Category: science

art, hope, New York City, science, South Africa, travel

My Year of Hopefulness – Hope Grows

Christa Avampato

Today I went to the New Museum of Contemporary Art with my friend, Allan. There’s a South African photography exhibit by David Goldblatt on display there that I wanted to see. On the third floor, the photographs are dire. “Is all of South Africa a desert, Christa?” Allan asked me. In the photos the land has been reduced to rubble, laid barren by years of struggle and negligence. “Where is the hope?” Allan asked.

We then made our way up to the fourth floor where there were a series of before and after photographs. Barren land had regrown some. South Africa seemed a little more green, not teeming with life, though certainly much improved. I felt a small flicker of hope.

I went to South Africa about 2 years ago and though I had a series of unfortunate incidents, I also had a set of really incredible circumstances that endeared me to that country and its people. I’m sure I’ll return some day soon. While there seems to be no hope in the structures of shanty towns that can be found throughout the country, there is a great deal of strength and ambition in the eyes of South Africans. They seem to always be looking up and over, at something brighter and better in the distance.

The handful of before and after photographs got me to thinking about how hope and life can regenerate without any outside influence. The first law of thermodynamics involves the conservation of energy and it states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. In Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, he reveals to us that while the first law of thermodynamics holds true, energy can transform into mass, and vice versa. As I viewed the photos of South Africa, particularly the before and after photos, I thought about Einstein’s theory and how it applies to broader circumstances outside of science.

It seems to me that the re-growth of life, mass, could be due to the fact that energy, hope, cannot be created nor destroyed. It just is, then, now, and always. While it may change forms and go into hiding from time to time, we can be sure that it is always there, available to us if only we have the insight to recognize it.

insomnia, science, sleep, The Journal of Cultural Conversation

The Journal of Cultural Conversation – Take a Nap, or Don’t

Christa Avampato

My latest post on The Journal of Cultural Conversation (TJCC) is up: Take a Nap, or Don’t, an update of my continued research on insomnia. Does sleep help creativity? Does insomnia help creativity? Science weighs in…

My writing partner and collaborator, Laura Cococcia, is the creative genius behind TJCC and has asked me to write for the site every Monday. I will repost all links to my TJCC articles on this blog and on my Twitter account.

career, creative process, creativity, discovery, entrepreneurship, friendship, invention, job, relationships, science

My Year of Hopefulness – Lots of ideas

Christa Avampato

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” ~ Linus Pauling, American scientist

It’s a romantic ideal that in a flash of insight we finally come up with a brilliant idea to overcome some challenge. Truth is it takes us time to wrestle a problem to the ground. Lots of ideas have to be considered, tried, tested, and tweaked to get us to an elegant solution.

While Linus Pauling was referencing his own work in science, his quote applies to many areas. Where we live, where we work, and who we spend our time with can take some trial and error before we strike just the right place and people. This is my third try at living in New York, and I think I got it right this time. There have been a lot of ups and downs over the 10 years since I first moved here. Finally, I found a way to make this place home.

Pauling’s quote also holds up in entrepreneurship, too. I’ve now been doing interviews with a variety of entrepreneurs for five months and I’ve asked each of them for advice to others who are considering starting a business. All of them have said to give it a shot, recognizing that it takes a couple of years to really get a business off the ground. We might need to kick around a number of different ideas for businesses before we hit upon one that makes our hearts sing, that makes us want to dive in with everything we’ve got to make it work.

Having lots of ideas requires patience and persistence. We have to be willing to try and try again, and again and again. We need to be patient with ourselves and believe in the slow steady process that leads to true insight and learning. Flashes of quick genius happen once in a while. What is a much more of a sure bet is that if we keep trying new ideas, one will certainly rise to the top.

The photo above is Linus Pauling holding a molecular model. It can be found at: http://osulibrary.orst.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/pauling-qv09-198xi.050.jpg

education, learning, passion, science

My Year of Hopefulness – The Laws of (Minimizing) Distraction

Christa Avampato

Distraction is everywhere. I’ve recently learned about a company that does brain imaging using neurofeedback to help people get “in the zone”. Athletes, artists, politicians, CEOs, writers. Fascinating stuff. And before you know it I was off and running researching psychology programs to see if I should get another Masters degree.

There’s a key difference between new knowledge that informs our current work, or the work we’d really like to be doing, and developing a brand new passion. A brand new passion takes a lot of dedication, time, and very often, money. After business school, I wanted to really understand and participate in social media, and I really wanted to focus on the craft of writing. It’s taken me thousands of hours over the course of two years to get a handle on those things. Well worth the time and effort because those are passions of mine. They define me in a very significant way.

There are a million interesting things in this world to learn so it’s no wonder that there seem to be no end to distractions. Given my propensity for distraction, I’ve recently done two things that have been helpful ways to keep my focus:

1.) Take on only 1 or 2 goals, not 5 or 6, in any one area of life.
2.) Write those 1 or 2 goals down and post them up in place you will see regularly. I’ve found that the inside of the front door is a good one so that way I read it every time I come into and leave my apartment.

Limiting distraction and maintaining focus is difficult work. It requires constant vigilance. But it’s critical to happiness and meaningful accomplishment in our lives. I have a friend who is forever getting involved in more research projects, prolonging his doctoral studies. Another friend of mine has been collecting degrees of a wide variety and in the process making her feel more unhappy and lost. There’s a balance we have to strike between expanding our horizons and keeping our eye on the ball. In general, I find the golden rule is to expand my horizons only to the point that my interests are reinforcing and supporting one another. So far, so good.

books, determination, movie, science

My Year of Hopefulness – The Transformative Power of Tenacity

Christa Avampato

“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.” ~Louis Pasteur

My friend, Laura, the author of Laura Reviews, recently posted an interview with Hugh MacLeod, author of Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. At the end of the interview, Laura asked him for his advice to writers. He simply said, “Keep doing it. It’s better to write 50 words every day, than 2,000 words every month.” In other words, keep going.

On Daily Good, a blog that promotes positive news stories, I read the quote above by Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is best known for the development of vaccines and the process of pasteurization. While he could attribute his vast scientific accomplishments to intelligence or creativity or even a variety of qualities, he credited his tenacity as the only key to his success. In other words, his achievements are due to his ability to keep going.

With all the rain falling in New York City lately, I’ve steadily been working my way through my Netflix cue. I rented We Are Marshall. It looked like a compelling story, and one I was unfamiliar with. After a tragic plane crash in which nearly the entire team, coaching staff, and many fans of Marshall University’s football team perish, the university considers deferring its program.

One of the four remaining players rallies the school’s students who stage a peaceful demonstration outside of the school’s board meeting as the board is deciding whether or not to defer the program. Every student at the university turns out, chanting one single saying, “We are Marshall.” After an exhaustive search to find a new coach, Jack Lengyel (then head coach of the football team at The College of Wooster) convinces Marshall to give him the job of head coach.

A grieving town, a spare number of players whose hearts and spirits were wracked with guilt, and a university suffering with a tremendous sense of loss and loneliness. That’s all Jack Lengyel had. And though the team had far from a winning season in 1971, the fact that they could rebuild any sense of spirit and win any games at all in the competitive arena of college football was nothing short of a miracle. They just wouldn’t take no for an answer, not matter how many obstacles they encountered. They kept going.

Tenacity pays. It obliterates challenges. It provides confidence to those who embrace it and inspires others who witness it in the spirit of others. So when we’re down or lost or we don’t know what to do with what we’ve got, the only way for us to get unstuck may be to just keep plowing through.

The image above can be found at: https://christaavampato.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/tenacity.jpg?w=300

books, education, science

My Year of Hopefulness – Darwin

Christa Avampato

This months marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his landmark work, On the Origin of Species. Darwin makes me hopeful for several reasons: his tenacity, his ability to “think different”, and his age when he wrote his seminal work.

On the Origin of Species challenged nearly all preconceived notions of how life evolves and changes. Darwin was adamant that it was not the strongest species that survived, thrived, and lived to see future generations of their offspring. The ones who gain the most evolutionary success are the ones who are most adaptive to change. Darwin faced rigorous challenges from his contemporaries and some of those arguments still persist even today. He had the ability to use those arguments to strengthen his own.

It can be hard to break with the thinking of our contemporaries. When everyone else around us says one thing, and we have a different belief, it can be difficult to voice our ideas, and even more difficult to believe in those ideas so deeply that we will commit them to writing. Darwin is a great example for us to follow. He used his observations of evolution to develop a theory entirely contrary to the accepted beliefs of the day. He had the ability to stand up and walk to the beat of his own drummer. In the challenging times we’re currently facing, we would be wise, and courageous, to do the same.

The other element of Darwin that I find so inspiring is Darwin’s age when he wrote On the Origin of Species. A lot of times I feel the pressure to get out there now and create the greatest work of my life. I am constantly worried that I am not doing enough, that I am not living up to my full potential. A lot of my friends comment that they see their years slipping away, toiling at work for other people, even though they know that eventually they will and need to join the ranks of the many entrepreneurs that I write about and admire. After 50 years of study and observation, Darwin took the leap and put his greatest work, his greatest thinking, out into the world. My friends and I have time, at least a little anyway, to make our mark.

The cartoon above can be found at: http://www.anthroblogs.org/nomadicthoughts/archives/addis-darwin-bday-cartoon.jpg

gaming, science, video games, will wright

Spore: the moment gamers have been waiting for

Christa Avampato

I’m not a gamer – my hand-eye coordination is about as good as my sense of direction, which is to say it’s non-existent. I’ve never played a Wii or an X-box or a PS2 (or is it PS3 they’re on now?) And yet, I am completely fascinated by the growth of the gaming industry and because of my interest in customer engagement am passionate about finding ways for businesses to use gaming in a constructive business-savvy way.


Enter Will Wright, a legend in gaming, creator of the Sims, who has just released his latest, greatest, and long-developed project: Spore. Borrowing from the ideas of the Green movement and the biological evolution, Wright has created a game that allows players to create worlds, actions taken within those worlds, and then deal with the fallout of the consequences over centuries of time. One of the oddest things about life is that we can make all of these choices and decisions about our environment, our economy, our relations with foreign worlds, but because of the long time span needed to see the full effects of our actions, we often don’t live with the results. Our children, our children’s children, and so, deal with the messes we make. 

Wright carries a profound belief that if we could see first hand the damage or delight we cause decades after our passing, we would make more choices that have a long-term benefit. And to top it all off, we have fun along the way creating different creatures. We get to run the world, or rather a simulation of it, for a little while. 

Tonight I was telling my friend, Dave, about my sketch comedy writing class and how the difficulty of writing this genre gave me so much more respect for comedians. With Spore, I believe that we could all benefit from playing Boss of the World for a while – maybe we would be able to see that running this planet isn’t as easy as we think it may be. We are now being faced with tough decisions about our future; Spore gives us a way to try out scenario planning in a cost-effective, entertaining, and informative way.        

As Ellis Marsalis said to his son Wynton “earn your prejudices.” Meaning, before you go giving your opinion on how to run something, try it out first. Thank you, Will Wright, for dedicating a decade of your life to this project for the sake of the planet. 

For photo above, click here.
Africa, education, media, science, technology, TED

Searching for the Next Einstein

Christa Avampato

There is a profound belief in the West that if we throw enough money at a problem, the problem will ultimately go away. I’m not sure how or when or by whom this misconception was started. I do know it runs deep in this country, and recent world events have shown its fragility.

I read extensively about Africa and the circumstances that many of the nations on that continent are facing politically, economically, and socially. Recently I heard an NPR story covering integrated schools in South Africa where students don’t feel safe because of ever-rising racial tensions. In the New York Times I’ve been following the campaign of Morgan Tsvangirai, the man who dared to challenge President Mugabe, and then dropped out due to the threat of violence. Yesterday I was reading a story in Sierra Magazine about Ethiopia’s optimism, a story chronicling the long-overdue arrival of contraceptives that are allowing women and girls to take more control of their lives.

The one topic I don’t hear much about in relation to Africa is science. Yes, in a roundabout way the topic is addressed via food shortages or medical relief work. Science education isn’t touched. With great excitement I learned about a program initially sponsored through TED, NextEinstein. Neil Turok, a brilliant cosmologist and education advocate, was honored with the TED Prize, and thus was able to use TED’s incredible network to announce his one wish for the world and receive support to bring that wish to life. “My wish is that you help us unlock and nurture scientific talent across Africa, so that within our lifetimes we are celebrating an African Einstein.” Essentially he is saying that Africa must solve Africa’s problems if those solutions are to have longevity.

In 2003, Turok, who was born in South Africa, founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, a postgraduate educational center supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent. The website http://www.nexteinstein.org/ was just launched about a month ago and the movement is looking for help in the form of donations, media talent, creative business consultants, educators, and infrastructure.

This effort is about helping entire nations lift themselves up and propel themselves forward. African nations have been down-trodden for too long, dependent on aid that is always too slow to arrive and never substantial enough. Neil Turok is building a program for Africans to help other Africans. There is more to those nations than disease and war and social ills, contrary to so much of what our national media covers. It is a continent rich with possibility and talent and heritage. Now the question is how to mine that potential so that the outcome is even more elaborate than Turok’s dream. To lend a hand, visit the TED Prize website.