Where Do They Get This Stuff?

If you've ever watched "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," you'll recognize these fellows as the not-so-smart droids that are everywhere. But look closer - these droids have their own disco ball. And, they are dancing on one of those light-up disco dance floors. I have no idea how this particular combination occurred - perhaps the artist saw part of "Saturday Night Fever" in the last week? But I was impressed by how thorough this is. Go droids!

Drawing Over Time

This drawing, on a white board, looks like there's a ton going on - and there is. The space-invader-like creatures are battling the black rocket things, everyone is shooting at each other, and there's even a lot of yelling of "Zowee momma!"

But what's also interesting here is that this drawing was made over about 45 minutes. It started as one alien, then another one attacked, then someone's friend showed up, then people started yelling "Zowee momma," and things went from there. Along the way, a lot got erased also as the story developed. So this was not just a single drawing at all - it was a whole movie. Zowee momma!

Drawing in Reverse

I just spent a week at my son's school teaching a drawing camp - we used white boards, and paper, and drew from books and from our imagination. We even took the white boards out to a park one day and drew under the trees (no paper, since that would have gotten all over the place).

Since we had shiny new dry erase markers, there was a lot of ink (good thing these were the non-stinky kind). This meant the kids could color in the entire board and then erase to make their drawing. As you can see here, that's especially good for making space scenes. If you look closely, there's a rocket leaving earth to go visit some distant planet.

Studying the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

On Thursday, NASA will launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the LCROSS or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satelllite. So we've set about studying the LRO first, to see what it looks like, what its payload will be, and how long its mission will take. The kids then took some clay and made their own LRO displays. The second one is a little more free-form, sine my 5-year-old mainly wanted to make a Lunar landscape, but you get the idea. The LRO is kind of a blunt-looking vehicle, and that's the moon over on the right. We used clay and then colored it in with paint and markers. You can see more about it on the NASA site.

This is gonna be some cool stuff and tell us a whole lot more about the moon. They're going to study radiation, craters, resources, and more. I'm hoping we can see the launch on Thursday!

On another note, I heard that there's actually astronaut poop on the moon. I'm not kidding. I mean it makes sense, given the *ahem* in's and out's of those space suits, but that's certainly not something I had considered. I've said enough - if you want to know more, you can go here.

Things You Can Make with a Box - Robot Head!

Some robots come with enormous numbers of puffballs on top. External brain perhaps? Exo-brain?

Ideally, what I'd like to do is now attach some big robot arms that are controlled with sticks that the wearer holds in each hand - but first we've got to figure out what materials to use. A good start though, eh?

It's an Abacus! It's a Soroban! It's....

So, my kids and I have created a school for the summer, which they have named "The Cherry Lane School of Craziness." Each day we decide what we're going to do, like field trips and projects and such. Yesterday, we made an Abacus out of beads, bamboo skewers, and popsicle sticks. And glue. Lots of glue. Here is where we got the instructions.

It kind of took all day to do this because of waiting for the aforementioned glue to dry, but the results looked pretty good. We started out making an Abacus, which has two beads up top and five in the bottom. Then I went out and looked for pointers on how to use the Abacus to do calculations, at which point I learned that the second and fifth beads in the top and bottom, respectively, are used to do hexidecimal stuff like calculate pounds and ounces and things like that. I was looking for a simpler calculation device so now we are starting in on a Soroban, the Japanese version which has just one bead up top ("heavenly bead") and four in the bottom ("earthly beads").

On an Abacus or Soroban, the decimal places get bigger from right to left just like written numbers. We did a simple one with just three decimal places - ones on the right, tens in the middle, and hundreds on the left.

This is a pretty nice demo on how to use an Abacus, and why those extra beads complicate things - We are still trying to get the hang of it, but I think it will be a cool way to visualize numbers. Plus, there's pretty beads. What's not to like?

Here, Kitty Kitty

There is a ton of cool street art in the Mission District of San Francisco - however, this one is closer to the Financial District. I saw it on my way to dinner the other night. I think someone had better get this kitty a bowl of milk before it eats a car or something.

And Furthermore...

A follow-on to my last post about Creativity and Careers...

Okay I read the Harvard Paper, found here.

While interesting, it is missing a big ol' Chunk out of it - the basic Function of art. It talks a lot about art's Value, and sort of its role in society, but not its Function.

The Function of art is to communicate something.

That Something could be communicated to one person, or lots of people, or differently to everyone in the world, or only between the artist and him or herself. But art communicates.

Sometimes art doesn't communicate anything to one person, but volumes to another.

Here are some examples of what art can communicate:

1. What it was like today inside someone's head (Van Gogh)
2. What God is like (Michaelangelo, oh and a whole lot of other people)
3. A good story about a hunt or other event (Caves)
4. What emotions feel like on a deeper level - anger, sadness, joy (Beethoven)
5. How the paint is behaving today
6. Who we love
7. What a place felt like at a particular day and time
8. A historical event (Goya)
9. How light works
10. How dark works
11. Things that scare us
12. Things that make us laugh
13. Things we remember
14. How we wish the world was
15. How we wish the world wasn't
16. Ideas about space and time
... and on and on...
... in short, what it is like to be human, communicated in deep, varied ways.

That's art.

Creative + Career = ?

Alright here we go again with the Ongoing Theme of how Stupid it is to think of Creativity as a. A luxury b. A rarity c. Not "useful" or d. Not the makings of a career.

As I've mentioned before, I've encountered many cues in our society that creativity and art are somehow these exotic, fluffy things that you do only if you have the time or if you aren't smart enough to do other "real" things (i.e. accounting, medicine, etc.)

I was at dinner at someone's house once when the husband stated that art had no value except economic... if it did not have economic value, there was no reason for it to exist. I don't really keep in touch with those guys.

This isn't a discussion about the value of art, it's about the values of our society. A society that is one-dimensional is unhealthy. Our one dimension is capitalism.

Oh, and have you noticed how capitalism rewards creativity? I mean, everyone who has ever invented or innovated anything Important or figured out how to do something New that People Want has done really, really well. Like, mansion- on-the-hill well. The evidence is all around you right this minute, in people's pockets and cars and ears and homes and stores and doctors' offices and movie theatres and, well, Everywhere.

Here's a paper from Harvard that looks interesting on the topic: "It Is Okay for Artists to Make Money…No, Really, It's Okay".

Anyway, I'm not going to go on about "art is valuable, really, let me spell out various reasons why," because that's not the issue. The issue is examining how we get out of a mental rat-hole about how we value things and how we remind ourselves that sometimes, money isn't part of the equation. No, really.

Oh and then when we put our Capitalist hat back on, we can look around and notice how creativity and innovation have a whole stinkin' lot of money associated with them.

The Lost Art of Puttering

When I was a kid, sometimes I went to stay with my grandmother.

There was no Nintendo or anything remotely like it -- in fact, I don't even think the TV was ever on when I was there. Except maybe for the evening news. Maybe. There was no such thing as passive entertainment.

This is because my grandmother was a Master Putterer.

She lived by herself when I knew her, my grandfather had died rather early leaving her a widow in her 60's.

We'd get up and make our beds, then we'd make breakfast and clean that up. Then we'd go out in the vegetable garden and pull some weeds, or plant things, depending on the time of year. Then we'd rake, or sweep.

Then we'd go get groceries, often on foot. Or if Easter was coming up we'd go to the department store ("Bullocks, I don't trade at Weinstocks") to get me an Easter sweater.

Later we'd go to a convalescent home and she would putter from one resident to the next, visiting and straightening lap robes and trimming hair and such.

Then we might go home and make cookies, or butter cream eggs, or some such thing. This involved licking of bowls and eating anything remotely "extra." "That's what it's for," she would say.

The days were filled with these sorts of things. There was never "nothing to do." There was a front porch to paint, or a lawn to mow, or someone to visit - like Nellie Goodenough, who was 101 when I met her. She took a long time to get to the front door after we knocked, but once she made it, the visit was a lot of fun.

And, I always had some art supplies handy and could draw whenever there was a break in the puttering action.

Puttering is an activity most people assign to elderly people in their front yards. But I think it's an important skill to cultivate. The fact is, there is never "nothing to do," we just expect to be entertained all the time.

I think I got the puttering habit from my grandmother -- I'm always cruising around doing random things, to the amusement of my family. I will go out and fuss with the pool equipment in a rainstorm. I like to see things from the roof. Not in a rainstorm.

Here's what puttering is: It's engaging with your environment. You cruise around, you interact with things and people, and you keep your environment alive. You don't just occupy one couch or chair or room, you circulate.

Kids do this naturally. In fact, they "engage" with the environment even when you'd really rather they didn't.

Here are my tips for Good Puttering:

1. Don't have a Big Goal. This is not about finishing something, it's about keeping things moving forward. A little of this, a little of that, and pretty soon the garage looks better or the car is clean or your books are organized.

2. Don't think in terms of Chores. That's the wrong attitude. If you see something to do, just do it. Enjoy the satisfaction of of just being present and taking care of things.

3. Don't putter fast. The whole point is to be methodical, not speedy. The clock is the enemy of puttering.

4. Find someone nice to putter around with you.

There. Maybe you know a Master Putterer yourself, who can give you some more tips. Or better yet, you can just go putter together.

Living Squiggle-ly

Federico Fellini said, "You have to live spherically--in many directions. To accept yourself for what you are without inhibitions, to be open." I ran across this after I had been thinking for several days about how life does not follow a straight line. I also saw this clip by Carol Bartz talking about how careers take shape in a pyramid, not a ladder (okay it's kind of a corporate talk, but you get the idea).

Thing is, our education system does seem to be in a straight line. Everything seems to be on a continuum. You are in a grade, with people behind you and people in front of you. You score a number on a test, there are numbers below it and numbers above it. Even the school day is kind of linear - you do this, then you do this, there's 1st Period, then 2nd - and on and on.

But the really cool classrooms and learning environments do kind of feel like spheres, because they associate everything with everything else. The only thing that changes is the focus. So maybe you're doing math problems, but there are shapes and drawings on the walls. Or you are reading, but there are graphs and maybe a terrarium or a view of the playground. 

My career has been more of a plate of spaghetti than a line. I've moved all around, done different things, and had lots of times when I felt like I had no focus and why couldn't I be the kid who discovered his genius at age 12 and went on to excel in something and have movies made about her and all of this.

But, for everything that I am doing now, which I love, by the way, I can point directly back and say, there is something in that muddle of pasta noodles that I call a career that has made this possible. Everything from being able to upload my cartoons onto a server, to negotiating contracts, to drawing. All of it. Every bit.

So, here's to wiggly scribbly careers, and living spherically, and hoping that we can encourage kids to make scribbly wiggles too.