Besides his writing and cartooning David also has a few side projects. The one that caught my eye was one called Artisanal pencil sharpening. There is no better way to describe what this means than to quote from his website: “In New York’s Hudson River Valley, craftsman David Rees still practices the age-old art of manual pencil sharpening. His artisanal service is perfect for artists, writers, and standardized test takers. Shipped with their shavings and a “certificate of sharpening,” these extra-sharp pencils make wonderful gifts.”.
With other words, you pay $17 or $20 to get your pencil sharpened by David Rees. Now, that is as a coll, quirky idea as I’ve heard of so far. But, if you think about it, it’s not that bad. You are a fan of David and want to get his autograph alongside with something from him? Pay the $20 and you will have it! Or you want to make an unusual gift? Same thing.
So, what do you think it is? A Great Business Idea, Art, Madness or a Bad Joke? I’ll go with the first one.
Posted on December 28, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
Thinking is hard, thinking requires commitment and decision-making, decisions that can turn out good or bad, it might even come to be seen as bad decisions. Judging people or situation on preconceived ideas is easy, it’s a think once apply everywhere schema. Nothing is more easy to stamp a stereotype on the forehead of the people you meet. That guy is corporate slave, that guy is a nerd, the gal, over there, is a poser and so on.
Preconceived ideas, stereotypes and the unwillingness to think for ourselves are one of the worst offenses that we can bring to the interactions we have. Be it cataloging people we’ve just met to putting people we already know in the same box over and over again and refusing to acknowledge that they have changed. It’s offensive, it’s unjust, it’s rude, it’s destructive to those who do it on regular basis and it’s one step away from racism, discrimination and intolerance.
I believe that the use of stereotypes comes mainly from a mechanism our brain has devised to make it easier for us to handle new situations. Applying patterns. Look at a child faced with a new situation. She will be completely absorbed by it, will put all her mental capacities in figuring out what to do in that new situation and if all fails she will fall back to the known and safe “I don’t know”, “I can do it” and “Please help me with this”. The lack of patterns requires the effort to deal with the unfamiliar. As the child grows, more and more situation will be obvious. Patterns like “Don’t take toys from other children because you won’t be able to keep it and you will be punished” fill their young minds.
As adults we drown in a sea of patterns. And I believe that the ever-increasing demand for our attention creates a fatigue that pushes too many of us to fall back to the familiar and, what we perceive as safe, preconceived ideas. And yet, this is the worst thing that we can do to our selves. We are forcing ourselves in an artificially familiar and boring world that will come crushing down when any of our patterns will be proven wrong. And this will happen sooner or later.
The solution is to make the effort and approach each situation with an open mind and a hungry mind, just like a child, discovering the world, don’t judge people by appearances, let actions speak and be tolerant and open as people change. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, stay foolish, stay hungry, and don’t assume you know a thing about the person you sit next to. Life will be more interesting this way.
I leave with with the speech in which Steve Jobs mentioned the phrase above, a little unrelated but still an interesting talk.
Posted on December 22, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
I love stop motion, I’ve wrote about great stop-motion or time-manipulation examples here and here. And here comes another great example of a sort of stop motion done with Google Docs for Google Demo Slam about which I’ve written a little here.
It amazes me the pains some people would go to make these things and while thinking about it, it downed on me that the more time-consuming the clips are the greater we think the outcome is. Or at least this is how it works for me. I find myself thinking: those poor soles spend a week putting post-its on a wall to give me 5 minutes of enjoyment, wooooow. So enjoy the 3 day work these guys made, which totaled in 450 slides.
Posted on December 21, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
Art can take any shape, I don’t think art is limited to the 6 arts Hegel could think off, or seven, if you count cinema. Art is in anything that is done with great skill and taste. For me art can be in movement. Hegel calls the 4th art as being dance. Dance is movement. Why shouldn’t a masterful and effortless ski run shouldn’t be called art.
If you ask me art is trying really hard to be exclusive and markets itself wrong. Art is in any object or movement done expertly and with great energy and feeling, anything that makes you want to be better, do better, or moves you in any other way. The definition of art is not far off: “Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect”.
Many professional athletes are more showman than anything else. Many amateur athletes do sport to feel better about themselves, their body, their actions. I’m part of this last group.So, to my eye, these guys are artist in the purest form.
Posted on December 17, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
We, humans, are horrible at judging talent, especially if we don’t know the first thing about the field we are observing. It’s hard to judge the top figure skaters, beyond the “I like her more, she’s cute” level. It’s hard to learn the subtleties of a certain move that seem easy and yet, if you skated yourself, you would know it’s unbelievably difficult.
Yet, in figure skating, we can observe the act itself, the gracious moves. But what about something more common, like a web developer building a website or even more obscure, a delivery firm delivering a much-awaited package. How do we judge that, from our point of view of outsider, uninitiated in the art of package delivery, how do we price the “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these carriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” attitude? By the way, this is actually not the motto of the U.S. Post Office. There is the obvious quality of service, yet many times services have hidden flaws. That beautiful website might be gorgeous, yet, in the same time, completely counter-intuitive to use, coded backwards, a complete mess for search engines to read. Not to speak of the nightmares it gives you when you want to update the smallest thing. But hey, it’s beautiful and it costs half the money the other guy was saying it is worth. And about that package, you only got 4 out of the last 5 packages, but hey, the ones that made it though were here fast, one a little crumpled, but fast!
As sure as the fact that’s snowing right now in Bucharest, there is a way in which you, the business owner and the master of an intricate and well oiled system that provides great service, to show your average un-initiated customer with a great service and a way to tell that you do your job well.
Just put on a show! Make a point of how fast you delivered the package and how reliable you are. Do it again and again, put on a show. Talk to your customers and give him an inside look at the many steps and things you had to consider when you built his website, show him a piece of code to get him grasp the sheer amount of typing you had to do, show him the 50 prototypes and sketches you made, until you found perfection.
It might seem like a scam or bragging but it’s not. You need to give a glimpse into the pains and efforts it takes you to be good a swift so that your customers appreciate you and value your work at its true value. Otherwise you will get exactly what Dan Ariely describes in his locksmith story. The, “What? 50 bucks for 10 minutes of work? You gotta be kidding me, pal” attitude. Yet, make them understand that it took you 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to go back and you saved her 200$ a the trouble of buying a new lock and that you performed an act that it took you 10 years to master and it would take her 10 years to do. Suddenly the 50$ for 10 minutes of work seem like a bargain.
Put on a show, don’t overdo it, but put on a show. My father always says that if you don’t brag yourself about your real achievements, nobody will do it for you.
Posted on December 14, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
Continuing the series of time-lapses started by this and this post, here are two more interesting clips of how a baby plays and how a 747 is being assembled. Both are fascinating, my favorite is the baby one.
Posted on December 11, 2010 by Liviu Lică in Stories & Life
I’ve been a fan of Sir. Attenborough for many years. As a kid I used to devour all kinds of books about animals and plants and dinosaurs and space. His programs have always been fascinating stories about our planet and the natural world. I’ve always admired them and watched them with fascinations.
Now, I had the chance to listen to the audio version of his wonderful memoris, Life on air, and Sir. Attenborough managed to make me an even bigger fan. Besides the wonderful tale of how his many programs were filmed, it is a story of an incredible life told with the skill of the greatest writers. Funny and subtle, it’s one of the best books I had my hands on for some time, a great inside look at the wonderful world of animals and the people that document and study their behaviour.
As much as I enjoyed the book, as a story, I liked it most because it ignited anew that spark of curiosity and wonder about nature that I had as a child. That, I believe, is the greatest gift a book can give someone.
I recommend anyone to read, or even better, to listen to it, it’s story of a great life and a great passion for life.
Below are is a clip I love about persistence hunting and below it a clip about which Sir. Attenborough talks in his book.
