eminent human

This is a guest essay by Timothy Chutes, and the third in a series of essays on Art, Science, and Technology. Read the first and the second.

This is a guest post by Ryan Hogan, a Nashville visual artist. This is part of a week-long series on Art, Science, and Technology. Read the first post here, and the third post here.

Joseph Kittinger is our new hero, even though this event took place about 5 decades ago. He holds the world record for the highest skydive in history, and he also holds the record for the fastest a human has ever traveled without propulsion. In August of 1960, he rode a ballon into the outer atmosphere, approximately 102,800 ft above sea level, where the atmosphere is so thin it almost isn't even there. The bitterly cold temperatures he endured were unimaginable, getting as low as -90° F.

Josiah just posted some of the details about how he and I booked a 16-stop, around the world trip, for about $400. The trip is booked for May of next year, and lasts about a month.

A lot of people would focus on the monetary aspect of this, how we were able to work the system to get cheap flights and so forth. But a bigger point for us was that this trip would not focus on Europe, but on some of the more interesting, less first-world-centric parts of the planet.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Awesome. Via @patrickrhone.

Watch this. People catch baseballs from midair, go polar diving, plummet off tall things, and perform amazing feats of skill. The music's not bad either.

I am a complex individual. We are all complex individuals.

For the past few months, I've been writing in the shadows, trying to figure out how to do justice to my thoughts and thought-processes, without traumatizing anyone. My primary tool for this has been my email list, which I started for the express purpose of putting out into the world my bizarre and unfitting thoughts. And I've let my websites lie untouched.

It crystallized when I read this article about a talk by John Mayer: John Mayer at Berklee.

In it he talks about becoming big on twitter, and why he eventually quit it entirely.

Maybe I think he's right because I resonate so deeply with the rest of what he says. Or maybe because I've noticed myself that his experience is true.

I believe that what is needed is to meet the unfelt needs, the sensed desires that have no name. When something comes forward to meet those needs, it springs large and wide, and reshapes the world. Forming a business or being a rock star is about finding the right needs to fill, the ones that you are uniquely able to answer to, the ones you are uniquely equipped to address. It's not enough to be really good at what you do; if you're not meeting someone's needs, they will have little use for your contribution.

My head is full of several thoughts I've been trying to write about for quite a while. The ideas are so entangled, so wrapped up in each other, I don't know how to separate them, I don't even know which ones are which. And so I'm just going to write.

I think there's something really important in the distinction between living "contingently" and living "non-contingently". Most people, I think, live contingent lives, focusing on making decisions on the basis of guesses and probability.