Knit a penguin a jumper, clothe it for a day. Teach a penguin to knit…

No, really. A friend sent me an e-mail this week with a pattern for knitting wee, bird-shaped jumpers for penguins suffering after the New Zealand oil spill.

After the initial amusement wore off -- see again the bit where the message included a pattern for wee, bird-shaped jumpers -- I exercised my fact-checking muscles to confirm that this is indeed a real thing, and that this current push is being organized by a NZ yarn shop called Skeinz. The tiny avian knitwear helps keep the penguins comfortable while they recuperate, and prevents them from preening (and thus ingesting oil) before they can be scrubbed clean. Who knew?

(ETA: I've just heard back from Skeinz, and they've had enough pledges to clothe all the needy penguins! Don't go crazy and knit a bajillion birdie jumpers.)

~*~

Slightly old news at this point, but io9 has a great post about "writer's block" that breaks it down into different issues and offers suggestions on how to work around it and/or banish it entirely.

Equally useful if you're a struggling creative (or just looking for ways to prime the pump a little) is the idea of 100 words in 100 days over at Not Enough Words.

My personal creative process is in a strange kind of place in that I've got no shortage of ideas, but I'm still having trouble physically finding time to do the work. I'm either too intensely scheduled, too exhausted, or too distracted to really produce at the level I'm used to. It's becoming something of a nasty cycle: something is late, I get tense, too much tension and I freak out on the page, not enough on the page and things are late, etc.

It will get better, and I'm doing my best to do what I can when I can, but in the meantime I really just kind of want to curl up someplace and not move for about a week.

~*~

Another bit of slightly stale that I've been thinking about is Neal Stephenson's essay about innovation starvation, or the idea that Big Stuff no longer gets done.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I share his frustration that I am not presently writing this from a badass moonbase (or, less glibly, that the sectors that could be innovating seem more risk averse these days compared to the heyday of the Apollo program). Risk is a necessary part of almost any formula for great success. If it weren't, great success wouldn't be significant. It would be the norm.

On the other hand, I look at things like CERN and the 100 Year Starship conference, which are mind-bogglingly insane in terms of scope and awesome, and wonder if maybe there are two things in play: signal to noise ratios and a necessary period of transition.

One of the neat things about our current age (and also one of the challenges that Stephenson mentions) can neatly be described as the Google issue. Which amounts, basically to this:

Anyone with a reliable device and connection to the free and open Internet theoretically not only has access to immense amounts of information, but has the ability to produce and post more. The net result is both really excellent -- social networking, community building, critical information sharing, democratizaton of information -- but also the biggest, most technologically advanced demonstration of Sturgeon's Law in history. It's both possible to find minute details about one thing and fail utterly to find another because it's buried in unrelated rubbish.

Stephenson's assessment that the Google issue means that promising avenues of research are getting nipped in the bud because of risk-averse behavior on the part of various entities may well be a fair one. On the other hand, isn't being able to say "That didn't work, here's why," and then looking for other avenues (or even compelling justifications for why the new attempt is different, or learning from prior failures), if applied wisely, something that can help accelerate development? Not just in the corporate sector, but among hobbyists who now have access to both equipment and information enough to do things like DIY orbital photography, serious astronomy, and rocketry.

Which brings me to the other issue, namely that we're living in a future we're still adjusting to.

If you're living in an industrialized country, you are already surrounded by miraculous, crazy-ass future things. Don't believe me? Go watch an episode of The Kids in the Hall. The difference between my life in 1991 and my life in 2011 gives me whiplash. I haven't tried it yet, but I have it on good authority that using the Netflix streaming interface on the Xbox Kinect is a hell of a lot like being Tony Stark.

So much change in the course of two decades (or, if we're going to look at things more broadly, the last 100 years) takes time to adjust to. Certain ideas, I think, can take generations to propagate. With that in mind, I wonder a little if it's going to take the general populace some time to really understand the true range of popularly-interesting questions it can be asking that we don't already have answers for in our pockets.

(Tangentially, some of the big questions we can be asking and should be doing heroic work on are old and obvious ones -- energy supply (esp. alternative fuels), ecological impact, pollution, etc. -- that aren't being treated as adequately heroic. The space program thrived because we were competing with another global superpower to be the best at getting out of our gravity well. Can you imagine what would happen if China, Europe, the Middle East, and North America got into a race to be the greenest, most efficient nation on the planet instead of mucking around with the same old fossil fuels? Can you imagine the R&D? The jobs?)

On the whole I think it's reasonable for Stephenson to feel concerned that we're not really meeting our potential as a technology-using species. I'm not sure it's fair to expect us to be in a progress boom at all times -- history actually seems to suggest otherwise -- but the comparison is ripe to for the making. All of 50 years ago people were willing to die in horrifying, fiery crashes to prove that something could work is a reasonable thing to do.

Then again, it's also possible we're enjoying a time in which maybe we don't have to take the same sorts of risks. Simulation technologies are incredibly powerful now. We can take certain steps more humanely, with less destruction and loss of life.

It also bears considering that finding ways to do the big work in ways that don't destroy our environment, poison our air and water might be a good reason to slow down just a little. The words "FUCK YEAH, WORLD'S BIGGEST DAM!" should not necessarily enough to make us want to build one. I can see why mourning the enthusiasm behind the "Bigger, better, faster, more!" ethic is natural, but working smarter rather than harder has pretty fantastic rewards, too.

I could be wrong. We could be experiencing an awkward Star Trek: The Next Generation phase, in which some of us have odd foreheads, a lot of possible excitement is off the table, and our second in command should probably grow a sexy-ass beard and have sexual tension with the ship's counselor.

And hey, at least Wil Wheaton's wearing a kilt this time around, right?

All I know is that unless I'm encased in a metal cage underground, I can read my e-mail using something smaller than a bar of soap, and physicists are arguing about whether somebody discovered FTL neutrinos or not. I'm all in favor of the big awesome, but let's not forget the sheer amazingness of now.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com