Are You A Hipster? Do You Think Video Games Are Art? And Other Important Questions

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PBS Idea Channel began this year with a quick look at New Year's resolutions and has continued the work they started last year, asking interesting, eccentric and often hilarious questions and pretty much twisting the worlds of pop culture, technology and art. Needless to say, I love the Idea Channel. 

 

Video Games have finally made it to the Museum of Modern Art, so we thought we'd celebrate and put together a list of our top 5 most artful video games! Not our favorites, mind you. These are the ones that are packed with significance and emotional weight. How does your own list compare with these 5?

 

We all hate hipsters, right? They seem so smug and arrogant, with their ray bans and scarves and ironic t-shirts. Even those who clearly are hipsters still recoil at the label. Embracing irony over earnestness, the key to hipsters is not just what they enjoy, but how they enjoy it. Borrowing from other subcultures, (see: Handlebar mustaches and flannel shirts), hipsters reappropriate these fashion elements as their own. But don't we all do that? Our own fashion came from somewhere, and certainly has been refined. Do we all have a little bit of hipster blood in us?

 

Will Space travel change our perspective on the human condition?

Space, also known as The Final Frontier, has been in our collective dreams and fantasies for decades. Who wouldn't want to blast into space, experience zero gravity, or walk on the moon? But with limited funding to NASA, the day that had been promised to us for years (in addition to flying cars and hover boards), seems no closer now than it did 30 years ago. Could private research and funding be the future of galactic exploration? And maybe once we are all able to see the earth from a distance, we'll all gain some much needed perspective. So keep on truckin' Elon Musk, for humanity's sake.

 

New Year's Resolutions are incredibly hard to keep. Watch this special episode to find out why!

 
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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Inventors: The First Software Patent & The Digital Camera

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PBS Digital Studios continues their great work with Inventors. Inventors is a series of portrait videos by filmmaker and photographer David Friedman, chronicling the work of contemporary inventors from all walks of life. It offers rare glimpses into the inspiration for their creations. Here we take a look at the very first software patent and the invention of the digital camera.

 

There's a good chance that you've heard about the controversy around software patents, but you probably don't know the story of Martin Goetz, who got the very first software patent in 1968. Today, some people say that software patents owned by big companies end up stifling innovation in small companies, but the first software patent was a tool that enabled a small company to compete against a big corporation. 

You can see the first ever software patent here. 

For a more complete and nuanced look at Martin Goetz's views on software patents, see the article he wrote for zdnet.

 

Steven Sasson invented the digital camera in 1975 while working at Kodak in Rochester, NY. In this video, he shows off features of the original prototype, and describes how digital imaging has expanded beyond anything he could have imagined.

You can see the original patent here. 

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Tiredness

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

The Real Problem With Neuroscience Today→

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The real problem with neuroscience today isn’t with the science—though plenty of methodological challenges still remain—it’s with the expectations. The brain is an incredibly complex ensemble, with billions of neurons coming into—and out of—play at any given moment. There will eventually be neuroscientific explanations for much of what we do; but those explanations will turn out to be incredibly complicated. For now, our ability to understand how all those parts relate is quite limited, sort of like trying to understand the political dynamics of Ohio from an airplane window above Cleveland.

 

Gary Marcus, writing for The New Yorker, reiterates the simple fact that as much as we have studied the brain and as much as we are making progress in those studies we have no idea, still, how it works. 

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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.

Your Brain by the Numbers

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Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Jorge Cham draws the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper at www.phdcomics.com.

 
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Antonio Ortiz

Antonio Ortiz has always been an autodidact with an eclectic array of interests. Fascinated with technology, advertising and culture he has forged a career that combines them all. In 1991 Antonio developed one of the very first websites to market the arts. It was text based, only available to computer scientists, and increased attendance to the Rutgers Arts Center where he had truly begun his professional career. Since then Antonio has been an early adopter and innovator merging technology and marketing with his passion for art, culture and entertainment. For a more in-depth look at those passions, visit SmarterCreativity.com.