Serendipity and Learning

The original quote goes Birds of a feather, flock together, but when you think it is true for a ideas as well. Take any thought process and you will find a remarkable similarity across ideas in a particular generation. This struck me as particularly obvious as part of our ongoing googling on car designs, something struck me as quite amazing. When you see car designs over a period, say the 50's, 60's or any other period - the majority of cars look similar. When I say similar, I mean that their overall structure, proportions, shape and lines are similar. There are variations in engine, accessories, interior layout and so on, but by and large they do appear same. In the sense, if you picked out a particular car it is easy even an untrained eye to observe the, quite obvious, similarity. This was something I knew intuitively as a "car watcher", but the fact that this has repeated consistently over many eras was quite something. There is an explanation for why this i...

Google boy at work: Think of a car brand. Type it into the Google box -which I suspect is his worm hole for reaching out into other dimensions. Wait for auto-suggest to kick in. Wonder what are each of those suggestions, click them one by one and expand knowledge. Said modus operandi has worked very well. One day, Googleboy was typing Morgan (yes, it is a car company) into the Google box - And google helpfully suggested, "Freeman". With the result, that from staring at cars one moment, Googleboy found himself staring at the pictures of an oldish man in a French beard. Much peevishness resulted from the incredulity that Google could not figure out that Morgan was a car manufacturer and when combined with Freeman, it was a person not a car. And for us, that caused much hilarity...while for Google, that might be some feedback!

Imagine -how creativity works is the title of a book by Jonah Lehrer. There are numerous books on creativity and yet creativity is one of those topics that is quite tough to be captured inside a book. And yet, Imagine does this quite well. What Imagine does is it looks at examples of people across disciplines - music, sports, literature, technology among others and also explores the science behind these and tries to connect the two. That makes for very engrossing reading. One part that had me enthralled was the part about how population density and people interactions in cities can give rise to ideas. Another section was on the way the Pixar workplace is designed so as to increase interaction and give rise to higher levels of creativity. Both these are great reading for someone who wants creativity in their workplace and are all worth thinking about. As we think about this for the next generation, education is definitely an area that can be looked at in a different perspective, ...

I am a superhero. Googleman. Without google, I am the ordinary human being. But with Google at my disposal, I become the superhero.  I also strongly suspect that between the age range of 3 and 8, children believe their parents are superheroes. Post this age, the power of the internet is available to kids and they discover googlesearches themselves. Parents the world over should be thankful to google for increasing their question answering by an exponential factor. Earlier there were a zillion questions that could go unanswered. But not any more. The internet gives parents the power to answer the most obscure of questions. I am not sure if this is good or bad, but it does seem like the fact that answers are available means that more questions can be asked. Sample this: Why do buses have bigger steering wheels? Why does Audi name their cars one way and BMW another way? Who invented soap (and this screaming from the bathroom)? Who invented shampoo? Who i...