Brain Food

Stuff that sparks ideas or imagination for me.

New Urbanism – Study at home

Cordelia at the Phenomenal Field proposes a home study course in New Urbanism, based on recommended reading over at the Where blog.

I’ll sign up for this home study course – this has been a subject burgeoning at the base of my brain for awhile. I’ve had Jane Jacob’s book (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) on my wish list for some time. I need an excuse to pull that trigger, and the others on the list sound great as well:

2. The Option of Urbanism by Christopher Leinberger (2007).

3. The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler (1993).

4. Cities Back from the Edge by Roberta Gratz, with Norman Mintz (1998).

5. How Cities Work by Alex Marshall (2000).

I have at hand already A Pattern Language, and another book that has been languishing on my shelf for several years “Cities in Civilization” by Peter Hall – focusing on cities that have had created “golden ages” of influential cultural creativity – think Florence in 1400-1500, or Paris in 1870-1910, and examining what was unique about those urban settings that created the crucible for that dynamic creativeness.

And as a resident of an old urban neighborhood, I’m particularly interested in this title:

The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999 by Ray Suarez.

I always get good ideas from Cordelia; this reading list and subject is another. And I have a cool new blog – Where – to add to my feed reader.

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Ruining It for the Rest of Us

I only follow a couple of podcasts regularly because my drive to work is relatively short, and I otherwise can’t keep up. But I happened to read about one particular episode of This American Life – entitled Ruining It for the Rest of Us – on a blog somewhere, and was interested enough to loop back and get caught up with that show. The Prologue was particularly interesting:

A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there’s research to prove it. Host Ira Glass talks to Will Felps, a professor at Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, who designed an experiment to see what happens when a bad worker joins a team. Felps divided people into small groups and gave them a task. One member of the group would be an actor, acting either like a jerk, a slacker or a depressive. And within 45 minutes, the rest of the group started behaving like the bad apple. (13 minutes)

A very interesting study — one person with a bad attitude can indeed spoil the whole barrel, even for people who have a good reason to want to succeed. Bad apple behaviors tend to pull the whole group down, and groups were only as successful as their poorest member. And one of the interesting things is that only one particular type of person was able to short-circuit the bad apple behavior in their study — one of the participants was the son of a diplomat, and was able to diffuse the behavior of the bad apple and lead the group.

I’d strongly recommend listening to that podcast – It made me think about my own behavior and how I react to others, both at work and at home.

I did some additional research and found the Journal where Felps published this report — Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 27. Dunno if I’ll go ahead and order it, because I have lots to read already, but I thought it was really cool.

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Harlan Ellison on volunteering your professional work

This is a really good point – and it was made to me many years ago by a woman who objected to me doing web design on a volunteer basis. She pointed out that the reason so many women are downwardly mobile is because they give away their work through volunteerism, where men demand to be paid.

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Dooce’s Hypothetical Question

A few days ago, Heather Armstrong posed a question on her blog:

Indulge me for a second and consider this scenario: let’s say you’re given the opportunity to donate some money to a desperate family who would use it to feed their children, but were only able to do so if you donated the same amount of money to someone you knew would use it to buy crack. Would you do it?

The responses were interesting: lots of yes answers, peppered with people who had some angry ideas that the question was really about taxes and how they shouldn’t have to support people on welfare.

I was really struck by the responses of people to her second blog post about the question; the one where she explained WHY she asked it:

But something happened during that Christmas vacation that changed a fundamental part of me, and I bet you he doesn’t even remember this. I’d forgotten about it until last week when my brother and I met for lunch, and sitting there across from him at that sushi restaurant and listening to his stories I remembered what a profound effect his influence has had on me.

It was Christmas 1990, and he and I went shopping at a local mall to find gifts for the family. It was bitterly cold outside made worse by a cutting wet breeze, winters in Memphis are like that, and as we pulled out of the parking lot at the mall we passed a man standing on the median of the road selling single stem roses for $2. He was wearily disheveled, not dressed at all for the weather, and looked like he hadn’t eaten in days. He could have been starving, but he also could have been a drug addict. I’ll never know.

We’d always been taught that you ignore these people, they’ll take your money and use it to buy booze, or they’re somehow scamming you. Better to keep your money and do something more productive with it. Except Ranger pulled right up to the man, handed him a twenty dollar bill and said, “I’d like a rose for my sister,” and he pointed toward the passenger seat. “I haven’t seen her in months.”

The man looked down at the bill as if he were holding a fragile newborn animal, and his hands started to shake.
“Aw man,” he said. “I ain’t got no change for this. You got something smaller?”

“No,” said Ranger, and then as he shifted the car into drive he continued, “Please keep it.”

The window was still down as the car pulled away, and I’ll never forget how he called after us, “YOU’LL NEVER KNOW, MAN! YOU’LL NEVER KNOW!”

As we pulled up to a stop light in silence Ranger finally spoke up. “I saw him when we first drove into the parking lot hours ago. No telling how long he’s been out there, and he doesn’t have change for a twenty? LET HIM HAVE MY TWENTY.”

The answers to THIS post are striking: — lots of people saying that they’d rather give money to the homeless than to Lehman Brothers executives.

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The Power of Day Dreaming

The most common criticism I received when I was a kid was that I daydreamed too much, especially in class. Even though my classwork was high quality, staring off into space would set my teachers off all the time, and it was one of the things I was always very upset about, because it never felt like I was really doing anything wrong. And I wasn’t:

An article in the Boston Globe:

Although there are many anecdotal stories of breakthroughs resulting from daydreams – Einstein, for instance, was notorious for his wandering mind – daydreaming itself is usually cast in a negative light. Children in school are encouraged to stop daydreaming and “focus,” and wandering minds are often cited as a leading cause of traffic accidents. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. It’s a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They’ve demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind – so fundamental, in fact, that it’s often referred to as our “default” mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings – such as the message of a church sermon – the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we’re able to imagine things that don’t actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks.

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Cool Artist – Little Robot

I happened to be looking on etsy.com for a daniel striped tiger hand puppet (don’t ask – I’ll get around to explaining it later) and stumbled on this really marvelous artist’s store – Little Robot – AKA Lindsey Carr.

Little Robot Artwork on Etsy
Little Robot Artwork on Etsy

Little Robot Artwork on Etsy
Little Robot Artwork on Etsy

I have to count my pennies before I buy any prints with the wedding coming up, but this is definitely going in my “to buy” wishlist, for sure.

She also has a website and a blog, too.

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