and computers, but I don’t see this happening so much and instead I think wrist watches will follow a path similar to phones.  Think about what you do with your “phone” on a daily basis and I think you too will find that you use it for almost everything but a “telephone” as you text, Email, read, take pictures, draw, get turn by turn directions, ask a question (type or voice), check the time and oh yea, make or answer a voice call.  In a similar way I think we will find ourselves continuing to chose to wear wrist watches for a long time to come and that we will start using them for so many more things than just telling time.

One of the reasons I think mobile devices and our “mobile” phones have become so ubiquitous for so many of us is that we are so much more likely to have them with us at the time and point of need, providing us with another big step towards the long promised “information at our fingertips”.   The more recent and significant jump to “smart” phones that connect to the web, have touch based interfaces and run applications was synchronistic with the move to more pro active and interactive uses of our devices such as the addition of a digital camera built into that ever present phone enabling us to capture that unexpected serendipitous moment. 

To my way of thinking, something you wear all the time increases the notion of “mobile” up by another order of magnitude and the net effect over time will be enormously popular and pervasive.  Consider how much more accessible a watch on your wrist is than a phone in our pocket or purse!  Many of us wear watches 24 hours a day so they are difficult to forget and truly always with you and there is no need to fumble as you fish it out of your pocket or purse.  It is always right there, right when you want it. VERY compelling to me at least.

Wearing a watch also seems to be such an easy way for so many people to try out truly useful “wearable computing”. While I personally am also looking forward to the days of having actual implants and bionic things like true inner ear “head phones” (another intriguingly quaint term), microphones and sight augmenting devices in and around our eyes, those less inclined to take this big step could easily strap on one of these type of new “smart watches”, no surgery or injections required!

Even in their initial release, these new Pebble watches can display most anything that is on your iPhone or Android device via Bluetooth, interact with and control these devices and notify you with sounds or vibrating alerts.  Additional HCI (Human Computer Interaction) comes in the form of the built in 3 axis accelerometer so you can use physical gestures such as shaking the watch to dismiss a notification or vibrating to let you know of an incoming call or notice or timer.  You can also receive notifications from your “if this then that” (www.ifttt.com) app and any routines and alerts you have set up there which is a very powerful and multiplying combination.  If you are not yet aware of IFTTT that alone is ell worth checking out ASAP.

What I’m’ excited about and how I will look forward to snowflaking my Pebble when I catch up with it include:

• having immediate access to my GPS and other boat info as I’m sailing.  I’ve already got things in place so that there is a full WiFi “bubble” on Learnativity and there are more and more apps and links between all my boat instrumentation, and navigation data with my laptops, boat computer, tablets and phones.  With the addition of one of these watches on my wrist will mean that all this data is always just a glance away and even some controls are ever present on my wrist no matter where I am on the boat, and even off much of the time.

 

• Getting vibrating alerts to wake me up if needed when I’m on a multi day passage and something happens that deserves my attention like a change in the wind or something popping up within the Radar alert circle I’ve programmed, or a call comes into my sat phone, or …… well you get the idea.

 

• Being able to customize any and all screens on the watch for things as simple as analog or digital watch faces to how much data to display.

 

• Instant access to my ever present music so I can mute it when a VHF radio call from another boat comes in or I want to skip a song that has come up that isn’t just right for the moment.

 

• abilty to receive alerts and notifications for any of the IFTTT (if this then that) routines I have set up. (see www.ifttt.com ) for details.

 

• and because I really do think these watches are going to take off and there is already an SDK kit for developers I’m looking forward to a future of more and more apps being written to extend all these capabilities.

None of these are new capabilities and I do have them on various devices, but that is kind of the point and the big deal with watches; I can now have access to all those other devices with me at all times, just a glance and an arms length away.  IMHO these are the very same reasons that mobile devices of all kinds have taken off so unexpectedly and exponentially in so many regions and cultures.

And don’t even get me started on the applications and implications these new watches will have on learning. There is fun story about teachers reminding their students “I know you are texting in class; not even teenagers look down at their crotch and smile for so long!” so I guess teachers will have a bit more trouble (though not too much) telling when student are texting in class. Or getting some “help” during an exam! However the positive uses FAR outnumber these more comical or negative ones and I’m sure I at least have yet to imagine some of the specific innovative new ways to use the wrist watch to augment our learning. In most cases though I see that the change will be less so in adding new capabilities we don’t have now and more the case of augmenting what we already have and applications that will be developed in the future and simply yet profoundly changing things dramatically by providing communications between us in the way of the Snowflake Effect; just the right person at just the right time in just the right way.

Time will tell (sorry couldn’t help myself) so stay tuned and do check out Kickstarter in general and this new Pebble watch in particular.  Maybe it is just the geek in me or maybe it is my watch fetish kicking in, but I fully expect the word “watch” to join the growing list of quaint understated terms like phone, computer and camera.  Hard for me to imagine that we won’t soon have young children asking “Where did the word phone come from?” and we will have some difficulty remembering the days of the telephone.

Snowflake Eyes?

Back in 2000 I had the honor of writing a vision paper for ASTD and the National Governor's Association called "Into the Future".  I included some of my thoughts and excitement at the time about the notion of augmenting our eyes by having additional layers of information overlaid on top of what we are "really" seeing.  I described things like being able to walk around the ruins of an ancient city and be able to see drawings, photos and video of what it would have looked like hundreds of years before.  In the years since my excitement has continued to grow and I’ve written more and more articles on this and all other forms of augmenting our “cognitive capacities” and there have been more and more advances on transforming this vision into reality.

 

Google has just released an update on their work on “Project Glass” and some new prototypes they are testing with wider audiences now.  One of their new examples can be seen in these photos for a pair of frames that sit above your eyes and provide information by looking up or another pair of more traditional glasses where the information is projected onto the clear glass lenses.

 

 

Nick Bolton provides a more comprehensive overview of this type of augmented reality in his NYT “Bits” article “Google begins testing its Augmented Reality glasses”.  Personally I’m more excited and interested in future models Nick also notes of wearable and imbedded technology such as the contact lenses pictured here.  I’ve posted previous articles with more of my thoughts on these such as this one on “Augmented Reality in Contact Lenses”.

 

Personally I will also welcome and be first in line for things like embedded ear buds that would give me additional sound and control to augment what I am hearing and a similar form of embedded microphones to augment my speech and vocal output.  Begin to imagine having a camera, earphones and microphone literally “on you” or “in you” at all times?!

I’m pretty confident that groups of bright people all over the world will continue to develop every better augmented reality technology at an exponential rate and in all cases I think the greater challenge befalls the rest of us to begin figuring out how to use these well and how to deal with the inevitable pitfalls and more negative consequences all great innovations and inventions bring with them. 

For example how will we deal with this significant additional increase in the information at our avail?  In some of the more negative initial reactions to Google’s update some have already begun to worry about the likelihood that our eyes will be “augmented” with even more marketing images and this is a legitimate and inevitable concern. 

However these new forms of information delivery and consumption are inevitable IMHO and so let’s just get over it and get on with it!  WE get to chose how to use these new tools and information influx.  As Clay Shirky put it so well; “There’s no such thing as information overload, just filter failure”.  While there is no question we have lots of progress to make in overcoming “filter failure”, we ARE making progress and it seems to me that failure is the root of most learning so it is all good. 

So let’s continue to develop better ways of filtering information in the Snowflake Effect tradition of getting just the right information for just the right person at just the right time in just the right context, and so on.  We certainly have as much more more learning and creative thinking to do in coming up with new habits, conventions and techniques that will ensure that exponential innovation also leads to exponentially better living and learning!

Let’s start thinking about what an incredible way of augmenting our learning these kinds of “glasses” can be by enabling us to add additional information to what we are seeing before us.  And note how Google’s Project Glass also includes a wearable camera.  This makes taking pictures and video more instantly available anywhere, anytime and more transparently for us in that we would always have a camera available to capture serendipitous moments and memories by simply blinking our eyes or some other simple gesture.  While there is always the “scary” part of how this can and will be used, this capability will also let us continue to live more IN life’s moments, enabling us to learn and live life more fully in the process.

It will take us many years to develop new conventions for all these kinds of new technology as well such as how do we best ‘interface” with them for things like gesture based control with our eyes.  How do we learn to use these to improve our connections with others and not interfere?  Gee, if you think people’s behavior with the use of cell phones and texting in the middle of a conversation are a problem just imagine what it will be like when we don’t even have to look away or down to see that new call coming in!! 

As usual, it all comes back to and down to each of us snowflakes.  WE are the ones who are responsible for our own behaviors and need to learn how to use and control the tools and technology we are surrounded by such that they increase our connections and conversations with the other special snowflakes around us. 

I for one could not be more excited by both the new technology arriving daily and the new challenges and learning that lies before us and in many ways is already here.  The best way I know of to counter FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) is to run TOWARDS it rather than away from it by increasing our curiosity and learning of things we don’t know.

What if the Secret to Success is Failure?

A recent NYT article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” is long by today's snack food reading standards but served up a VERY full course meal of great food for thought and is well worth your time to read no matter if you are a student, parent, teacher and indeed aren't we all of these simultaneously. 

I'm a huge fan of failure and remain puzzled and curious as to why it has come to be such a negative thing in many societies and communities.  Something to be avoided at all cost.  Maybe it is because I fail so often, many times every day, always have and hope I always will, that I have come to love failure.  What I love most is learning and I figured out a long time ago that learning and failure are inexorably linked and almost synonymous.  No learning without failure and no failure without learning.  Every time something goes wrong or does not work out for me, my first instinct is to ask "What is this trying to teach me?" or "What can I learn from this?" and each time I find the answer my learning goes up significantly.  Part of the reason perhaps that I also go for experiential learning every chance I can.  What I’ve learned along the way is that failure IS the “secret” to success in learning, love and life.

I mention all this for some context as to why this article resonates so deeply with me, along with my years as a high school teacher, a parent and an insatiably curious learner.  Learning is hard and figuring out how to do it well, especially in the more formal setting of education and training is particularly so.  I think we all know this and yet most discussions and programs seem to assume the opposite and come up with overly simplistic explanations of the problem and matching shallow solutions. 

It is therefore refreshing to see this complex challenge being treated with such seriousness and vigor as outlined in this article.  You may disagree with the specifics or perhaps the whole approach the two schools in this article are taking and I hope you will indeed reflect upon your experiences to critically consider their approaches.  However I also think your experiences will have shown you that “character traits” are more than anything else, the underlying factors leading to true success; a happy, meaningful, productive life.

Think about it; whether you are considering a new job applicant, a student, your children, your partner or best of all, the person you see in the mirror, don’t you find that it is traits such as

“zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity”

that have most determined your success?  Isn’t it when you have failed to do as well as you know you could in these areas that you have learned the most and gone on to be that much stronger, smarter and successful?

Whatever your answers and thoughts are to these questions, please do give this a read and your careful consideration.  I know many of you who follow my writing and speaking are in the learning, education and training fields and will find this particularly relevant.  Moreover though I think there is much to be learned here for every one of us snowflakes as we too strive to succeed a bit better each day at living a happy, meaningful and productive life. 

I hope you will get as much out of reading this article as much as I did and will give it your thoughtful consideration, talk about this notion of “character based learning” with your friends, family and colleagues and continue the conversation with your own posts, articles, FB updates, Tweets and talks,

Seeing Around the Corner of the Future of Photography

I continue to believe that we are hitting the tipping point of the exponential curve of the evolution of what we currently call photography.  I think photography and camera are becoming as ill fitting as terms like calling and phone.  Don't you find it interesting that one of the things you do the least with your "phone" these days is actually call someone?  Or at least your smartphone now does so much more than just act as a telephone that it seems quaint to call it a phone.

Capturing our world via sounds and images is being revolutionized as we see exponential increases in things like resolution, combining still and video capture with sounds, location and more and now being able to photograph things we can't even see such as with this recent development from MIT of cameras that can see around corners. 

With the note that all of these are all technologies which now several years old, as are my posts about them, consider some of the following examples of how rapidly and fundamentally things are changing in these areas:

Adobe and others have also developed cameras and what they call “computational photography” that can gather such complete information on a scene that focus becomes infinite and something we can adjust after the photo is taken. 

Or how about things like Photosynth which can align and stitch together thousands of photos and videos to create a “model” of the whole building or space which you can then walk through.

Add to this the ability to take photos with your “phone” and convert them into 3D models such as with apps like the Autodesk 123D series and how we are starting to see 2D printers replaced by 3D versions capable of "printing" full working 3D assemblies so you can “print” those models you’ve captured and snowflaked them to make them “just right” for you.

Add to the mix things like the Sixth Sense technology

and notions such as The Quantified Self 

and you will start to see how we need to completely rethink and reimagine what “photography” means and consider what we need to learn in order to make smart choices and use the power of these innovations for positive good and gain.

For now start to notice how the use of video is becoming more and more pervasive and consider that as the resolution of video cameras in our “phones” goes up and up, won’t still and video merge into one when you can grab just the perfect “frame” for a video anytime you want a “still photo”.  A little further out what if you don’t need to remember to take a photo or a video of an event before it happens because it you are capturing everything all the time. 

Scary?  You bet!  Exciting?  Absolutely!  Inevitable?  I think so.

Snowflake Effect: Mass Personalization of Manufacturing

Derek Singleton has written a good overview of some good examples of the mass personalization of manufacturing in a recent posting “Anyone can be a Manufacturer” and an earlier one “Three ways to bring Crowdsourcing into Mainstream Manufacturing”.  They are IMHO well worth the read and following some of the links. 

The only significant omission to me. which many seem to miss, is the area of 3D scanning that enables us to capture existing objects in the form of full 3D models which we can then modify and adjust to suit our individual needs and situation before “manufacturing” at a click of a button.  Perhaps Derek will write more on this topic as well.  For now you can see some good examples such as Autodesk’s 123D series of apps for more on this critical component of the Snowflake Effect on manufacturing for the rest of us.

As I’ve been saying in my articles and speaking engagements the last few years, one of the biggest and best examples of how the ubiquitous Snowflake Effect is fundamentally disrupting the present and shaping the future is what I think can rightly be called the Third Industrial Revolution wherein each of us as individuals become empowered to create or manufacture our own “stuff”. 

This revolution is very pervasive and diverse in that sometimes we will literally have a one click manufacturing plant on our desktop along the lines that can already be seen with some of the early 3D printers available.  At the other end of the spectrum it will simply yet powerfully mean that we will play a more and more key role in the design and production of products we create with the assistance of others and higher end services and the myriad of points along this entire DIY (Do It Yourself) spectrum.  I think this will likely proceed along lines similar to how photography and photo printing have evolved where they were initially the domain of experts only to where we used to just take photos and send our film off to be developed and turned into prints to where we now either just click and immediately see the photo results on extremely high resolution screens or hit the print button and soon have a near perfect photo in our hands.

As we begin to similarly capture and print real and complex objects with the simple click of a button we become more intimately involved in the whole process from the initial idea of “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have one of those.” or “I wish ‘they’ would make something like this.” to the modification and improvement of the object to make it “just right”, just for me, just for now and almost instantaneously have that in our hands.

The instant gratification and production of more “stuff” does NOT excite me and is in fact one of the concerns to be dealt with as we move into this brave new world.  What I am VERY excited about is the degree to which this will in fact involve each of us more directly and intimately in the whole idea-design-test-create-improve cycle.  Think of all the learning this will inspire in us all!  Think about how much more we will understand the materials and energy that go into producing things and the power this new awareness will bring to many as to how to consume less, reuse more and get more out of life. 

How much “stuff” do you have in your life that you don’t use because it never worked well, never fit you properly, never did what it was supposed to do?  Imagine if every “thing” you have is just right, just for you.  Imagine the new skills and knowledge you will need to have and want to have to live life well in this new snowflaked world.  As with all powerful new innovations and discoveries the advent of personalized manufacturing will bring with it equal measures of risks and benefits and it is up to each and everyone ONE of us to choose how we will shape and use these new tools and enablers going forward.

We may curse snowflakes while shoveling billions of them from our driveway or when our car is skidding on compacted ones on roads, yet the almost spiritual beauty of fresh fallen snow and the intricate perfection of each and every unique snowflake evokes emotions deep in our souls and reminds us what a profound gift uniqueness is.  It may be difficult at fist to see such beauty in something as ‘ugly” and conforming as manufacturing has historically been, but these are the traits of the previous forms of manufacturing and why, for me at least, the rapidly evolving Third Industrial Revolution is so powerful, so exciting and yes, so beautiful. 

 

Think about it.  What will you do as these capabilities are put into your hands?  What new skills and knowledge will you need to have to use them wisely and for best benefit?  What new services and support will you need?  How will use these new capabilities for greater good both for the world overall, yourself and the rest of the world’s snowflakes?  As you ponder these kinds of questions, if it doesn’t make you equally excited and scared then I’ve done a very poor job of explaining this.  Hopefully better writers like Derek will help to do a much better job and set off that spontaneous cognitive combustion within you as you have that the Aha! moment of recognition and set of in pursuit of your relentless curiosity to learn and practice more.

Technology Can and DOES Change our Relationships; for the BETTER!

I like the concluding recommendation in this article and this TED talk by Susan Turkle for learning to love yourself better by being comfortable with and appreciative of solitude.  However I think that Turkle's TED talk and her new book Alone Together,make a fatally flawed assumption that using things such as texting and social media are eliminating our alone time and that our virtual means of expressing our emotions are replacing the real ones and lessening our human connections.

I simply don’t buy into Turkle’s assumptions that we are letting technology "take us places we don't want to go." and her conclusion that"The little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't eve change what we do, they change who we are."

Sorry Susan, but in my experience and observations at least NO! this is NOT necessarily so and WE as fundamentally social animals decide how, when and where to use tools and technology .  While learning to choose the best tool for the job and how to use it well is a big challenge that takes time and lots of experiential learning to figure out, and this is an exponentially increasing learning curve in our world filled with such abundance of choice, most of us DO figure it out and are all the richer for it in terms of improved connections with the other special snowflakes we chose to include in our lives.   Some of us are slower to learn than others and we pay lots of “stupid tax” in the wonderful cycle of try/fail/learn/adjust/repeat, but this tax amounts to less than a rounding error in the overall net value we gain through such learning.

While I understand that there are some glaring examples of poor choices we make along this learning curve which gossip and the media focus on, based on my experiences and observations, these examples are by far the vocal minority and represent a small extreme end of the spectrum of human behavior.  Surely by now we understand that such examples and “failures” are necessary components of learning and improvement and we should see them as positive things we want more of not less in our quest to continuously enrich our lives with greater breadth and depth of connections with both ourselves, our friends and our families?!

History shows that we make this same mistake over and over again where the pundits proclaim the arrival of new tools, technology and media are going to eliminate those that came before.  TV was going to eliminate radio, flight was going to eliminate trains and automobiles, eLearning was going to eliminate teachers and so on.  While new innovations clearly have a significant influence on what came before, (when was the last time you sat around with friends or family listening to the radio??), the new hardly ever eliminate or replace the old.  Our world is much more one of a giant Boolean Add equation than one of subtraction or reduction.

The new and sometimes daunting challenge as we acquire more and more tools in our toolbox is to know how and when to use the right tool for the job.  When is a Tweet or a FB update the best choice?  When is an Email or a phone call better?  When best to wait for the chance to meet in person and what to do in the interim?  I concur and hope that we will always prefer in person human contact over more distanced and removed virtual forms, but surely we would also want to augment the limited opportunities we have to be with those we love and care about with every possible means to converse, share, love and learn with them.  And as our tools and technology continue up the exponential curves increasing capabilities and decreasing costs, not too how the tools become more and more transparent and the connection we have with others becomes the focus.  Does it matter HOW an emotional personal connection with another human happens or that these happen more often for all 7+ billion of us snowflakes?

Turkle posits that our increased use of digital technology to converse with each other is lessening our ability to self reflect.  Seriously?  For me at least it has produced the exact opposite effect and something I’ve blogged about several times on my Learnativity blog as I try to reconcile how I can have so many deeply rich experiences in my day to day live in such a very short time.  It is an effect I have called ELD or Exponential Learning Density which I believe is created by a cycle of living IN the abundance of moments life offers us every day, then reflecting upon these and then sharing our thoughts, questions, feelings and learnings with others.  My conclusion is that by repeating this cycle of Live-Reflect-Articulate I end up with this extreme “density” or rich learning experiences and a life that is filled with non stop adventures, interactions with others and Mother Nature and more love, life and learning every day.  As I reflect back on how filled with rich experiential learning my life is, I still can’t quite comprehend I’m only just starting my fifth year on this grand sailing life adventure!

As one who perhaps has more solitude than most as I wander, wonder and ponder the world one nautical smile at a time single handing my sailboat around the planet, I can offer at least one shining example where I use the entire plethora of means at my avail to express my thoughts, feelings and emotions with the many friends and family who I am blessed to be surrounded by.  When I’m with others I meet out here or on my trips back to see friends and family, I’m as good and frequent a hugger as you’ll ever meet, I’m as comfortable kissing men as women (on the cheek/forehead) who I love and care for when I’m given the gift of the opportunity to be with them in person.  If I shake your hand, clink glasses with you or talk to you, I will be looking deep into your eyes.  However to the best of my knowledge all these people in my life also feel my love and caring for them more often as I use a vast array of tools and technology.that augment my abilities to connect with them.  All of these additional means are “virtual” through the use of the increasing abundance of communication choices I have.  I care SO much less about the means through which I get to express and share with others as I do with ensuring that we have more and more opportunities to share our lives, learning and love with each other.  So let’s please keep our eyes on the prize and not mistake the means we use with the end results of deeper human connection, commitment and conversation and ensure that what we have the most abundance of is Life, Love and Learning!

We Snowflakes are all made of Stardust!!

I learned one of the most amazing things yesterday and just had to share it with the rest of you in case you didn’t know this either. 

Every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded! 

That means that each of us snowflakes are made of stardust!!  How awemazing is THAT?!?! 

 

I learned this yesterday while pursuing one of my current curiosity threads about space time continuum and the cosmos and reading “A Universe from Nothing” by Lawrence Klauss.(highly recommended)  Klauss explains how the heavier elements such as nitrogen, oxygen, iron were NOT made by the “Big Bang”.  These heavier nuclei elements can only be made with truly huge energy levels and heat, much more than even during the Big Bang.  The only place there is enough energy and heat to form these heavier atomic elements is during the rare occurrence of an exploding star called a supernova.  A supernova burns for about a month with the brightness of 10 billion stars!  This only happens about once per hundred years per galaxy, but then again there are billions of galaxies so there are still quite a few of these overall. (about 200 million in the history of our galaxy). 

What this means then is that the only way these elements could get into our bodies is if these stars were kind enough to have exploded and sent their products hurtling out into the cosmos, some of which eventually arrived at the blue marble called Earth. 

It gets even better for me in that the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than the ones in your right.  So we are quite literally as Klauss puts it

“we are all, literally, star children and our bodies are made of stardust!

Sorry, I’m fascinated by so many things and even without the assistance of my ADD riddled brain I’m sure I would be just as easily excited by the awesomeness of the world around me. I’m still reeling in amazement of just how poetic and powerful and humbling it is to learn that each and every one of us snowflakes are made of stardust.

I’ve described some of my many experiences of looking up into the night sky while out here sailing around the world on my Learnativity blog.  The perspective you get when you are out in the middle of the deep blue sea with no land in sight is a unique life experience as the sea and the sky merge into one and surround you completely.  It is an awemazing experience with a spiritual like quality as you feel a profound connection with the world around you and become one with it.  You are no longer a mere external observer, you are a part of this big picture. 

Regular readers know that I live using serendipity and synchronicity as strategies and guides so it came as no surprise that this morning, as I was typing up this post and catching up with Emails, Facebook updates, notes, etc. (ADD remember!) I stumbled over a post that my friend Tina in Newfoundland Canada had posted to FB about her discovery of the exact same fact that we are all made of stardust.  Her source was Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and was his answer to the question “What is the most astounding fact you know?”  Better yet, Tina included this great video (must watch!) and moreso, she posted all this at literally the same time I was reading my book!  Thanks Tina!

I used to have the problem of keeping my jaw from bouncing off the steel desks of my sailboat when my mouth gaped open as I looked up and out at the night sky which is now almost every night in this charmed life I lead, but I just lay down and look up now so my jaw doesn’t hurt so much. I have similar feelings when I’m snorkeling and experience those moments when I become one with that undersea world in these areas where all the other life forms wondrously ignore me. But last night, as I looked up into the clear night sky and those billions of stars shining down on my here in Fiji, it was somehow even more amazing now that I know that not only am I part of the universe but it is a part of ME!

Maybe you already knew about this and I’m just slow to learn as usual but if we are not all amazed by things like this and the beauty that surrounds us EVERY day, then I think we are just not paying attention and not living up to our responsibility to live this gift of life well.