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2018 in Books #1 : Outliers

My membership at the Evanston Public Library is my best-worst decision. Best, because I now have e-books delivered right into my Kindle without having me trudge in snow to borrow or return a book and the worst, because it is going to make me lazy and unfit.  Cut to the chase, Outliers has been a good start to 2018. At a modest 300 odd pages, Malcolm Gladwell writes a deeply researched and critically analysed account of success stories that we know of.  | The biggest takeaway you can get from Outliers  is the "other side" of stories, which are often ignored for the sake of glorification of the achievement. | It was enjoyable to see how tiny, seemingly inconsequential factors can help a person go a long way. A popular example the book talks about is Bill Gates' rise as a billionaire when he was a college dropout.  Treating his story superficially has led to popularizing the opinion, "hey, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were college drop outs
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A Marvellous Timepoint in Internet History: r/place

On April 1st, 2017, Reddit conducted a social experiment on a dead sub r/place.

A digital canvas of 1024x1024 pixels was created.
Over a million tiny boxes.
72 hours.
16 colours.
A million people.
(A lot of free time)

Each one could place a coloured tile on this canvas every 5 to 10 minutes. You could also colour over someone else's pre-filled pixel, so the timelapse of r/place shows shifting scenes.

The result? This.



Yep.

A million people created this, slowly, steadily and this work of art was created. Look at it! You can see flags of different nations, random bars, transgender flag, Star Wars text, logos, cartoons, caricatures, cityscapes, Mona Lisa, the blue corner, Pink Floyd, van Gogh's Starry Night, the void, a start button with minimized windows and so so much more all created from scratch.

It is a marvellous moment in internet history because hundreds to thousands of people worked on common ideas and goals. A single person would have struggled to make the Mona Lisa, but no, through some fantastic understanding and coordination, different images were created, erased or elongated. A bunch of minds who didn't know each other could sit together, see a common vision and worked towards making it happen. A bunch of people with a unified thought wanting to leave a mark on this canvas. This is collaborative art. It is a global painting.

Watch the time lapse of r/place here to see how it began, what happened and what became of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5EcQG3ydAI

I think I will appreciate art more once I know the story behind it as happened in this case. Here's to delving more into art history.

Edit: The best part about this creation is every time I look at it, I find something new. Just discovered Radiohead, David Bowie and a bunch of university logos!

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