His art has been linked here always as a staple on the sites blog roll. In this video though, Chris Jordan, is in his own words able to bring new life to his work (from TED, Chris Jordan: Picturing excess).

As any writer worth his salt might reflect, we each are characters in a plot-line too big to comprehend. Or, put another way, we are each unique snowflakes thrown across the stormy sky. However you put it, this reality can sometimes make seeing change difficult. This aspect of human life while enjoyable, dynamic and mysterious also means, the actions we take are what make our environment; a place that might be as different without us as that storm without snowflakes.

Voltaire spoke in these exact terms only about people, noticing one way that the impossibly tiny connected with the impossibly massive. For people especially, and maybe with all things, this specific domain where an intersection of scale seems to take place ought to be referred to as the Scale of Truth. When Voltaire pinned down this Scale he did so saying, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

There is a hidden truth revealed in personifying snowflakes this way — perhaps only about people and societies, perhaps about all of nature. It is this: small things make big things; small things happening make big things happening; at least one very small event (like a molecule of air interacting with a molecule of water of a snowflake) must occur as the “responsible” cause of much more massive events (like a whole snowflake moving and causing an avalanche) or else no such larger events are ever able to take place. We call this logical ordering of things, causal thought — for humans it seems it has to due mostly with frame of reference and blame.

Remarkably unlike most, Voltaire, was not pointing out frame of reference, nor looking to blame. That’s probably because Voltaire possessed different knowledge, having realized much earlier than most, how rarely it is about who done it in nature’s court, instead how it was done. This idea of the responsible snowflake in an avalanche, points out how people do not view their own impact when that impact involves big, landscape-changing events. Voltaire observed how human beings over-quantify the fairness of their own assessment — I sense therefore must be correct, as it were; how we inflate ourselves as individuals, yet underestimate ourselves, dismissing the impact we have as groups. In short, on the Scale of Truth, what Voltaire found was, humans have a kind of blind-spot. They are only so considerate or aware (?) of those other people and things happening around them. As Al Gore pointed out, we have all the sense of a frog slowly set to boil.

Using this view of our individual impact, I can provide some realization about technologies or changes which already exists that have solved nearly impossible problems: a) Change must always occur first on the smallest of scales to ever be evident on larger ones and there it may look different (a realizaion that lead to Quantum Mechanics) b) Every change no matter how seemingly insignificant in any particular frame of reference resonates throughout all scales and all frames of reference (a realization called the Butterfly Effect). This suggests we need even newer forms of technology though. Technology not unlike the Internet which capitalizes on this problem within human design to create new ways to communicate on larger scales, decreasing the blind-spot.

If we go on though, each a little at a time, unable, unaware or simply discounting each other as we go, than we are that thing, that avalanche of change, and we are responsible for its consequences. In fact, if we continue to treat the world as we have, all the generations that come to follow us will have no such thing and not understand a snowflake in order to relate such ideas. Imagine, Voltaire’s wisdom will, along with all other wisdom, fall back into the abyss.

My friends (who’ve quit on me) always end up asking me the first two questions in these lyrics — because I apparently need to calm down as they have — and I always reply about the same as the song, from this state of cynical and sarcastic realization: this Superman has too many problems to solve. In other words, I can’t calm down for the same reason I didn’t just stay down on the farm and listen to my old man. I’m not meant for that or to know people that want to live denying the darknesses that surround them when they ought to re-find their youthful innocence, and be inspired to create light — or “be too young to be singing the blues.”

When are you gonna come down
When are you going to land
I should have stayed on the farm
I should have listened to my old man

You know you can’t hold me forever
I didn’t sign up with you
I’m not a present for your friends to open
This boy’s too young to be singing the blues

So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to my plough

Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road

What do you think you’ll do then
I bet that’ll shoot down your plane
It’ll take you a couple of vodka and tonics
To set you on your feet again

Maybe you’ll get a replacement
There’s plenty like me to be found
Mongrels who ain’t got a penny
Sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground

I was feeling insecure. You might not love me anymore. I was shivering inside. I was shivering inside. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry that I made you cry. Oh no, I didn’t want to hurt you, I’m just a jealous guy.

Sourced from here on Flickr, the image shows a tank marked with black spray paint reading “Screw You Guys, I’m going home.” Click on the image to zoom-in.

…And all the science I don’t understand — it’s just my job five days a week…

There is an article I read which I can’t seem to say enough is Absolute Genius — because thats what its describing: absolute genius. Its called Programming can Ruin Your Life. I keep saying absolute genius because, for me, all of this is truth about reality. Every bit in the article.

I feel what the author has described here, is sort of the weight to which genius can burden. I covered and explained this idea that genius grows exponentially through its own internally created pressures or burdens in a series of essays I wrote entitled “Neurogenesis”. Maybe one day I’ll republish them here. In the meantime, let me lay in with examples of this wonderful piece of literary work… and give you an idea of the bold diagnosis this writer has made of most Programmers (or, as I state in Neurogensis, most geniuses).

When faced with an interesting programming problem your mind will chew it over in the background. Maybe it’s an algorithm you need to develop, maybe its a tricky architecture problem, maybe its data that needs a model. It doesn’t matter. Your mind will quietly work the problem over in search of a solution. The ah-ha! moment will come when you’re in the shower, or playing Tetris. This practice of constant churning will slowly work its way into the rest of your life. Each problem or puzzle you encounter will start its own thread; the toughest and most troubling of which will be blocking.

This all seems very, very accurate to me. I’ m even quite certain that this sort of problem-solving phenomena translate to other careers too. In fact, I contend it translates across so many disciplines because this describes a human compulsion toward optimization (or the providing of a solution of an optimization problem). I contend optimization is the only problem ever being solved during all human problem-solving. But, thats a contention that takes us to deeper place than I want to go with this post. Don’t worry, we’ll get there some day.

One thing I notice about other people is how little they think and I mean that about everything. I can’t imagine how one could exist with such precious little going on inside them as I find with most people. In fact what I’m noticing is not how little those people think but how much I myself think by comparison. I always wonder,”Why don’t they just stop and think for a second?” Thats a good example though.

No wait, its not good, its a Programmers example, its perfect! I’m wondering why others are NOT thinking, in effect, thats just more thinking I have to do [for them] (or thats how I observe the case to be). You see, in problem-solving with Programmers, what I realize is, they’re always thinking, because they’re always programming. But, consider it, and it should only make more sense to you even if you’re a non-programmer.

If your job is to feed exotic and somewhat exclusive phrases of a dynamic and specific language into some device and then predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable outcomes, you will become as much like that device as possible. This is the mammalian method-trait called mimicry. This method-trait is true of how human beings grasp information at all through all language. Progressively over time the input and output of procedures of communication with others grow as we do, embedding in our minds the pathology to interact socially. Or as it could also be described, so that we’re able to feed other people information and predict outcomes as well as manage the unpredictable ones.

So Programmers, like anyone learning or coping with anything follow a pattern of mimicry in order that they become even better at translating these exotic phrases and languages and predicting outcomes (or at least as close as they can become to the machine). But, mimicry has its draw backs in this case since we’re now trying to mimic something not nearly human — a programming language.

Programmers become obsessed with perfection. This is why they are constantly talking about rewrites. They cannot resist optimum solutions. Perfection requires tossing aside mediocre ideas in search of great ones. A good programmer would rather leave a problem temporarily unsolved than solve it poorly. A good solution takes into account all predictable outcomes and solves the largest number of them in the most efficient way. This mindset prevents you from writing code with limited utility and life span. While its a wonderful trait to have in programming, the demons of scope and efficiency will start to assert themselves on your ordinary life. You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.

This statement by the author acts to solidify my point as well as his; that an obsession for perfection is actually a shedding of the human condition. This means Programmers have trained their minds to be inhuman as such that they cannot make a choice knowingly acceptant that it will be deficient or have a limited life time. This kind of avoidance of care for simple things such as is described is something well known about the personality of most Programmers.

Finally, note the point above that thinking in this way reduces the number of your potential choices to those seemingly optimal at design time. This means Programmers only do things that they analyze as optimal in that moment. So, a night out on the town where one acts foolishly without regard for themselves to a degree, as well as the feelings of the others around (whom act and have cascading affect on those they surround thereafter) — throwing caution to the wind — would not be very attractive to someone measuring each element of their experience in terms of optimality toward building a method based in perfection.

And, it is for some of those reasons that genius tends to burden. Or, as I have put it in Neugenesis: Elegant thought is a symptom of a passionate, sensitive mind, its expression is nothing more than the easing of its burden.