Big Ideas

The internet gives everyone the opportunity to be surrounded by smart people. I think one of the tenets of being a geek, whether you’re a programming geek or a hair stylist geek, is that we love to surround ourselves with people who are a hell of a lot smarter than us. For instance, I would love to go work at CERN; a place where I am at a loss for an analogy to reference my relative stupidity. However, I would absolutely love every second of it… even if I walked around confused by everything I heard or saw… on some level I would take some stuff in and leave wiser. I think, as I said before, this is one of the differences between geeks and non-geeks.

I’ve found that a lot of my non-geek friends try and avoid situations where they might look dumb because they fear that it will reflect negatively on them. Perhaps true geeks have realised that there is always someone else who is a hell of a lot smarter than you, so there’s no point in trying to look clever. Obviously geeks revel in being the smart one and teaching others, but this is also part of being a geek: we love to teach because we make the world a better place by doing so. It’s also possibly why geeks are so incredibly fanatical about things like programming languages… because we believe that by convincing someone to switch from PHP to Python will make the planet a better place… and we’re probably right.

Which is all a very long introduction to the guy who made this:

Embedded video Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

You want to jump to about 1.10′ for the music. Anyway, the guy who put it together has a blog, read it.

In his own words
Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

This speaks volumes to me. I like to imagine that the old hardware really all want to make music and this is their best effort an effort which, albeit rough around the edges, translates to something beautiful. Mankind’s quest to understand time and space is similarly rough, but we’re on our way.

Over and out.