Download or read book The Adjacent Possible written by Nancy Hillis and published by . This book was released on 2023-02-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the life cycle of being an artist, the thorny issue of moving past emulating not only other artists but also yourself is a perennial one. There is a path through this predicament.Being an artist is about continually evolving your art. It's about cultivating your fullest self-expression and getting to the elusive deepest work your heart yearns to create. Learn the science of creativity, the art of the possible- the adjacent possible This is a revolutionary method influenced by groundbreaking research in biology and physics to guide you to embrace the unfolding of your art. Every brushstroke, every decision in your art, creates a set of possible paths that were not only invisible before, but didn't exist before you made that creative move. This is the adjacent possible. This book will:- guide you to evolve your art- nudge you to create art that excites, scares and wows you- inspire you to move past emulating not only others, but yourself in your art Becoming a great artist is about the movement of coming closer to who you are and reaching the fullest expression of YOU in your art. With one foot in the known and one foot in the unknown, you'll become aware of your creative edge where the adjacent possible lives. At the pivot point between creation and collapse, you'll experience a state of poised instability. This is the art and science of the possible- a world of continuous creation.
Download or read book Where Good Ideas Come from written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?
Download or read book Extra Life written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Offers a useful reminder of the role of modern science in fundamentally transforming all of our lives.” —President Barack Obama (on Twitter) “An important book.” —Steven Pinker, The New York Times Book Review The surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an extra life, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come From In 1920, at the end of the last major pandemic, global life expectancy was just over forty years. Today, in many parts of the world, human beings can expect to live more than eighty years. As a species we have doubled our life expectancy in just one century. There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this increased longevity. Extra Life is Steven Johnson’s attempt to understand where that progress came from, telling the epic story of one of humanity’s greatest achievements. How many of those extra years came from vaccines, or the decrease in famines, or seatbelts? What are the forces that now keep us alive longer? Behind each breakthrough lies an inspiring story of cooperative innovation, of brilliant thinkers bolstered by strong systems of public support and collaborative networks, and of dedicated activists fighting for meaningful reform. But for all its focus on positive change, this book is also a reminder that meaningful gaps in life expectancy still exist, and that new threats loom on the horizon, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear. How do we avoid decreases in life expectancy as our public health systems face unprecedented challenges? What current technologies or interventions that could reduce the impact of future crises are we somehow ignoring? A study in how meaningful change happens in society, Extra Life celebrates the enduring power of common goals and public resources, and the heroes of public health and medicine too often ignored in popular accounts of our history. This is the sweeping story of a revolution with immense public and personal consequences: the doubling of the human life span.
Download or read book At Home in the Universe written by Stuart Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life.
Download or read book The Adjacent Possible written by Julie Phillips Brown and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length sequence of linked poems, The Adjacent Possible centers on problems of consciousness, inter-subjective relation, theories of emergence, and Buddhist philosophy. These thematic concerns emerge through the dialogic exchange between two abstract figures, as they range across a variety of landscapes and poetic forms, including free verse, hybrid forms, and the traditional Japanese forms of haibun, tanka, and renga. The questions The Adjacent Possible explores are these: How does consciousness emerge into being, and how does one subject, human or otherwise, connect with another? How might poetry--as aural, visual, and elemental matter--catalyze these forms of relation?
Download or read book Everything Bad is Good for You written by Steven Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of How We Got To Now and Farsighted Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, unfailingly intelligent, thoroughly researched, and surprisingly convincing big idea book, Steven Johnson draws from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and media theory to argue that the pop culture we soak in every day—from Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons—has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. After reading Everything Bad is Good for You, you will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again. With a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book The Adjacent written by Christopher Priest and published by Titan Books (US, CA). This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eagerly anticipated new novel from “one of the master illusionists of our time.” (Wired) In the near future, Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled from Anatolia to Britain when his wife, an aid worker, is killed—annihilated by a terrifying weapon that reduces its target to a triangular patch of scorched earth. A century earlier, Tommy Trent, a stage magician, is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy. Present day. A theoretical physicist develops a new method of diverting matter, a discovery with devastating consequences that will resonate through time.
Download or read book A World Beyond Physics written by Stuart A. Kauffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere. Building on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere.
Download or read book The Evolution of Everything written by Matt Ridley and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Mr. Ridley’s best and most important work to date…there is something profoundly democratic and egalitarian—even anti-elitist—in this bottom-up approach: Everyone can have a role in bringing about change.” —Wall Street Journal The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world Human society evolves. Change in technology, language, morality, and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual, and spontaneous. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next, and it largely happens by trial and error—a version of natural selection. Much of the human world is the result of human action but not of human design: it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few. Drawing on fascinating evidence from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley demolishes conventional assumptions that the great events and trends of our day are dictated by those on high. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. The Industrial Revolution, cell phones, the rise of Asia, and the Internet were never planned; they happened. Languages emerged and evolved by a form of natural selection, as did common law. Torture, racism, slavery, and pedophilia—all once widely regarded as acceptable—are now seen as immoral despite the decline of religion in recent decades. In this wide-ranging, erudite book, Ridley brilliantly makes the case for evolution, rather than design, as the force that has shaped much of our culture, our technology, our minds, and that even now is shaping our future.
Download or read book The Artist s Journey written by Nancy Hillis and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you yearn to say yes to your deepest expression in your art and life, this self-help book is for you. Dr. Hillis guides you past resistance on your artist's journey so you can finally trust yourself, develop confidence and cultivate deep exploration and experimentation in your art. Bonus resource library with videos lessons and book club guide.
Download or read book How We Got to Now written by Steven Johnson and published by Riverhead Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a celebration of ideas: how they happen and their sometimes unintended results. Johnson shows how simple scientific breakthroughs have driven other discoveries through the network of ideas and innovations that made each finding possible. He traces important inventions through ancient and contemporary history, unlocking tales of unsung heroes and radical revolutions that changed the world and the way we live in it
Download or read book Organization Design written by Donald L. Anderson and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To thrive in today’s rapidly changing, global, dynamic business environment characterized by constant change and disruption, organizations must be able to adapt and innovate to maintain their competitive edge. Organization Design: Creating Strategic & Agile Organizations prepares students to make smart strategic decisions when designing and redesigning organizations. Structured around Galbraith’s Star ModelTM, the text explores five facets of organization design: strategy, structure, processes, people, and rewards. Author Donald L. Anderson distills contemporary and classic research into practical applications and best practices. Cases, exercises, and a simulation activity provide multiple opportunities for students to practice making design decisions. Includes an innovative organization design simulation activity that puts students in the role of a design practitioner!
Download or read book The Adjacent Possible written by Nancy Hillis and published by Adjacent Possible Series. This book was released on 2022-10-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 200 photographs of artwork Bonus Book Resource Library with Artist's Archetype Quiz & Creativity Challenge Videos, Podcast Videos
Download or read book The Gone World written by Tom Sweterlitsch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inception meets True Detective in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind.... “I promise you have never read a story like this.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family—and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence. Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself. Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.
Download or read book The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible written by Vlad Petre Glăveanu and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible represents a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners interested in an emerging multidisciplinary area within psychology and the social sciences: the study of how we engage with and cultivate the possible within self, society and culture. Far from being opposed either to the actual or the real, the possible engages with concrete facts and experiences, with the result of transforming them. This encyclopedia examines the notion of the possible and the concepts associated with it from standpoints within psychology, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience and logic, as well as multidisciplinary fields of research including anticipation studies, future studies, complexity theory and creativity research. Presenting multiple perspectives on the possible, the authors consider the distinct social, cultural and psychological processes - e.g., imagination, counterfactual thinking, wonder, play, inspiration, and many others - that define our engagement with new possibilities in domains as diverse as the arts, design and business.
Download or read book So Good They Can t Ignore You written by Cal Newport and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.
Download or read book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned written by Kenneth O. Stanley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity. Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.
