Outside the natural habitat

Every year, the Seattle Symphony does a concert featuring the music of independent local composers. The artists are there in the audience to come up on stage and discuss the piece before it's performed. I went into this one with my eyes wide open, knowing that "indie" probably means "modern," and "modern" virtually always means "weird," and "weird" directly translates as "immensely talented but painful to listen to."

The evening was rather hard to describe.
There was a black-and-white silent film about shipwrecks, vaguely-implied infidelity, and the dangers of sleeping on rocky beaches at high tide, which played on screen while a woman in a bright orange dress pounded the 5 lowest keys on a grand piano for 21 solid minutes.
One of the pieces featured cowbells.
And toward the end of a program, a local rapper performed the drum solo from a Phil Collins song, backed by a 60-piece orchestra full of musical prodigies wondering how their Juilliard training had culminated in something like this.

Before the show started, I was trying to snap a picture of the stage...

...because it featured a wall of gongs.  I repeat: An entire wall of gongs.

It's there, partially hiding behind the piano and the harp.
Ready to pounce at any moment.

It was only when I looked at the picture later that I realized it had so many other little gems in it.

Rarely observed in the symphonic wild, behold the blue jeaned - canvas Toms footed - pink mohawked - Hipster sapien:

This appears to be a breeding pair.

And finally, trying desperately to maintain their acoustically-balanced territory on the velvet-upholstered slopes, the clearly-intimidated old couple.

Their stares are unmistakable.
Her hand is delicately raised to her mouth,
stifling a gasp of horror.
His arm is protectively wrapped around her,
ready to defend from the fuscia mohawk onslaught.

Thanks for keeping it reliably interesting, Seattle. I really mean that.
The real question may be which of these symphony couples delights or distresses you more?

Frustration and Brilliance and Late-night Infomercials

My last post was about hard questions without good answers.

(Somehow, it turns out it was also about cats wearing space suits.) 

Because really when you come right down to it,
maybe Catstronaut is the answer after all?

While I was thinking about all that, it occurred to me that what controversy and frustration really come from is the mismatch between how bad a problem is (ENORMOUSLY bad) and how adequate the solution is (WOEFULLY inadequate). 

By extension, I wonder how many of the world's issues can be charted out according to how well-matched the problems and solutions are.

Problems can range from being no big deal (toast with the crust still on it) all the way up to indescribably awful (life/death/dismemberment/catastrophe/war).

Solutions can range from being completely useless (battery-powered light-up pepper grinder) to beautifully life-changing (cataract surgery restoring sight to the blind).

When the magnitude of the problem and the solution matches up, you're on the green line here:

If you could boil down the stuff our sincerest most human goals and aspirations are made of;

if you could condense the very essence of what parents want their children to grow up to do,

it would be that we find the perfect solutions for the hardest problems. Cure cancer! Clean up the SuperFund sites! Make Donald Trump's hair look good! Do something worthy of a Nobel Prize! Solve political corruption in Latin America! Build a better mousetrap! Move humanity forward!

It would be where the Green zone sits on this matrix:

Green is what we all dream of accomplishing in our lives: Finding an authentic answer to an enormous and profound problem. It's establishing accessible clean water in developing countries. It's implementing the affordable effective vaccine that eradicated smallpox worldwide. It's the innovatively-engineered retrofits that brought Apollo 13 home.

At the other end of that line where problems and solutions are well-matched, you've got ineffective solutions to problems that aren't really problems. It's the Yellow zone of the graph.

Yellow is a place for all those life hacks on Facebook. They don't actually work but it doesn't matter because the problem wasn't that big of a deal anyway. Solutions...or not... for problems... or not... doesn't really matter, doesn't really stir up a heated debate, doesn't inspire brilliant efforts. Meh?...or not.

But what happens when a brilliant mind pours blood, sweat, tears, time, and mental energy into finding the perfect solution to a tiny problem? A problem that wasn't really worth spending so much brain power on?  That's the Blue zone on the graph:

Blue is late night infomercial products and virtually everything in the now-defunct SkyMall catalogues -- great solutions to problems that never actually bothered you all that much.  Blue is 6 misspent years doing ingenious work to get a hard-earned PhD on a pointless topic, making a substantial contribution to a field no one cares about, then going on to work at Starbucks. Blue is where brilliance is wasted.

What if the effort going toward the Blue zone could be reallocated? What if all that phenomenal cosmic effort were pointed toward phenomenal cosmic problems?
The place where we have staggering, seemingly-insurmountable problems and woefully inadequate solutions is the Red zone on the matrix:

Red is traumatic optic neuropathy and CPR in space and cold fusion and the Syrian refugee crisis and trying to raise good children in a rough world. Crushingly difficult issues with no good answer, no matter how much we wish we had a good answer. It's a churning, struggling, unsatisfying, painful place. The Red zone is full of things worth arguing about and problems worth grappling with.

I'd hazard a guess that everything that has ever arrived to the Green zone was in the Red zone first.
That means that frustration and controversy are only bad things if we sit around angrily-but-ineffectually stewing about them, rather than actively pushing them along the pathway toward the Green zone.

So there it is. Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue.
What are you spending your life on right now?

Is doing nothing doing something?

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a former astronaut about his experiences flying 3 shuttle missions. He mentioned that each mission has a crew member trained as the medic for the trip, which led to a conversation about the supplies they carried and the emergencies they trained for. Ultimately, he wound up talking about their protocol for doing CPR in zero gravity. The problem with trying to do CPR chest compressions inside a space shuttle in zero gravity is that anytime you push against something Newton's Laws still apply, so rather than generating a good compression you just drift away. 

How did NASA solve that problem?

No.  Actually, the solution was not Catstronaut.

NASA's solution: In the moment when a vital crew member is dying from a cardiac event and there isn't a minute to lose, the protocol calls for taking about an hour to set up a securely-braced platform to attach the crew members to, so that CPR chest compressions can be performed effectively. They all knew that by the time the system was set up it would be too late for CPR anyway.  They all knew it was a completely inadequate solution to a terrible situation, but they trained for it anyway because there was no other/better answer, and simply doing nothing seems wrong.

On a somehow-related note, I'm giving a presentation at work soon about treatments for Traumatic Optic Neuropathy, which is vision loss caused by injury to the optic nerve.  It's a controversial subject because all of the treatment options have major risks, and none of them are proven to work.  Picture a person who has just been blinded by nerve trauma and all we want is to make it better, but we have no reliably-proven way to do so, and the harder we try for a benefit the more risk it is to the patient.  ...But yet again, simply doing nothing seems wrong.

And yet again, shockingly,
somehow the solution is not Catstronaut.

Is it more frustrating to have a lousy answer or to have no answer at all? Imagine if instead of describing a detailed protocol (albeit one that won't work), what if that page in the manual just said "We're very sorry. There's no way to fix this one." 

Would that be better or worse?