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Es werden Posts vom Oktober, 2017 angezeigt.

Three Branches of Creative Activity: Engineering - Art - Science

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Today, I have had an ingenious idea that has helped me a lot find out what I am really striving for. Here is the result of this idea: This image shows the three branches of creative activity humans perform: Engineering, Art and Science. There are, of course, many other things human beings do (e.g. healthcare, politics, military,...), but those things are not creative. Being creative does not mean that you have to draw a painting that looks good or compose music. That is only one branch of creativity - Art, where aesthetics matter. But Science and Engineering are fields of creative activity, too. So you can actually be creative - create something - without having an aesthetic intuition, e.g. by writing a scientific paper or working out a mathematical proof, or by creating a mechanism or building a machine that works. Engineering is the Generation of Working Things. That means, what matters is that the result works. The difference to Science, which is the Generation of Knowledge

Malcom Gladwell: Outliers

I purchased this book out of curiosity, and after reading the first couple of chapters I can conclude it has been worth it. It is of high relevance to my own life. In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier. In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetic