The Procrastinators

Last week, we featured five perspectives on procrastination, from the philosophical to the scientific to the comedic. Today, we’re back with more.

The Procrastinators is a fantastic project by Dutch director and artist duo Lernert & Sander, consisting of eleven short films commisoned by limboland.tv, each featuring a monologue by an artist, writer or filmmaker ruminating about “concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting time.”

A beautifully minimalist set of objects representing the speaker’s unique brand of procrastination serves as a backdrop for the narrative.

The remaining episodes of the series will premiere on limboland.tv over the coming weeks.

via Reaction!

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60-Second Lectures: A Tapas Bar of Academic Insight

Consciousness, the unknown and why your childhood aversion to math is finally validated.

Last week, we featured BBC’s 60-Second Ideas to Improve the World podcast and it reminded us of a fantastic project from the University of Pennsylvania, our alma mater, called The 60-Second Lectures. Every semester for the past four years, the university has been inviting leading faculty to share their ideas on topics as far-ranging as poetry, pottery and political science in one-minute microlectures.

From obvious but necessary reality checks to aha!-inducing , the lectures offer a tapas bar of academia’s most compelling cultural insight. Today, we’re inviting you to sample them with five of our favorites.

PETER STRUCK ON THE UNKNOWN

Hope, fear, hubris and humility, after all, are aftereffects of the unknown. And if I need to face fear in order to make hope possible, I’ll take that bargain any day. In short: Give me ignorance, please, let me not know!”

TUKUFU ZUBERI ON CONFLICT

We have killed each other because of differences of religion, race, class, geography, wealth, education, to mention a few of the more contemporary justifications. These justifications are all based on ideas that we create.”

DENNIS DETRUCK: DOWN WITH FRACTIONS

I have a simple suggestion when it comes to teaching fractions in elementary school: Don’t. Imposing the study of fractions on kids does much more harm than good by replacing confidence and understanding with confusion and memorization.”

GINO SERGE ON WRITING NONFICTION

The important thing about writing a nonfiction book is you have to choose your story carefully and make sure it has good characters in it because you’re going to be spending a couple of years, at least, with these characters — and you better like them, you better be interested in them. Otherwise, it’s really a drag.”

SUSAN SCHNEIDER ON CONSCIOUSNESS

An explanation of consciousness cannot literally be that there’s a mind’s eye in the brain watching the show. And there’s no evidence that there’s a singular time or place in the brain where consciousness congeals — thoughts seem highly distributed throughout the cortex. So what, and when, and where is consciousness? And, for that matter, why are we conscious at all?”

(While we’re big proponents of asking the right questions, if you, like us, were a little disappointed that Schneider didn’t actually define consciousness, we have you covered with three people who did — see our recent troika on what it means to be human.)

For more micro-interestingness, explore the 60-second lecture archives or sample some more recent talks on YouTube.

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Fifty People, One Question

What world peace has to do with zombie fever and waking up in your own bed.

This past weekend, Vimeo announced the finalists in the first-ever Vimeo Awards for creativity and innovation in online video. While many of our favorites from the past few years made the cut, today we’re looking at one particularly wonderful project: Fifty People One Question.

The brainchild of filmmaker and designer duo Benjamin Reece and Nathan Heleine, the project is based on a simple premise that yields surprisingly rich results: Asking people one question and filming their response.

The project consists of four films, the first of which was shot in New Orleans and conceived by Reece, who later partnered with Heleine to produce the remaining three.

It’s amazing, in a deeply sad kind of way, how self-conscious and timid people become as they communicate a genuine wish for “world peace,” fully aware of the contrived fluff-status the phrase has attained. How disheartening to think that we’ve built ourselves a culture where the prospect of world peace is met with more cynicism than optimism and relayed with more self-derision than bold advocacy.

Filmed in 2008, the project is both brilliantly timeless in its honest humanity and curiously timestamped by the cultural fads and patterns of the day, from the bugeye sunglasses to the dawn of the zombie craze to the common concerns about joblessness at the peak of the economic meltdown.

Where would you like to wake up tomorrow?

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