what you think and what you know

We really like the Edge Foundation. They and the GBN (Global Business Network). Almost anyone who is affiliated with these two amazing orgs, and there is frequent cross-over which is no surprise, I will enjoy reading or listening to.

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks 1 big question of its members. They are usually big, open-ended questions to get you thinking. This year, it’s “What is your dangerous idea.” Go ahead and click them down the side. Andy Clark, as usual, pulls in one of our favorites (and it’s remarkably akin to Malcom Galdwell’s recent research in blink. While you might think Clark is cribbing, keep in mind he’s been doing this work for years).

And while we have GBN on the mind, let’s check in with one of our favorite features on the web, the GBN Book Club. The freebie web version is always a few months behind the paid-member one, but we are totally cool with that. Nov 2005 is about Terror. GBN has thrown up a number of books in the past couple years about Terror and trying to understand it. Mostly, they talk about how Terror organizations work, cells of chaos, disruptions, communications networks. All interesting stuff. But what we want to know about Terror is that (and we will put this as politic as possible) given that most Terror organizations in the world are backed by a radical Muslim ideology, A) what is the ultimate end-goal of this form of Terror, B) why does it cling to Islam, and C) why does Islam (radical or not) prop up such a view? While we continue to gain insight into how people communicate to perform Terror acts, we know little as to the how or why.

For instance, we saw last night on the news a story about the Iranian president speaking out against the Holocaust again. A “childhood friend” was interviewed who said he “didn’t really believe that”, but what the hell do they think happened? The president’s podium was decorated with a sign which read, “A world without Zionism.” We can understand an Arab hatred of Jewish-occupied Israel; we get it. It’s about land, okay. But there is a deeper hatred there, which lies seething. The news story concluded with the Iranian president talking about moving forward with a nuclear weapons plan. And then we remembered a Jerusalem Post article we saw yesterday that the US might be planning an attack on Iran.

On another note, one of the perils of turning a new year is the inevitable lists and comparrisons with previous years (although ESPN’s year-end fawning over USC being the “best team ever” sure didn’t mean much last night–what happens to “SC wins” shirts?). Most of these lists we dread. Although the BBC’s list of 100 things we didn’t know last year, with facts like “A single ‘mother’ spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today,” is fun. And first cousin to the lists are the year in pictures. Here’s 2005 by MSNBC and Time magazine.

BigSleep666 recently told us about Learning to Love you More, a series of artistic “assignments”. We tend to enjoy these sorts of generative experiments. Chalk it up to early OuLiPo influence in our formative years.