Last night I made a few acrylic poured paintings. It's mostly fun and takes very little artistic ability. The patterns develop as you cause the paint to slide around the canvas by slanting the canvas after you pour your own customized concoction of paint (and Floetrol, water and a few drops of silicon) out of a cup. And then you get to stand back and watch more patterns and "cells" emerge on their own. If you are interested in trying this, just Google acrylic pour painting and you'll find numerous tutorials/demos.
On FB, a friend commented: "An uncanny resemblance to some rocks I've seen some guy posting lately."
My response: There is a parallel to rock tumbling. Very little need for talent, yet sometimes stunning results. These activities are both fun and relaxing and they work well as a counter-balance to the intense abstract time-driven work I do as an attorney. Or maybe I'm simply regressing to my childhood . .
As any science guy recognizes, evolution is a fact of life. If an environment is inhospitable to a population, that population dwindles and another prevails. Flu shots are designed every year to prevent the premier emerging strains that are likely to become dangerous, either through virulence in the body, or…
I wore two hats today at a presentation by two of my friends, Dan Rubright and Leslie Peters. I was already planning to attend the “The Hidden Jazz of Groups” presented in the Cortex District of St. Louis. Dan asked me whether I could also shoot some photos of the presentation, which sounded like fun.
Dan and Leslie, who are married to each other, have combined their skillsets into a way that celebrates both individual differences and the magic of collaboration. Dan, who is both an exquisite musician and an educator, began the session by giving his insight into the process of creating jazz, and then moved on to discuss the wide variety of creating and combining sounds to create music. Leslie, an author and speaker on group dynamics, then joined in. It was a smart and unintimidating way to broach the topic of efficient group dynamics. These are a few of my photos from the presentation.
If you click on the video, you'll hear Dan’s impromptu performance of some of his music. His style is truly his own. I’m always delighted by the amount of music he can coax out of a single guitar.
Today, I was thinking about Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I think of this book at least several times each week. It's got to be one of the most important books I have ever read, in that it identifies numerous ways in which people are unwittingly mislead by mental heuristics, i.e., by their intuitions and shortcuts. You might be a bigger threat to yourself than any outsider.
The solution to Kahneman's heuristics is seemingly that we should be more careful or that we should train ourselves so that we are not mislead by these heuristics. Kahneman concludes, unfortunately, that heuristics are too strong to recognize in real time. He characterizes them to be like optical illusions. When we look at them over and over we will be fooled over and over.
Here is one of my favorite optical illusions: The Ames Window. My mind is intransigent. I can't unsee this illusion even though I know exactly what is going on.
This is nonetheless, discouraging, right? Maybe that's why it is a good idea to work with groups of people. Maybe someone else will catch your mistakes. And if not, maybe you can catch your mistakes in a post-mortem and then add your mistakes on your check list to help you for the next time the situation arises.
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