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2009-02-01T10:07:00.000+07:00

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2008-12-02T19:52:00.003+07:00

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What Kind of Genius Are You?

2008-12-02T19:36:00.002+07:00

www.wired.com :

By Daniel H. Pink
A new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types – quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet.

In the fall of 1972, when David Galenson was a senior economics major at Harvard, he took what he describes as a “gut” course in 17th-century Dutch art. On the first day of class, the professor displayed a stunning image of a Renaissance Madonna and child. “Pablo Picasso did this copy of a Raphael drawing when he was 17 years old,” the professor told the students. “What have you people done lately?” It’s a question we all ask ourselves. What have we done lately? It rattles us each birthday. It surfaces whenever an upstart twentysomething pens a game-changing novel or a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur becomes a billionaire. The question nagged at Galenson for years. In graduate school, he watched brash colleagues write dissertations that earned them quick acclaim and instant tenure, while he sat in the library meticulously tabulating 17th- and 18th-century indentured-servitude records. He eventually found a spot on the University of Chicago’s Nobelist-studded economics faculty, but not as a big-name theorist. He was a colonial economic historian – a utility infielder on a team of Hall of Famers.

Now, however, Galenson might have done something at last, something that could provide hope for legions of late bloomers everywhere. Beavering away in his sunny second-floor office on campus, he has scoured the records of art auctions, counted entries in poetry anthologies, tallied images in art history textbooks – and then sliced and diced the numbers with his econometric ginsu knife. Applying the fiercely analytic, quantitative tools of modern economics, he has reverse engineered ingenuity to reveal the source code of the creative mind.

What he has found is that genius – whether in art or architecture or even business – is not the sole province of 17-year-old Picassos and 22-year-old Andreessens. Instead, it comes in two very different forms, embodied by two very different types of people. “Conceptual innovators,” as Galenson calls them, make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines. They do their breakthrough work when they are young. Think Edvard Munch, Herman Melville, and Orson Welles. They make the rest of us feel like also-rans. Then there’s a second character type, someone who’s just as significant but trudging by comparison. Galenson calls this group “experimental innovators.” Geniuses like Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock proceed by a lifetime of trial and error and thus do their important work much later in their careers. Galenson maintains that this duality – conceptualists are from Mars, experimentalists are from Venus – is the core of the creative process. And it applies to virtually every field of intellectual endeavor, from painters and poets to economists.

After a decade of number crunching, Galenson, at the not-so-tender age of 55, has fashioned something audacious and controversial: a unified field theory of creativity. Not bad for a middle-aged guy. What have you done lately?

Galenson’s quest to unlock the secret of innovation began almost by accident. In the spring of 1997, he decided to buy a painting, a small gouache by the American artist Sol LeWitt. But before he put down his money, he called a friend in the art world, who told him that the price was too high. We’re selling that size for less, she said.

“I thought, this is like carpet,” Galenson tells me one afternoon in his office. Size determines price? His friend hadn’t even seen the painting. What about when the piece was created, what stage it represented in the artist’s career? His friend said that didn’t matter. “I thought, it has to matter.”

Galenson was right, of course. Art isn’t carpet. And age does matter. The relationship between age and other economic variables was at the foundation of Galenson’s academic work. His first book examined the relationship of age to productivity among indentured servants in colonial America. His second book looked at the relationship of age to the price of slaves. “It was the same regression,” Galenson says, still amazed years after the discovery. “A hedonic wage regression!”

So he bought the painting and set out to answer questions about art the way any LeWitt-loving economist would.

Galenson collected data, ran the numbers, and drew conclusions. He selected 42 contemporary American artists and researched the auction prices for their works. Then, controlling for size, materials, and other variables, he plotted the relationship between each artist’s age and the value of his or her paintings. On the vertical axis, he put the price each painting fetched at auction; on the horizontal axis, he noted the age at which the artist created the work. When he tacked all 42 charts to his office wall, he saw two distinct shapes.

For some artists, the curve hit an early peak followed by a gradual decline. People in this group created their most valuable works in their youth – Andy Warhol at 33, Frank Stella at 24, Jasper Johns at 27. Nothing they made later ever reached those prices. For others, the curve was more of a steady rise with a peak near the end. Artists in this group produced their most valuable pieces later in their careers – Willem de Kooning at 43, Mark Rothko at 54, Robert Motherwell at 72. But their early work wasn’t worth much.

Galenson decided to test the robustness of his conclusions about artists’ life cycles by looking at variables other than price. Art history textbooks presumably reflect the consensus among scholars about which works are important. So he and his research assistants gathered up textbooks and began tabulating the illustrations as a way of inferring importance. (The methodology is analogous to Google’s PageRank system: The more books that “linked” to a particular piece of art, the more important it was assumed to be.)

When Galenson’s team correlated the frequency of an image with the age at which the artist created it, the same two contrasting graphs reappeared. Some artists were represented by dozens of pieces created in their twenties and thirties but relatively few thereafter. For other artists, the reverse was true.

Galenson, a classic library rat, began reading biographies of the artists and accounts by art critics to add some qualitative meat to these quantitative bones. And then the theory came alive. These two patterns represented two types of artists – indeed, two types of humans.

The insight was so powerful that Galenson soon turned his full attention to the subject. He elaborated his theory in 24 additional papers and set down his findings in a pair of books, Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, published in 2001, and Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, published earlier this year.

Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne are the archetypes of the Galensonian universe. Picasso was a conceptual innovator. He broke with the past to invent a revolutionary style, Cubism, that jolted art in a new direction. His Demoiselles d’Avignon, regarded by critics as the most important painting of the past 100 years, appears in more art history textbooks than any other 20th-century piece. Picasso completed Demoiselles when he was 26. He lived into his nineties and produced many other well-known works, of course, but Galenson’s analysis shows that of all the Picassos that appear in textbooks, nearly 40 percent are those he completed before he turned 30.

Cézanne was an experimental innovator. He progressed in fits and starts. Working endlessly to perfect his technique, he moved slowly toward a goal that he never fully understood. As a result, he bloomed late. The highest-priced Cézannes are paintings he made in the year he died, at age 67. Cézanne is well represented in art history textbooks; he’s the third-most-illustrated French artist of the 20th century. But of all his reproduced images, just 2 percent are from his twenties. Sixty percent were completed after he turned 50, and he painted more than one-third during his sixties.

Picasso and Cézanne represent radically different approaches to creation. Picasso thought through his works carefully before he put brush to paper. Like most conceptualists, he figured out in advance what he was trying to create. The underlying idea was what mattered; the rest was mere execution. The hallmark of conceptualists is certainty. They know what they want. And they know when they’ve created it. Cézanne was different. He rarely preconceived a work. He figured out what he was painting by actually painting it. “Picasso signed virtually everything he ever did immediately,” Galenson says. “Cézanne signed less than 10 percent.”

Experimentalists never know when their work is finished. As one critic wrote of Cézanne, the realization of his goal “was an asymptote toward which he was forever approaching without ever quite reaching.”

Galenson later applied his methodology to poetry. He counted the poems that appear in major anthologies and recorded the age at which the poet wrote each entry. Once again, conceptual poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath, each of whom made sudden breaks from convention and emphasized abstract ideas over visual observations, were early achievers. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at 23 and “The Wasteland” at 34. Pound published five volumes of poetry before he turned 30. On the other hand, experimental poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, whose work is grounded in concrete images and everyday language, took years to mature. For example, both Pound and Frost lived into their eighties. But by the time Pound turned 40, he had essentially exhausted his creative output. Of his anthologized poems, 85 percent are from his twenties and thirties. By comparison, Frost got a late start. He has more poems in anthologies than any other American poet, but he wrote 92 percent of them after his 40th birthday.

On and on it goes. Conceptualist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby – light on character development, heavy on symbolism – when he was 29. Experimentalist Mark Twain frobbed around with different writing styles and formats and wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at 50. Conceptualist Maya Lin redefined our notion of national monuments while still a college student; experimentalist Frank Lloyd Wright created Fallingwater when he was 70.

The theory even applies to economists. Over lunch at the University of Chicago’s faculty club, Galenson tells me the story of Paul Samuelson, one of the most renowned economists of the last century. No shrinking violet, Samuelson titled his dissertation “Foundations of Economic Analysis.” As a 25-year- old, he sought to reinvent the entire field – and later won a Nobel Prize for ideas he came up with as a grad student. Swift, deductive, certain. That’s a conceptual economist.

An experimental economist is someone like … Galenson. He progresses more quietly, more inductively, step- by-careful-step. And he often sails into the winds of indifference – from the art world, which believes that creativity is too elusive for econometric analysis, and from colleagues who can’t comprehend why he’s wasting his time with picture books. At one point, he leans over his chicken sandwich and tells me quietly and in mild horror, “I don’t have a colleague who knows a Manet from a Monet.”

Yet Galenson, whose parents were both economists, pushes on, ever approaching the asymptote. “Most people in economics do their best work before the age of 35. And I was constantly irritated that these guys were getting ahead of me,” Galenson says. “But from very early in my career, I knew I could do really good work. I didn’t know exactly how, and I didn’t know when. I just had this vague feeling that my work was going to improve.”

The most-reproduced 19th-century work in US and European art history texts is Georges Seurat’s Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The painting, completed in Paris in 1886, now hangs on the second floor of the Art Institute of Chicago. One morning in April, I visit the museum with Galenson to look at this and other masterpieces.

Walking the floors of a museum with David Galenson is a treat. He is astonishingly well informed about art. For nearly every painting I point to, he accurately pinpoints the year it was made, tells me its backstory, and describes something my pedestrian eyes haven’t noticed. He is an erudite, insightful guide who keeps things entertaining with salty asides. “Monet had a lot of balls,” he explains in one gallery. “Renoir was a very peculiar guy,” he says later. Several times during our four-hour journey through the museum, tourists and schoolteachers sidle up to eavesdrop on his commentary.

Galenson threads his small frame through the swarm of visitors gathered in front of La Grande Jatte, considers it for a moment, and then launches into an explanation of why this artist was the quintessential conceptual innovator. “Seurat starts off at the official academy,” Galenson says. “He goes and finds the Impressionists, and he works with them. But he’s a very nerdy guy. He’s sort of a proto-scientist, and he wants to be systematic.” Seurat knew about recent discoveries on optical perception – including that people perceive a hue more vividly when it’s paired with its opposite on the color wheel. So he broke from the Impressionists to study the science. He made dozens of preparatory studies for the painting, then executed it with scientific precision.

As Galenson explains, “This guy comes along and says, ‘Look, Impressionism has been all the rage. But these guys are unsystematic, they’re casual. I’m going to make a scientific, progressive art. And this is going to be the prototype of the new art. In the future, everyone will paint scientifically.’” Seurat was 25. “This is his dissertation, basically. This is like ‘Foundations of Economic Analysis,’” Galenson tells me. “It’s like Samuelson saying, ‘I’m going to unite all of economics.’ Seurat is saying, ‘We’re discovering the underlying principles of representation.’ One of them is the systematic use of color. And this is the masterpiece.” La Grande Jatte changed the practice of nearly every painter of its time.

Alas, this is the only painting for which Seurat is remembered – in part, because he died five years after completing it. But that would be the case even had he lived far longer, Galenson maintains. “He did the most important work of his generation; he couldn’t have done it again. There’s no law you can’t do it again. But once you’ve written Gatsby, it’s very unlikely you’re going to outdo it.” (Indeed, Fitzgerald went on to write two more novels, one published posthumously, but neither approached the importance of The Great Gatsby.)

We meander through the museum and stop awhile in Gallery 238, which includes two paintings by Jackson Pollock. Galenson gestures toward the first, The Key, done in 1946, when Pollock was 34 years old. It looks like a child’s drawing – thick lines, crayony colors, underwhelming. “Pollock was a really bad artist at this point,” Galenson says.

Nearby is another Pollock, Greyed Rainbow, a large and explosive work done in 1953. It’s spectacular. Pollock was an experimental innovator who spent two decades tinkering, and this painting is a triumph of that process. To paint it, he laid the canvas on the floor, splattered it with paint, walked around it, tacked it to the wall, looked at it, put it back on the ground, splattered it with more paint, and so on. “This painting is full of innovations,” Galenson says, “but Pollock arrived here by trial and error. He was a slow developer.”

“Take a few steps back,” Galenson directs me. “If you were to describe this to somebody and see the jagged edges, you might say this is a really agitated painting. If you had this in your house, would it make you nervous?”

No, I answer.

“No. It’s perfectly resolved. This is a great visual artist making a great work,” Galenson says. “He didn’t start this way.”

We walk back to The Key. “Look at this thing,” Galenson says. “It’s a piece of crap. If that weren’t by a famous artist, it wouldn’t be here.”

“Seurat died at 31,” Galenson reminds me. “If Pollock had died at 31, you never would have heard of him.”

Galenson’s theory of artistic life cycles is hardly bulletproof. Picasso, the marquee youthful innovator, painted his incomparable condemnation of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, at the creaky age of 56. Is that somehow an exception? Sylvia Plath, a prolific conceptualist poet, did extraordinary work in her twenties but committed suicide in her early thirties. Couldn’t she have continued innovating if she’d lived? Philip Roth won a National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus in his twenties and a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in his sixties. Where does he belong?

Galenson recognizes the limits of dogmatic duality. In his later papers, as well as in the book he published this year, he has refined his theory to make it less binary. He now talks of a continuum – with extreme conceptual innovators at one end, extreme experimental innovators at the other, and moderates in the middle. He allows that people can change camps over the course of a career, but he thinks it’s difficult. And he acknowledges that he’s charting tendencies, not fixed laws.

Just because a theory isn’t perfect, though, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. What Galenson has done – and what might deliver the recognition that bypassed him in his youth – is to identify two significant gaps in our understanding of the world and of ourselves.

The first gap exists within his own field. Galenson mentions that his professional colleagues scratch their heads over his research. “It doesn’t fit immediately into what economists do,” he tells me. “The word creativity won’t appear in the index of an economics textbook.” Then, ever the empiricist, he rises from his chair, grabs a textbook off a shelf, and shows me the lacuna in the end pages.

That’s a serious omission. Although Galenson has limited his analysis mostly to artists, he believes the pattern he’s uncovered also applies to science, technology, and business. Economic activity is all about creation – even more so today, as advanced economies shed routine work and gain advantage through innovation and ingenuity.

If the link between age and creative capacity applies outside the bounds of the arts, then every economic institution – universities, companies, governments – should take note. Galenson’s ideas may yield clues about how to foster fresh thinking in a wide range of organizations, industries, and disciplines. If nurturing innovators is an economic imperative, the real peculiarity isn’t that Galenson is studying creativity; it’s that other economists aren’t.

Which leads to the second gap. Consider the word genius. “Since the Renaissance, genius has been associated with virtuosos who are young.

The idea is that you’re born that way – it’s innate and it manifests itself very young,” Galenson says. But that leaves the vocabulary of human possibility incomplete. “Who’s to say that Virginia Woolf or Cézanne didn’t have an innate quality that simply had to be nourished for 40 or 50 years before it bloomed?” The world exalts the young turks – the Larrys and the Sergeys, the Picassos and the Samuelsons. And it should. We need those brash, certain, paradigm-busting youthful conceptualists. We should give them free rein to do bold work and avoid saddling them with rules and bureaucracy.

But we should also leave room for those of us who have, er, avoided peaking too early, whose most innovative days may lie ahead. Nobody would have heard of Jackson Pollock had he died at 31. But the same would be true had Pollock given up at 31. He didn’t. He kept at it. We need to look at that more halting, less certain fellow and perhaps not write him off too early, give him a chance to ride the upward curve of middle age.

Of course, not every unaccomplished 65-year-old is some undiscovered experimental innovator. This is a universal theory of creativity, not a Viagra for sagging baby boomer self-esteem. It’s no justification for laziness or procrastination or indifference. But it might bolster the resolve of the relentlessly curious, the constantly tinkering, the dedicated tortoises undaunted by the blur of the hares. Just ask David Galenson.

Conceptualists

Many geniuses peak early, creating their masterwork at a tender age ...

LITERATURE: The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Age 29

PAINTING: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Pablo Picasso
Age 26

FILMMAKING: Citizen Kane
Orson Welles
Age 26

ARCHITECTURE: The Vietnam War Memorial
Maya Lin
Age 23

MUSIC: The Marriage of Figaro
Wolfgang Mozart
Age 30

Experimentalists

... while others bloom late, doing their best work after lifelong tinkering.

LITERATURE: Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Age 50

PAINTING: Château Noir
Paul Cézanne
Age 64

FILMMAKING: Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock
Age 59

ARCHITECTURE: Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright
Age 70

MUSIC: Symphony No. 9
Ludwig van Beethoven
Age 54

Can everyone be an Einstein?

2008-12-02T12:39:00.003+07:00

The Sunday Times:

Science is getting ever closer to solving the complex puzzle that is the human brain. And it’s beginning to look as if there’s genius in all of us.

Time to buff up your brain, to send your synapses to the spa. How about a couple of hours of sudoku? No? Well, fire up your Nintendo DS and pump up your neurons with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training games — “Keep your brain sharp and in shape.” Nicole Kidman says she does it and she’s always right about everything. Or go on the net and test your brain out at brainmetrix.com before going for a real synapse sauna at braingle.com. Stave off senility by signing up at happy-neuron.com, massage the grey matter between your ears by joining lumosity.com (the “fast, fun and effective way to take care of your brain”), or go to sharpbrains.com to get “high-quality, research-based information and guidance to navigate the brain-training and cognitive-fitness market.” Or, better still, read a good book.

“There’s no empirical evidence that these games produce improvements,” says Nancy Andreasen, one of the world’s most distinguished neuroscientists and author of The Creative Brain. “Saying you spend half an hour a day playing sudoku and you won’t get Alzheimer’s, or playing any of these brain games and you’ll lose less grey matter than somebody who doesn’t — well, nobody has ever done that study.”

“These games definitely work because you get better at playing them,” says Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The big question is: do these skills generalise to normal everyday thoughts? That hasn’t been studied.”

But don’t despair: Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, may be able to help. She has devised a brain-training game that actually works. It’s a strange, complex game involving sequences of squares on a computer screen, and it definitely improves “fluid intelligence” — the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, “the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge”.

And there is some evidence that the games in MindFit (mindweavers.com) do work. Baroness (Susan) Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, says it does. Short-term memory and basic reaction time are said to be improved by 20 minutes’ play three times a week.

The brain is not, as the brain trainers like to say, a muscle. It is a 1.3-kilogram crème caramel-like mix of fat, water and proteins driven by electricity and chemicals called neurotransmitters. As far as we know, it is, unless it belongs to Kerry Katona, the most complex thing in the universe. It’s made to last, at best, about 100 years. It shrinks and deteriorates with age. By the time you’re 30 you’re probably past your intellectual peak. This is a problem, as we’re living longer and longer, and the danger is that we’ll just get stupider and stupider.

It’s a particular problem for baby-boomers, the large, rich, spoilt generation born after the second world war. They’ve had everything, they run the world, but now they’re in their fifties and sixties. They love themselves to bits. But the selves they love are just so many crème caramels soon to pass their sell-by date. Already they can see the signs. Why did you leave your phone in the freezer? Why do you lose your glasses six times a day? These are symptoms of age-associated memory impairment (AAMI). It happens to everybody, but the boomers didn’t think it would happen to them. If brain- enhancing tactics are suddenly fashionable, it’s because of boomer self-love.

Perhaps, in desperation, they’ll take supplements said to improve brain function — co-enzyme Q10, ginseng, bacopa. Or perhaps they’ll look on the bright side: the brain, though unquestionably mortal, is surprisingly resilient. We’ve known this since 4.30pm on September 13, 1848. It was at that moment than an iron rod an inch-and-a-quarter thick and 3ft 8in long was blasted through the head of an American railroad worker called Phineas P Gage. Large parts of his brain were destroyed, but his recovery was almost complete. Much about this story is controversial. But what is clear is that it inspired all subsequent investigations of the brain, from surgery to neuroscience. Gage’s survival, more or less intact, also shows the brain’s staggering ability to work around problems.

There’s one more bright spot. If we work the brain, we can grow new brain cells.

“There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects,” says Dr Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University. “Every time you challenge your brain, it will actually modify the brain. We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it’s impossible.”

So your brain may be rotting, but there should, in theory, be something you can do to keep it reasonably fresh. The important concept here is “brain plasticity”, the ability of the brain to change and adapt.

“We are literally remaking our brains,” writes Andreasen in The Creative Brain, “— who we are and how we think, with all our actions, reactions, perceptions, postures, and positions — every minute of the day and every day of the week and every month and year of our entire lives.”

Yet, even knowing this, there used to be precious little we could do about it, because humans are notoriously averse to having their brains taken out and examined while in use. The electroencephalograph (EEG) — a way of observing brain activity via electrodes on the skull — was of some use. But it was not until the early 1990s, with the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), that we found we could watch the brain actually working. If MRI delivers half of what many people expect it to deliver, these could turn out to be the most revolutionary machines in human history.

These are, be warned, very early days, so any extravagant claims about ways of improving your brain on the basis of evidence from MRI machines are likely to be snake oil.

“There is this over-complicated thing we barely understand,” says Professor Lawrence Parsons at Sheffield University, “because we’re only at the beginning; we’re still looking at the circuit diagrams.”

But — and these may be the most interesting findings of all — there are tentative signs that we are making some headway in discovering something about the most important human qualities of all — insight, inspiration and creativity. These are what make all of us who we are. And, from psychiatry and psychology, we may even have made a start on the understanding of genius. Over the last few years, neuroscientists and psychologists have just begun to focus on all of these most elusive, precious and human characteristics.

At 6pm on August 5, 1949, a fireman named Wag Dodge and his crew found themselves cut off by a wildfire in Mann Gulch River Valley, Montana. A wall of flame was coming towards them at 30mph. Dodge took a match out of his pocket and set fire to the grass immediately in front of him, stepped into the cleared space, covered his face and pressed himself into the ground so that he could breathe the thin layer of air beneath the smoke cloud. The fire rushed over him and he survived. The other 13 members of the crew hadn’t heard his order to do the same. They all died.

Like the story of Phineas Gage, the story of Wag Dodge has become an inspiration to neuroscientists. Why and how did he do what he did under such extreme conditions? “Wag Dodge — he’s a great one,” says Mark Jung Beeman, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois. “It was particularly interesting in such a stressful situation. He was at the point where he basically gave up. He must have had some pretty awesome frontal lobes. Normally, high stress would limit creative, flexible or insight-type thinking, but not in this case.” Beeman’s phrase “at the point where he basically gave up” is crucial. Dodge had been struggling to find a way to escape the flames for some time. When, finally, the situation seemed to be hopeless, it is thought he had a moment of relaxation, of giving up, and that moment became his eureka moment.

Most people would call it inspiration, but neuroscientists prefer the more modest title of “insight”. Beeman is one of a group trying to unravel this extremely elusive phenomenon using MRI and EEG. There are two ways of solving problems: analytic and inspirational. With analytic you just plod your way through the work, reasoning your way to the solution. But often you grind to a halt and give up — exactly what Dodge seemed to do.

Up to this point your brain has been working through a limited number of connections, all directly related to the problem at hand. When you stop, the connections loosen; new connections, new possibilities, can be formed. You may even find that some random object — a bird, a tree — somehow inspires you. Finally you reach the eureka moment, you say “Aha!” and your problem is solved.

“It’s not really inspiration,” says Earl Miller. “There’s really no such thing. It’s more like a reconfiguration of old thoughts. I know from my own experience that most of my insight comes when I’m not thinking about a problem. I work until I’m really caught in a rut, and then I take a walk or play music or drift off to sleep and the solution will occur to me.”

Or, in the more technical language of a paper by Beeman and others on the phenomenon, “Although all problem-solving relies on a largely shared cortical network, the sudden flash of insight occurs when solvers engage distinct neural and cognitive processes that allow them to see connections that previously eluded them.”

In fact, the whole process seems to be centred on one small part of the brain: the anterior superior temporal gyrus. This seems to be the point at which bits of information stored far

apart in the brain are brought together. This may be an important clue as to how the brain organises itself. But it’s only the beginning. At Goldsmiths College in London, Dr Joydeep Bhattacharya says the real issue is not the “Aha!” moment itself, but the way it is produced in the brain and how we recognise it.

“We need to know the brain processes involved, to find how this moment is strong enough to reach consciousness. We know insight does not come from the sky.”

This is the problem with all neuroscience.

We don’t really know what we are seeing

when we watch the brain work. Is it the thing itself — the thought, the flash of insight — or just an aspect of it, the bark rather than the dog? “We’re just not at the point where we can

answer these big interpretive questions,” says Lawrence Parsons at Sheffield.

Parsons himself has conducted some of the most extraordinary experiments in an attempt to track the creative pathways of the mind. He has had tango dancers in his MRI machine. Of course, they couldn’t actually tango, but he did provide a board on which they could do some of the steps. He has also worked on musical improvisation, with Jarvis Cocker, among others, stuck inside his machine. He came up with plenty of information about what parts of the brain lit up. But at this point there’s not much we can do with it. Neuroscience lacks a big theory.

“It may be 300 years before we can do things like enhance our creativity,” says Parsons with a gloomy chuckle. “Some say in 20 years we can make you smarter, but I’m a pessimist.”

There is one important link between musical improvisation and the “Aha!” moment that saved Wag Dodge’s life. Improvisation was found to be accompanied by “a dissociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex”. The prefrontal cortex is to the brain what a conductor is to an orchestra. It pulls the whole show together. In humans it is a third of the whole brain, compared with around 5% in dogs and cats. If you want to find where the thing you call “me” is located, the prefrontal cortex would be a good place to start.

The point about that “dissociated pattern” is that it echoes the loosening of connections that precedes the “Aha!” moment. Insight and creativity, perhaps even genius, do seem to be linked to a brain that can disorganise itself and freewheel, making new and unexpected connections. As Nancy Andreasen puts it, the creative act may “begin with a process during which associative links run wild, creating new connections, many of which might seem strange or implausible. The disorganised mental state may persist for many hours, while words, images and ideas collide. Eventually order emerges, and with it the creative product”.

So, with that in mind, answer this question: how many uses can you think of for a brick? Or this: what would happen if people no longer needed to sleep?

These were questions asked in psychological tests specifically designed to measure creativity. They have been attacked as far too subjective. But they do point to a crucial way of defining creativity. If you are now idly imagining dozens of uses for a brick or the novelties of a sleepless world, then you are probably a divergent thinker. If, instead, the questions make you impatient — a brick is for building walls, dammit — then you are a convergent thinker.

Divergent thinkers habitually wander around their own minds, looking for links, however absurd or surreal. Convergent thinkers look for the one correct answer. The discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 was a clear example of convergent thinking — the one correct answer was a double helix.

Meanwhile, on August 10, 1788, one of the greatest of all examples of divergent thinking came into the world. It was Mozart’s last symphony, the Jupiter, and the final movement is not an answer: it is an explosive assertion of the joy of our apparently limitless creativity. If anybody was a diverger, it was Mozart.

But, of course, creative divergers who can think of 101 uses for a brick are treading a fine line. There has always been a romantic link between madness and genius, and too much divergence can undoubtedly drive you crazy. What science we now have suggests that the link might be true. Oddly, however, high creativity has not so far been found to be linked with schizophrenia, as most people expected, but with mood disorders — notably bipolar disorder or manic depression.

The link has been made by several highly authoritative studies, both by leading American scientists. Kay Jamison, a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studied poets, playwrights, novelists, biographers and artists and found 38% had been treated for an affective illness — ie, mood disorder.

Joseph Schildkraut, a Harvard psychiatrist, studied 15 abstract-expressionist painters from the 1950s — 50% had psychiatric issues, mainly mood disorders. And Nancy Andreasen studied students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the leading school of its kind in the world. Again there was a phenomenally high percentage of mood disorders.

Andreasen admits she was looking for schizophrenia. This did not mean she expected the students to be full-blown schizophrenics — this is an illness that can destroy the sort of high-level functioning required for true creativity. But she did expect to find schizoid relatives and tendencies. But bipolarity seemed to be the primary condition of the smart young writers.

So what, you might wonder, does all this mean for you, a boomer with brain rot who sometimes leaves his phone in the freezer and his glasses God knows where? What must you do?

The short answer — and the one on which all are agreed — is: use it or lose it. The plasticity of the brain means that it is able, in the face of injury or decay, to find ways of adapting itself to preserve strong patterns of activity. So, if you play chess all the time, you probably will be almost as good at 80 as you were at 40. You would probably also be almost as good at Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training games. But so what? Read books, good books — nothing works better.

The longer answer is that there are potentially beneficial techniques suggested by our still- limited knowledge of the workings of the brain. Jaeggi’s fluid-intelligence game works, but it’s lab-based at the moment and has yet to be adapted for general use.

Nancy Andreasen offers four suggestions to which you should allocate 30 minutes a day — choose a new and unfamiliar area of knowledge and explore it in depth, spend some time meditating or just thinking, practise observing and describing things, and practise imagining. This is quite a punishing workout but it makes perfect sense and, unlike the Nintendo DS, it does seem to describe a better way of life.

Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, suggests reading out loud at breakfast, making lists of related objects (say, yellow ones, or those beginning with A), and change hands — brush your teeth with your left hand if you’re right-handed. Again, this makes perfect sense: these tricks make your brain deal with the unfamiliar as opposed to getting locked in old patterns of thought.

But there’s going to be a lot of snake oil on the market in the decades, if not centuries, before we can come up with any more solid prescriptions to save our highest creative selves from brain rot. The brain workout is already as much of a boomer must-do as the body workout. In fact, it’s clearly a lot more important. The best advice I ever heard came from a Spanish neurologist, Damaso Crespo. He said I should do 100 yards a day, not sprinting but walking. But I had to walk with a friend and talk all the time. It’s the walking, the talking and the friendship that feed the brain; the sprint just feeds dumb muscles.

In the end you die, and it seems likely that the miracle of the world inside your particular 1.3 kilograms of crème caramel dies with you. Perhaps you had insight, inspiration, perhaps you created, perhaps you were a genius.

Perhaps, one day, neuroscientists and psychologists will finish their maps and tell us how it’s all done. But will they really?

One last time and date. At 8pm on January 27, 1756, Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria. He spent most of the next 35 years giving the best ever account in music of why your life is worth living, even though his own ended in poverty, suffering and disappointment. He never had electrodes stuck to his head, nor was he slid inside an MRI machine. And, even if he had been subjected to our mind probes, what would that have told us? Probably what we knew already: that this happened just once.

So forget the Nintendo, forget everything. Listen to what the human mind can do. Brain workouts are all very well but, stripping away the science and the rhetoric, they all come down to the same simple injunction: pay attention, because you pass this way only once.

The Greatest Game Ever Played

2008-06-19T07:49:00.008+07:00

Recommended Movie!!!

Thanks to good acting, great filming and production, and an interesting plot, The Greatest Game Ever Play will quickly hook you even if you don’t really care that much for the sport of golf.

The movie, which was directed by Bill Paxton, tells the true story of Francis Quimet (Shia LaBeouf) – who goes from being a simple caddy to play in the 1913 U.S. Open against his idol British champion Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane). The film starts with Francis as a boy, and introduces us to how he fell in love with the game of golf, met his hero at an early age, and began his rise as a player. We then skip ahead to a teenage Francis who is making a name for himself as a golf player for his high school team. He is approached about playing in a tournament, but has to go to his father for the entry fee. Although his mother supports his dreams of being a golf player, Francis’ father (Elias Koteas) makes him promise to give up on his dream of golf when he loses, and Francis stays true to his world.

Meanwhile back in England, Vardon (who also grew up poor and is not accepted by the members of the golfing community clubs) is trying to prove his worth (both to himself and to the upper class society) and agrees to go to America to win the U.S. Open. This puts him on a collision course with Francis – who is also being approached to play in the tournament as an amateur.
When Francis learns of Vardon’s involvement, he agrees breaking his promise to his father (which sets up some really good family drama as a side story), and once again trying to prove he belongs as a player in the game of golf despite his working class background.

Flitter and LaBeouf work great together as Eddie Lowery and Francis Quimet

As the tournament begins, Paxton keeps the movie’s pace moving along nicely and never lets it drag too much. The director puts some good suspense in the tournament scenes and makes sure that Francis is never looking like the he is going to just breeze through the tournament. Paxton uses lots of close up angles and even CGI effects to keep the game looking exciting for those who aren’t really into golf. He also makes sure to add plenty of humor to the movie through Francis’ pint sized kid caddy Eddie Lowery (Josh Flitter).

Lowery simply steals almost every scene that involves him, and is one of the main reasons that I ended up enjoying the movie as much as I did. The young actor is funny, delivers snappy lines, and is a great opposite for LaBeouf. I can’t imagine anyone else playing this role and pulling it off as easily as Flitter did.

LaBeouf also does an excellent job in the role of Francis. The actor really helps draw the audience in through his own doubts, and we are able to understand just how outmatched he truly is by the other players – including Vardon. The actor also delivers some good emotional scenes with Koteas and the addition of the family drama is a nice side story which keeps you hooked on the movie when it does start to drag a bit. The two argue over Francis playing in the tournament, but it is clear that Koteas truly only wants what is best for his son. The ending between the two pays off for the time invested in the side story.

Dillane also does a good job in the role of Vardon – who never really seems like a villain or threat to Francis, but someone who is simply in the same boat. We are able to see how his poor childhood haunts his successful career as a golfer, and the division in society that even as champion he can’t break.

I am not a fan of golf, and have never played the game. I honestly didn’t expect to enjoy the movie, but was quickly sucked into it. The movie not only explores the game of golf and these two great players, but also the society class separation of the 1913. The story does follow some of the cliché “feel good true life” plot elements that are hallmarks of these kinds of movies, but it also throws in enough strong performances and steady directing to make you not mind the formulaic feeling.

Even as a champion, Vardon (left) can’t break into upper society

Paxton (who was excellent in the director’s chair on Frailty) does a good job as director in the film, and brings together all the little side stories (such as the father son relationship and Vardon’s ghosts) nicely without letting one take over the other. All the pieces seem to fit well, and nothing feels like it was just thrown in there just to fill time or quota.

The DVD comes loaded with special features that fans of the movie and the game of golf will enjoy. They include A View From the Gallery: On Set of The Greatest Game Ever Played; Two Legends and the Greatest Game – a featurette on Francis Quimet and Harry Vardon; From Caddy to champion: Francis Quimet – A Historical Interview from 1963; and commentary with Paxton and writer Mark Frost.

The View From the Gallery is a pretty standard look at how the movie was made, and features lots of interviews with Paxton, the actors, and the different crew involved in bringing the story to the screen. Paxton talks about how he wanted to make the game exciting with the camera work, music, and the overall look of the film.

Two Legends and the Greatest Game will appeal to golf enthusiast with a history on Vardon and Quimet. The feature goes into how Vardon rose to fame as a golf player, the different ways he dressed and swung the clubs, and the new style of golf balls he endorsed. It also discusses how Quimet honed his golfing skills as a caddy and at the age of 20 became a competitor in the U.S. Open along with his 10 year old caddy Eddie. It talks about how the two worked together in the U.S. Open and formed a lifelong friendship. This feature adds a historical perspective to an already good movie and is worth taking the time to watch.

Francis Quimet – A Historical Interview from 1963 features historic black and white footage from Fred Cusick’s interview with Quimet. Cusick gives some history on the tournament before his interview, and then discusses player’s career with an elderly Quimet – who shares some of his past success in golf tournaments and his different honors as a player. Because of the discussion of the history of the game, this is a feature that golfers will enjoy, but might fall a little flat on the regular viewer.

The father and son relationship is a nice side story to the movie

Although it is a bit formulaic at times and somewhat predictable, I would highly recommend The Greatest Game Ever Played to anyone who wants to watch a good drama that the whole family can enjoy. It has enough of the game of golf in it to keep golfers happy and enough drama to hook viewers who don’t care for the game. The movie has some great performances from its cast, steady directing from Paxton and is worth taking the time to watch.

Lobby

2008-06-17T11:20:00.001+07:00

"Lobbying" ia an attempt to influence a legislator's vote on a bill.

Lobbying has been recognized as a legal activity since the earliest day of the United States. The first Amandement to the constitution says that no law may prevent people from pettitioning or requesting the government to change things the people feel are wrong.

It is the right of the people to petition the government that has led to lobbying.

The word "lobby" has been used for almost four houndred years. The large room next to the Britist House of Commons was called a lobby. It was a public area where private citizens could meet with legislators to make requests. So, people who met in the lobby with legislators were called "lobbyists".

During the eraly years of the United States, lobbyists had a bad name. There were many cases of lobbyists buying the votes of lawmakers. Lobbyists were seen by the public as dishonest person who influenced legislation illegally for their own private gain.

In late later, Congress and the state legislatures passed laws to restrict dishonest lobbying activities. And the legislators and the public began to recognize the value of the job done by honest lobbyists.

Lobbyists and lobby groups have an active part in makin law. Lobbyists help inform Congress and the public about the problem and issues. Lobbyists provide technical information about legislative proposals. And lobbyists let law makers know whom a bill would help and whom it would hurt.

As the federal goverment has expanded, so has the member of special interest groups affected by federal policy. Thus all kinds of groups-industries, labor unions, racial groups, professional organizations, citizens groups, and representatives of foreign interest-lobby COngress. A lobbyist represents a group and tries to advance its inetersts. When the bill is proposed that affects that group. a lobbyist meet with the lawmakers to explain the group's positon.

Same experts say at least 10.000 lobbyists are in Washington during a year. There are so many lobbyists that almost every side of an issue is represent.

How about our lovely country?

Colors

2008-06-14T13:39:00.004+07:00

Many everyday expressions in English are made from colors.
We say we are "in the pink": when we are in the good health. It is easy to understand how this expression was born. When the face has a nice fresh, pink color, it's a sign my health is good. If I look pale and gray, I may need a doctor.

Red is a hotter color than pink. And Americans use it to express heat. In English, the small hot peppers found ini many Mexican foods are called "red hot." for their color and their fiery taste. We say that fast, fiery music is "red hot" especially the kind called "Dixieland Jazz".

Blue is a cooler color. The traditional blues music of American blacks is opposite of red hot music. It is slow, sad and soulful. Duke Ellington and his orchestra recorded a faamous song, Mood Indigo, about the deep blue color, indigo. In the words of the song, "You ain't been blue till you've had that Mood Indigo". To be "blue", of course, is to be sad.

While the color green is natural for trees, it is an unnatural color for humans. When someone does not feel well, someone who is seasick, for excample, we say he looks green. When someone is angry because he does not have what someone else has, we say he is "green with envy". Some people are "green with envy" becouse someone else has more dollars, or greenbacks. Dollars are called greenbacks becouse that's the color of the back side of the money.

The color black is often us in expressions. People describe a day in which everything goes wrong as a "black day". A blacklist" is illegal now, but at one time, some employers shared blacklists of people who shouls not be given work.

In same cases, colors just describe a situation. A "black out" in world war II, was when all lights were turn off to make it difficult for bomber planes to find their target at night. A "brown out" is an American expression for reduced electrical power which make elctric light dim.

American women use the Frech word for red as the name of the colored cosmetic which they some times use to brighten their cheecks. It's just called "rouge". They use in especially when they are going out for the evening, or as American say "to paint the town red".

A person's skin may become yellow as a result of diseases that attack the liver. Yellow fever is one. In the past, ships carrying yellow fever victims raised a flag called the "yellow jack".
In the United States, an activist organization of older people calls itself the "gray panthers". The name comes from the gray hair of its members and from the panther, a fierce animal of the cat family.

Mengembangkan Inovasi dan Kreativitas Berpikir

2008-06-11T20:13:00.006+07:00

Anda mungkin pernah mendengar orang berkomentar terhadap gagasan anda, "Kamu ini sangat inovatif", (tapi dengan nada menyindir!). Atau "Dana yang ada tidak memungkinkan untuk melaksanakan gagasan anda!". Mampukah pada kondisi seperti ini Anda tetap berfikir positif dan menghindari mental blok no.1 yaitu fear to failure!

M. Ahmad Abdul Jawwad dengan jelas memaparkan rambu-rambu manajemen Nabawi dalam buku ini guna mengembangkan inovasi dan kreatifitas berfikir anda. Memperlebar ruang berfikir terbuka dan bebas, adaptasi yang cepat dengan perubahan, motivasi yang berkesinambungan, serta bertindak win-win solution adalah beberapa hal yang dapat anda temui.

Setelah membaca buku ini, bersiaplah untuk menjadi orang yang anti kemapanan, selalu berusaha menjauhkan diri dari rutinitas kerja, tekun, tidak mudah menyerah, serta memiliki kepercayaan yang besar dan tidak segan berbeda dengan main stream pemikiran yang ada. dilengkapi dengan ilustrasi yang menyegarkan dan beberapa latihan praktis, buku ini sungguh akan menyengat Anda dengan "kesadaran baru" bahwa sesungguhnya potensi seseorang itu seperti arus yang deras atau sungai yang mengalir.

Mulai sekarang, "Singkap keyakinan, sumbat keraguan, singkirkan ketakutan, sambut spontanitas. Just do it! Make it happen you will be innovative and creative!".

D-Corporation :

http://mr-sauvenir.blogspot.com/
http://pusat-haji.blogspot.com/
http://jajanan-saburai.blogspot.com/

AS dan Dollar akan bangkrut...?

2008-05-24T08:47:00.003+07:00

Posting ini adalah berasal dari e_mail seorang teman (m_yusuf1708@yahoo.co.id), bagi anda yang membaca berita ini mohon disebarkan seluar-luasnya.

Berikut e_mail tersebut :

Dulu rata rata kita menduga kalau alasan Amerika berperang ke Iraq ini karena:

Amerika ingin menghancurkan Islam;
Amerika ingin melibas terorisme;
Amerika itu memang bandit;
Bush mau dendam secara pribadi kepada Saddam yang dulu gagaldihancurkan Bapaknya Bush Senior;
Ini ulahnya Yahudi [intelektual kriminal Perle & Wolfowitz yangsaat itu jadi penasehat utamanya Bush;
Ini perang buat menguasai minyaknya Iraq ...
Dan variasi variasi lainnya.

Kini terbukti semua pandangan itu tidak 100% salah tapi juga "salah"karena itu semuanya cuma masalah kecilnya saja. Semua dugaan kita Itusemuanya tidak menjelaskan alasan utamanya perang Iraq ini dari sudutpandang si Amerika sendiri.

Karena, tujuan paling utama dari perang Iraq ini adalah:

Menyelamatkan dollar dari Euro

Di mata Amerika yang dulu menghadiahkan rezim Suharto ke Indonesia, dosa Iraq yang terbesar adalah ketika Iraq [Saddam] tahun 2000 lalu minta ke PBB supaya semua minyaknya dibayar menggunakan euro; plus semua uang milik Irak [$10 bilyun] dikonversikan ke euro dari dollar.

Dulu semua orang bilang kalau itu ide Saddam ini tindakan bodoh karena euro waktu itu masih 90% dari nilai dollar dan euro pun dari sejak dikeluarkan [Januari 1999] terus menerus terdepresiasi lawan dollaryang waktu itu demand (permintaan) nya memang kuat sekali karenapenipuan akuntasi besar besaran sedang terjadi di bursa efeknya dan investor asing juga perlu dollar untuk main di bursanya. Tapi, sekarang ini euro ternyata sudah terapresiasi sebesar hampir100% dari harga sebelumnya! Berarti apa, langkah "gilanya" Saddamtahun 2000 dulu itu ternyata sangat menguntungkan dan bahkan jenius!

Langkah ini pula yang sekarang sedang dikaji oleh Iran yang cuma maumenerima transaksi minyak dengan euro dan menolak dollar. Dan di dunia ini, kartel perdagangan yang terkuat ya cuma minyak saja. Kartel mobil, atau komputer, atau produk produk lain praktis tidak eksis. Minyak siapapun harus beli minyak.Terus perhatikan lagi, anggota OPEC itu rata rata isinya adalahmusuh-musuh Amerika yang nyata nyata memang benci kepada Amerika, karena rata rata negara Islam, yang bukan Islam pun seperti Venezuela yang dipimpin sama presiden Chavez malah lebih parah lagi anti Amerikanya.

Kalau saja semua anggota kartel minyak ini memang mau "jahat" dan main"evil" terhadap Amerika, maka caranya gampang sekali: mereka cukupbilang, kita sekarang cuman mau transaksi pake euro dan selesailahdollarnya Amerika! Bangkrut serta kiamat jugalah si kapitalis Amerika ini!

Kita yang tidak punya background ekonomi mungkin bingung. Koq bisabangkrut ?Orang yang bisa hitung hitungan ekonomi bisa menjelaskan begini, Kalaukita punya uang tunai $1, di tangan, maka secara ekonomi itu artinyaadalah Anda memberi hutang ke Bank Federalnya Amerika dan BankFederalnya Amerika itu "berjanji" akan membayar hutangnya sebesar $1 itu! .

Sekarang, karena kita tinggal di Indonesia yang rupiahnya sangat parahitu; maka jelas secara rasional kita berusaha terus memegang $1 ditangan itu dari pada ditukar ke rupiah. Bukan begitu! Jadi, secara ekonomi itu artinya Bank Federal Amerika tidak perlumenebus hutangnya karena hutangnya yang $1 itu tidak kita minta untukdibayar. Artinya: Amerika itu bisa berhutang tanpa perlu bayar sama sekali (sepanjang ekonominya memang masih kuat !) sepanjang greenback atau dollar itu masih jadi standard pengganti emas.

Dengan alasan inilah makanya Amerika itu berani main defisit gilagilaan selama ini karena toh mereka MEMANG tidak perlu membayardefisitnya sebab orang sedunialah yang harus membayar defisitnyaAmerika itu !

Supaya jelas mari kita lihat rupiah; kalau budget RI itu defisit maka negara Republik Indonesia ini harus nombok dengan cara menjual barang (eksport) atau mencari utangan (CGI). Jadi, defisitnya negara seperti Indonesia yang gemah ripah loh jinawi ini betul-betul adalah "defisit" yang harus dibayar, yang kalau tidak bisa bayar ya seperti yang kitaalami pada tahun 1997 yang sampai sekarang juga belum pulih yaituKRISMON! Tapi Amerika lain! Defisit buat Amerika berarti justru malah positifkarena defisit Amerika itu cara bayarnya adalah dengan cara memotongnilai $1 yang kita pegang itu secara intristik. Berarti . . kalau Amerika defisit maka yang rugi adalah kita orang non-Amerika yang pegang dollar!

Cara kerja sistem ekonomi kapitalis yang imperialistik ini berlakusepanjang orang seperti kita dan negara Republik Indonesia itu masih "percaya" dengan dollar dan menyimpan cadangan devisanya dalam bentuk dollar!
Eropa tahu persis tentang strategi makan gratis dan utang tidak perlubayar ini. Karena itulah Eropa sekarang punya euro. Tujuannya Euro sebetulnya ya cuma satu itu: ikut menikmati utang gratisan dari orang-orang seperti kita tadi.
Dan saudara-saudara sekalian yang paling mengerikan buat amerika yang diambang kiamat itu apa? Itu adalah kenyataan bahwa 80% US $ itu ada diluar negeri ya ditangan negara-negara seperti Indonesia ini, Cina, Jepang , India dan negara negara asia lainnya.
Apa arti situasi begini bagi AMERIKA ? Ya seperti saya tadi bilang..., KALAU mendadak saja semua negara penghasil minyak bilang " sekarang kita transaksi cuman pake euro"! Dan ini mungkin sekali terjadi karena semua negara perlu beli minyak! Sehingga tekanan dari negara penghasil minyak itu bakal membuat negara-negara seperti Cina atau Jepang menjual dollarnya dan beli euro.

Semuanya HEGEMONI Amerika dalam sekejap akan berantakan dan ini artinya apa ?...KIAMAT

Sebab kalau ini terjadi ini artinya sama saja dengan semua negaranegarapemegang US $ itu bilang...Amerika sekarang kamu harus bayar utang! Dan tentu saja: kalau dalam sekejap Amerika pun harus membayar hutangnya dan mendongkrak Euro tadi, dalam sekejap pula ekonomi Amerika bangkrut berantakan persis seperti waktu bank dalam negeri di rush nasabahnya jaman krismon dulu. Dan lebih mengerikan lagi, ekonomi Amerika pun bisa dalam sedetik bakal inflasi ribuan persen (karena semua orang menjual dollar dan membeli euro), perusahaan Amerika menjadi tidak ada harganya (persis seperti krismondi Indonesia tahun 1998 dulu) dan ajaibnya lagi orang Amerika pun tiba-tiba jadi persis sama dengan orang-orang miskin dari Afrika sana karena mendadak saja semua kekayaan mereka itu cuma kertas tidak ada harganya. Dan lebih sial lagi..., dengan bangkrutnya dollar praktis cuma Amerika bakal bangkrut sendirian, negara negara lain tidak ikut bangkrut karena ada Euro yang bisa menjadi penyelamatnya !

Bila anda menentang invasi AS ke iraq, dan anda belum bisa ikut terjun perang membela rakyat Iraq, atau anda belum punya cukup donasiuntuk membantu rakyat iraq, cukup anda segera lepas simpanan US $ anda atau ditukar dengan Euro, atau anda sebarkan pesan ini seluas luasnya !!

Doa Bapakku

2008-05-23T20:09:00.004+07:00

Kemarin Bapak Andrie Wongso "The Best Motivator atau Motivator No. 1 Indonesia", hadir pada Rapat Kerja diKantor. Suatu kebahagiaan tersendiri bagiku betemu dengannya. Ia memberikan motivasi kepada kami semua khusus bagi saya ini sungguh luar biasa, ia menceritakan perjalanan hidupnya dari seorang anak dari keluarga miskin di kota Malang sehingga menjadi The Best Motivator atau Motivator No. 1 Indonesia.

Salah satu slide yang beliau sampaikan terdapat puisi pada masa Perang Dunia Kedua, yang ditulis seorang jenderal kenamaan, Douglas Mac Arthur yang berjudul “Doa untuk Putraku”. Inilah isi puisi tersebut:

Doa untuk Putraku

Tuhanku...

Bentuklah putraku menjadi manusia yang cukup kuat untuk mengetahui kelemahannya. Dan, berani menghadapi dirinya sendiri saat dalam ketakutan

Manusia yang bangga dan tabah dalam kekalahan

Tetap Jujur dan rendah hati dalam kemenangan

Bentuklah putraku menjadi manusia yang berhasrat mewujudkan cita-citanya dan tidak hanya tenggelam dalam angan-angannya saja

Seorang putra yang sadar bahwa mengenal Engkau dan dirinya sendiri adalah landasan segala ilmu pengetahuan

Tuhanku...

Aku mohon, janganlah pimpin putraku di jalan yang mudah dan lunak. Namun, tuntunlah dia di jalan yang penuh hambatan dan godaan, kesulitan dan tantangan

Biarkan putraku belajar untuk tetap berdiri di tengah badai dan senantiasa belajar untuk mengasihi mereka yang tidak berdaya

Ajarilah dia berhati tulus dan bercita-cita tinggi, sanggup memimpin dirinya sendiri, sebelum mempunyai kesempatan untuk memimpin orang lain

Berikanlah hamba seorang putra yang mengerti makna tawa ceria tanpa melupakan makna tangis duka

Putra yang berhasrat untuk menggapai masa depan yang cerah

namun tak pernah melupakan masa lampau

Dan, setelah semua menjadi miliknya...

Berikan dia cukup rasa humor sehingga ia dapat bersikap sungguh-sungguh namun tetap mampu menikmati hidupnya

Tuhanku...

Berilah ia kerendahan hati...

Agar ia ingat akan kesederhanaan dan keagungan yang hakiki...

Pada sumber kearifan, kelemahlembutan, dan kekuatan yang sempurna...

Dan, pada akhirnya bila semua itu terwujud, hamba, ayahnya, dengan berani berkata “hidupku tidaklah sia-sia”

Sungguh puisi tersebut merupakan sebuah puisi yang luar biasa. Puisi itu adalah sebuah cermin seorang ayah yang mengharapkan anaknya kelak mampu menjadi manusia yang ber-Tuhan sekaligus mampu menjadi manusia yang tegar, tidak cengeng, tidak manja, dan bertanggung jawab atas kehidupannya sendiri.

Ya Allah, Sungguh Bapakku (Jendralku) berdoa akan hal yang sama bagiku. Ya Allah berikanlah tempat yang layak baginya disisi-Mu. Amin.

Sungguh aku akan buatmu bangga!

Taruhan Pak Andrie Wongso...

2008-05-23T13:27:00.010+07:00

Ini :

Atau :

Tantangan pembuka sesi motivasi yang diutarakan oleh Motivator No. 1 di Indonesia Bapak Andrie Wongso, SDTT, TBS.

Ia berani bertaruh bahwa slogan "Indonesia Bisa" yang dikumandang oleh Presiden SBY akan hilang hanya dalam waktu 1 bulan.

Siapa yang berani bertaruh silahkan buat kesepakatan diatas materei.. he he he...

Indonesia Luar Biasa!

SUPERHERO MENOLAK DATANG KE INDONESIA

2008-05-19T13:46:00.004+07:00

Dengan meningkatnya tingkat kriminalitas di ibukota dewasa ini, pemerintah Indonesia telah mengirimkan proposal penawaran kerja kepada sejumlah superhero dari negara paman Sam.
Proposal ini menawarkan suatu bentuk kerjasama dimana para superhero diminta kesediaannya untuk bekerja di Indonesia dalam kerjasama dengan Mabes Polri untuk memerangi kriminalitas yang marak terjadi di kota2 besar Indonesia , khususnya Jakarta .
Tetapi tidak diduga sejumlah besar superhero MENOLAK ajakan kerjasama ini. Berikut adalah alasan penolakan tersebut, yang mana membuat Indonesia TERSINGGUNG BERAT….

1. BATMAN (Bruce Wayne)

Bruce Wayne menolak ajakan kerjasama ini dengan alasan yang terlalu dibuat-buat. ALasan beliau adalah DIA KEBERATAN MENANGGUNG PAJAK IMPOR BAT-MOBILE KE INDONESIA . BAYANGIN AJA PAJAK IMPOR MOBIL MEWAH YANG SELANGIT, APALAGI UNTUK BAT-MOBIL YANG SECANGGIH ITU.

2. SPIDERMAN (Peter Parker)

Parker juga menolak ajakan kerjasama ini dengan alasanDI INDONESIA HANYA ADA SEDIKIT SEKALI GEDUNG TINGGI, YANG MENYULITKAN DIA UNTUK BERGELANTUNGAN DARI GEDUNG KE GEDUNG. KALAUPUN ADA GEDUNG TINGGI, JARAKNYA TERLALU BERJAUHAN, SEHINGGA SANGAT MENYULITKAN. BELUM LAGI SAAT BERGELANTUNGAN, DIA TAKUT KECANTOL KABEL LISTRIK DAN TELEPON YANG BANYAK BERSERAKAN DI LANGIT2 KOTA BESAR INDONESIA

3. INVISIBLE GIRL (Susan Storm)

Menolak dengan alasan MINDER. Kemampuan menghilang yang dimilikinya masih jauh kalah dengan kemampuan menghilang orang2 Indonesia . Berikut wawancara yang dilakukan dengan CNN SAYA SIH HANYA BISA MENGHILANGKAN DIRI SAYA SENDIRI. BANYAK ORANG DI INDONESIA YANG BUKAN HANYA BISA MENGHILANGKAN DIRI SENDIRI, MALAHAN HUTANG, ASSET2 NEGARA YANG PERNAH DIKUASAI, SAMPAI HUTANG2 KORUPSI PUN BISA DIHILANGKAN JUGA. JADI SAYA MINDER NIH…..

4. THE THING

Menolak dengan alasan DI INDONESIA SUDAH BANYAK ORANG DENGAN KULIT YANG LEBIH TEBAL DARI SAYA. BUKAN HANYA KEBAL PELURU, MALAHAN SUDAH KEBAL MALU SEGALA....

5. HUMAN TORCH (Johnny Storm)

Menolak juga sama dengan anggota2 Fantastic 4 yang lain, karena BELUM JUGA MULAI BEKERJA, DIA UDAH MENDAPAT PANGGILAN DARI KEJAGUNG KARENA DICURIGAI MENJADI DALANG TERBAKARNYA BEBERAPA PASAR DI INDONESIA .

6. THE FLASH (Barry Allen)

Sebenarnya Allen sudah mempertimbangkan untuk menerima proposal ini, tetapi setelah melakukan survey ke berbagai lembaga pemerintahan dia akhirnya menolak. BAYANGKAN AJA, UNTUK MENDAPATKAN TANDA TANGAN KTP AJA ORANG HARUS MENUNGGU BERHARI-HARI. ITU AJA MASIH SABAR. JADI KESIMPULAN SAYA, ORANG INDONESIA TIDAK MEMERLUKAN SEORANG SUPERHERO YANG MEMILIKI KEKUATAN BERUPA KECEPATAN. KECEPATAN TIDAK ADA ARTINYA BUAT BANGSA YANG ALON2 ASAL KELAKON.

7. SUPERMAN (Clark Kent )

Sang manusia baja ini menolak dengan sopan, karena SAYA TAKUT DISANGKUTKAN DENGAN TUNTUTAN MELAKUKAN AKSI PORNOGRAFI/PORNOAKS I KARENA CELANA DALAM SAYA DI DEPAN.

8. AQUAMAN

Merasa tidak kuat setelah mencoba pekerjaan baru di Indonesia , karena LAUTNYA UDAH TERCEMAR LUMPUR LAPINDO

9. WONDER WOMAN

Pada mulanya, sang peace ambassador dari atlantea ini merasa yakin bisa membantu pemerintah Indonesia . Tetapi setelah pengamatan lebih lanjut, dia akhirnya menolak juga dengan alasan KALO SAYA MATI DI US DALAM MENUNAIKAN TUGAS KAN MASIH BERGENGSI, DIBUNUH MONSTER / VILLAIN. DI INDONESIA BISA2 SAYA MATI DIGREBEK FPI GARA2 KOSTUM SAYA YANG SUPER SEKSI INI.

10 CAT WOMAN

Menolak setelah ketakutan mendengar lagu KUCING GARONG.

IndonesiaKu

2008-05-19T13:34:00.003+07:00

Saudara sebangsa setanah air....!

Jika di antara kita ada yang merasa mulai kurang bangga dengan negri ini, coba deh baca tulisan ini, sapa tau akan sedikit mengingatkan kita, bahwa masih banyak hal yang bisa membuat bangga atas negeri ini. Jika selama ini dalam berbagai guyonan negeri kita punya banyak "prestasi & rekor" yang ternyata negatif, sperti dalam hal korupsi, pengangguran, kemiskinan dsb, ternyata kita juga mempunyai rekor2 dunia dalam arti yang sebenarnya.

Republik Indonesia merupakan Negara kepulauan terbesar di dunia yang terdiri dari 17.504 pulau (termasuk 9.634 pulau yang belum diberi nama dan 6.000 pulau yang tidak berpenghuni) . Disini ada 3 dari 6 pulau terbesar didunia, yaitu : Kalimantan (pulau terbesar ketiga di dunia dgn luas 539.460 km2), Sumatera (473.606 km2) dan Papua (421.981 km2).

Indonesia adalah Negara maritim terbesar di dunia dengan perairan seluas 93 ribu km2 dan panjang pantai sekitar 81 ribu km2 atau hampir 25% panjang pantai di dunia.
Pulau Jawa adalah pulau terpadat di dunia dimana sekitar 60% hamper penduduk Indonesia (sekitar 130 jt jiwa) tinggal di pulau yang luasnya hanya 7% dari seluruh wilayah RI. * Indonesia merupakan Negara dengan suku bangsa yang terbanyak di dunia. Terdapat lebih dari 740 suku bangsa/etnis, dimana di Papua saja terdapat 270 suku.
Negara dengan bahasa daerah yang terbanyak, yaitu, 583 bahasa dan dialek dari 67 bahasa induk yang digunakan berbagai suku bangsa di Indonesia. Bahasa nasional adalah bahasa Indonesia walaupun bahasa daerah dengan jumlah pemakai terbanyak di Indonesia adalah bahasa Jawa.
Indonesia adalah negara muslim terbesar di dunia. Jumlah pemeluk agama Islam di Indonesia sekitar 216 juta jiwa atau 88% dari penduduk Indonesia. Juga memiliki jumlah masjid terbanyak dan Negara asal jamaah haji terbesar di dunia.
Monumen Budha (candi) terbesar di dunia adalah Candi Borobudur di Jawa Tengah dengan tinggi 42 meter (10 tingkat) dan panjang relief lebih dari 1 km. Diperkirakan dibuat selama 40 tahun oleh Dinasti Syailendra pada masa kerajaan Mataram Kuno (750-850).
Tempat ditemukannya manusia purba tertua di dunia, yaitu : Pithecanthropus Erectus" yang diperkirakan berasal dari 1,8 juta tahun yang lalu.
Republik Indonesia adalah Negara pertama yang lahir sesudah berakhirnya Perang Dunia II pada tahun 1945. RI merupakan Negara ke 70 tertua di dunia.
Indonesia adalah Negara pertama (hingga kini satu-satunya) yang pernah keluar dari Perserikatan Bangsa Bangsa (PBB) pada tgl 7 Januari 1965. RI bergabung kembali ke dalam PBB pada tahun 1966.
Tim bulutangkis Indonesia adalah yang terbanyak merebut lambing supremasi bulutangkis pria, Thomas Cup, yaitu sebanyak 13 x (pertama kali th 1958 & terakhir 2002).
Indonesia adalah penghasil gas alam cair (LNG) terbesar di dunia (20% dari suplai seluruh dunia) juga produsen timah terbesar kedua.
Indonesia menempati peringkat 1 dalam produk pertanian, yaitu : cengkeh (cloves) & pala (nutmeg), serta no.2 dalam karet alam (Natural Rubber) dan minyak sawit mentah (Crude Palm Oil).
Indonesia adalah pengekspor terbesar kayu lapis (plywood), yaitu sekitar 80% di pasar dunia.
Terumbu Karang (Coral Reef) Indonesia adalah yang terkaya (18% dari total dunia). * Indonesia memiliki species ikan hiu terbanyak didunia yaitu 150 species.
Biodiversity Anggrek terbeser didunia : 6 ribu jenis anggrek, mulai dari yang terbesar (Anggrek Macan atau Grammatophyllum Speciosum) sampai yang terkecil (Taeniophyllum, yang tidak berdaun), termasuk Anggrek Hitam yang langka dan hanya terdapat di Papua.
Memiliki hutan bakau terbesar di dunia. Tanaman ini bermanfaat ntuk mencegah pengikisan air laut/abrasi.
Binatang purba yang masih hidup : Komodo yang hanya terdapat di pulau Komodo, NTT adalah kadal terbesar di dunia. Panjangnya bias mencapai 3 meter dan beratnya 90 kg.
Rafflesia Arnoldi yang tumbuh di Sumatera adalah bunga terbesar di dunia. Ketika bunganya mekar, diameternya mencapai 1 meter.
Memiliki primata terkecil di dunia , yaitu Tarsier Pygmy (Tarsius Pumilus) atau disebut juga Tarsier Gunung yang panjangnya hanya 10 cm. Hewan yang mirip monyet dan hidupnya diatas pohon ini terdapat di Sulawesi.
Tempat ditemukannya ular terpanjang di dunia yaitu, Python Reticulates sepanjang 10 meter di Sulawesi.
Ikan terkecil di dunia yang ditemukan baru-baru ini di rawa-rawa berlumpur Sumatera. Panjang 7,9 mm ketika dewasa atau kurang lebih sebesar nyamuk. Tubuh ikan ini transparan dan tidak mempunyai tulang kepala.

Gimana....bangga khan hidup di negeri yang kaya sda, luas dari ufuk timur hingga ke ufuk barat ?...

Species Baru Narkoba!

2008-05-14T16:55:00.002+07:00

NARKOBA jenis baru dengan nama Strawberry quick .
Perlu kita waspadai, telah beredar disekolah-sekolah sesuatu yang mengerikan. NARKOBA Crystal berbentuk bulat, mirip dengan permen POP ROCK rasa Strawbery (kalau kita kemut bisa berdesis di dalam mulut). Aromanya persis seperti Strawbery dan saat ini sudah beredar bebas di lingkungan sekolah. Namanya ?Straberry Meth atau ?Strawberry Quick.
Anak2 berpikir bahwa barang tersebut adalah PERMEN (gula-gula), berhati-hatilah karana permen ini dapat menyebabkan kondisi sang anak bisa masuk RS dan ketagihan. Selain rasa diatas dapat juga dalam rasa Coklat, kacang, Cola, chery, anggur dan rasa jeruk. .
Peringatkan anak kita untuk tidak menerima Permen Jenis ini dari orang-2 yang tidak kita kenal, meskipun dari teman mereka atau dari siapapun .
Sampaikan pesan ini ke rekan yang lain untuk mencegah terjadinya hal-2 yang tidak kita inginkan.

Bismillah...

2008-05-10T09:37:00.000+07:00

Alhamdulillah, akhirnya punya bolg sendiri.