The view from the ferry this week as I headed into Vancouver.
This weeks notes and noticing:
- July 14, 2025: transform: transforming conflict, dialogue and community
- July 15, 2025: people doing things they are good at: handy apps, polymaths and women’s football
- July 16, 2025: seeing the treasure: local placemaking and the Golden Ratio
- July 17, 2025: I’m in awe..: complexity, constraints, governance and amazing medical science
- July 18, 2025: the threat to beauty: AI, and the threat and promise of true creativity.
Let your curiosity carry you. And if you are a blogger sharing links and little notes like this, the part of me that chases rabbit holes would like to add you to my blogroll.
A pox on the houses of those who monetize the elimination of creativity. We are increasingly living in the simulacrum of a world of human creativity and beauty. Rick Beato has been on this train for a while now but this video today makes the point that we’re all vulnerable to being sucked down the hole of a culture of barely adequate wall paper. Our sense of taste and appreciation for art has been undermined my whole life in favour of commercialized slop. The end game is upon us.
And an antidote to that: because it doesn’t mean that artists have lost the impulse to create and craft their voices. For example, there is a stunningly beautiful show on at the. Owen Island Art Gallery – The Hearth – with two of my favourite Bowen artists, Di and Guthrie Gloag. Get on the ferry and come over here and see it. It needs to be experienced in person and appreciated with lingering reflection. As does all the best art. Just go to a local gallery and linger in front of a painting. Go to a play with actual local actors. The next time you see a busker stop and listen to them. Go hear live music played by people who play instruments. Buy a book of poetry or a novel. These acts sound obvious but reflect on the last time you did them. When did you actually share space with an artist who is creating? Or held in your hands the fruits of their work?
Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
I love acts of local placemaking. Today, I caught up with a neighbour and asked how her daughter was doing. Here daughter, Tessa Goldie, a designer and animator, has a fun little line of T-shirts poking fun at some of the recent events of human/nature encounter on our little island: Bedtime Stories of Bowen Island. We are well endowed with local talents that do this sort of thing on Bowen, like Ron Woodall, who was a famous marketing executive in Vancouver before retiring to Bowen and becoming our local newspaper cartoonist. Every week we are treated to New Yorker level cartoons from this fella, and if you are a bit of a local, it’s likely that he’s done a portrait of you at some point, which he will religiously post on your birthday on our local Facebook page, with no comments. Mine is posted above. This kind of local placemaking serves as a beautiful reinforcing feedback loop of belonging.
There is something like the hunt for a deity in the way humans search for that one perfect thing in nature and seem to find it in a misapprehension of sceince. I’m no scientist, but I have long admired the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. For mathematicians though, it must be frustrating to see people take work you know is clearly bounded and generally apply it to wildly inappropriate contexts.
Perhaps the deity is already here, and the prayers are tiny whispered pleas for approval.
I sometimes joke that Vancouver has a form of sculpture that is “the unused memorial bench” placed along the sea wall. Unused because everyone always seems to be moving on that iconic path on foot or bike or scooter or still the occasional roller blades. Still, they make great places to sit and rest and read a book with a view. Thanks to a link from Peter Rukavina you can now find or map the ones near you.
More than a musician, Brian Eno is interested in a million other things including cybernetics. This is a tasty set of links to dive into. Here’s an article on how Eno discovered the field and harnessed it to work with what we would now call enabling constraints to feed his creativity.
If you haven’t already checked out the Northern Super League, Canada’s professional women’s soccer league, now is the time. The season is in full flow, and has exceeded expectations in terms of quality and interest. The summer transfer window is opening soon and lots of moves stand to be made. My friend AC Lang is one of the top observers of this league. Sign on to her newsletter.