omenti

the importance of art and nature

It was a chilly day in early Spring and I had only been with Bell Labs  for a few months when I came across Alan in Lord Stirling Park.  It's a lovely place and I was near the end of an eight point something mile loop.  I'd seen him going on the way out as he crouched by his homemade four by five inch view camera.  It was beautifully made with a very expensive German lens.  He showed me the controls and went back to looking at a tree stump as I walked on.  Three hours later he was still in the same spot when I came by .  Naïvely I asked how many exposures he'd made:

"Oh just one - but it was so beautiful!  In an hour the light could be right for another."

Years later I learned he was a physicist at another Bell Labs location.  We worked on a few projects together.  His patience and out-of-the-box creativity are remarkable 

 

One of my undergrad physics professors suggested walking in the woods,  not thinking of anything in particular before working on a difficult problem. You'd regularly see him just watching something on a tree or bush on campus.   He was also a big fan of art museums and was taking by "finding beauty in simple forms. " He also told us not to study for exams in classes that meant something to us. Just keep up and think and let the tests flow by as nothing other than mileposts.   Some of the best suggestions I've had.  When I've interviewed people for positions that demand a degree of cleverness I always ask about their hobbies.  It turns out that was a good idea.

 

The trigger for this  is new work from a group of Cambridge psychologists that, for the first time, offers empirical evidence that engaging in artistic beauty helps you escape the "mental trappings of daily life" and induce "psychological distancing" -  the zooming out on your thoughts to form connections and gain clarity.

 

The tests asked people to study simple ceramics as well as line drawings of them. Their simplicity demanded focus - something that might be difficult with a complex piece of art.   All of the subjects in the ceramic group tested higher on abstract thinking tests compared to those who looked at the drawings for short time.  The later group saw no improvement over their scores before the tests.  More startling were the results of those who regularly engaged in an artistic hobby. Their abstract thinking scores were even higher than the non-hobbyist group. 

 

Physics and math are the only areas I know with any depth.  Both are driven by beauty and curiosity.  Perhaps it's not surprising that many in these fields engage in artistic hobbies like art, music and even poetry as well as spending some time every day being alone with nature in some way.

 

Go to your local museum and look at a few things deeply, wander in a park or the woods and loose yourself.  Try drawing something.  Not only is it a good break, but your ability to think abstractly may improve!

 

creativity in film and beyond

Unburdened by the plastic wrap so common to art books, it was sitting  in the bookstore and was reminded how much I wanted it.  A copy of The Art of WolfWalkers. Ten minutes of delight, but it was too spendy for this trip.  

 

 WolfWalkers is the third in a set devoted to Irish myth from Cartoon Salon - a tiny studio in Kilkenny, Ireland that has won respect from Pixar, Disney Animation and Studio Ghibli.  It's on Apple TV+ if you like amazing animation. 

 

Animation studios and art schools are amazing places.  Years ago they seemed like black boxes that took stories and turned them into animation.  More recently I've been involved with one and am wobbled by the amount of creativity and work play that goes into the most simple moments.  It's always a team effort spread among disciplines and years.  

 

After a few months I finally bought the book. Just wow!   Here's a video of a roundtable the before the film was released.  It was my introduction to the film (although not to the myth or its historical offshoot as Kilkenny is an ancestral home). 

 

It's worth writing about as (a) some of you may enjoy and even love it and, (b) creativity in the era of generative AI  is something I've been spending time on this past year an animation studio and two universities.  Signals have emerged. 

 

The New Yorker published a must-read piece on AI and Art by Ted Chiang.  Given my experience with animation studios, a music conservatory and physics and math, I'm in conditional agreement.  I do see a place as a tool, even in the creative arts, but more as a tool to relieve drudgery rather than become 'thought'.  I use it to organize references in papers as well as to create simple programs that involve freshman level programming for simple but time-consuming tasks.  I stay far away when precision and accuracy are needed and I don't see the creative spark. 

 

Film studios, musicians, and artists worry about wholesale theft of their work in the short term and the potential, if these tools improve, that we'll see more 'art' of lower caliber largely because human-created art is too expensive.  I think the later isn't possible with generative AI - at least not for quality work.  That doesn't mean real art won't be forced out by economic pressures. 

 

As for schools I worry teenagers may take the easy way out in pursuit of easy grades and free time. They'll be cheating themselves.   The world has no need for more high school essays, but that isn't why they're assigned. On the other hand student can learn about tasks these tools can help them with.  That's going to be more important in college.  I've been on two task forces and some schools are developing solid measures as well as the ability to change with time.  The guiding light is "are you teaching them how to think?"  

 

Clearly we're in a fascinating time.  I think we'll see some real carnage in the industry and use cases before signals we probably haven't thought about emerge.  But in the meantime we have beautiful art.   If you haven't seen WolfWalkers, you're in for a treat!

 

 

playful active learning

A few months ago I had another in what has become a series of chats with a neurology professor.  Both of us are (well) over 60 and, given the two aging presidential candidates at the time,  the subject of preventing dementia came up.  He noted the standard things - exercise is a powerful tool, avoiding inflammation (you really don't want Covid), etc.  There's a genetic component, but that's more in dispute now as it breaks with twin studies - perhaps there's a bad habit component.  But actively learning is important.  

 

It seems scans of mentally sharp people with the sort of neural damage you see in dementia are able to continue to do well as they've created a web of alternate pathways - it's like the original idea for the Internet - route around the damage. Even the elderly can do this.  The trick is working hard at  something that really forces you learn.  Doing puzzles or reading is fine, but doesn't do the neural expansion. Learning a new language, how to build things, how to do something that's very confusing and hard at first creates a novel wiring overlay.

 

I've been known to plunge into new things for the fun of it.  I'm generally untalented, but love the experience of seeing some progress in an area I knew nothing about. My neurologist friend does some of the same. He likes playing board games so he's trying to create one.  It's given him a lot of respect for those that do it.  It's helpful to try something that might be fun as play is a powerful motivator.  If you like music, learn how to write something.  Try writing poetry.  The hardest part may be finding the time - but if you watch tv, perhaps it's the easiest. Turn on the curiosity.  I'd love to hear the projects some of you have.  It may be worse than what ChatGPT can do, but ChatGPT isn't giving you richer neural pathways. And there may be gains in your current level of creativity. 

 

Just now he sent a video that inspired him..  It's Xyla Foxlin.  She graduated from CWRU about five years ago and makes her living taking on unusual projects - (the rocket powered Christmas Tree is a personal favorite) Here she builds a mobius strip violin.  She admits she's not an instrument maker and goes on to use real luthiers for helping her with the bridge and a few other issues. It's a fun video!  And cheers to her for mentioning Hillary Hahn!

 

where goes art?

GOOSE -n

A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.

The Devil's Dictionary: Ambrose Bierce

 

I've had four conversations this past week about the direction of art given new technology and that catch-all buzzword term "AI"  Two of the people seemed convinced it was going to kill art and put artists out of business.  Their arguments were basically 'skill, particularly technical skill,  isn't needed with AI' and why would anyone look at a film or listen to music when they could just ask a computer to whip up something for them that they'd love.

 

These sort of arguments have been around since photography started becoming readily available around the time of the American Civil War.  Why would anyone learn art or hire an artist?   Film and radio were going to put theaters out of business, the theremin was going to kill the violin (!),  CG was going to kill the acting profession and so on.  And now we're hearing similar arguments. 

 

Capturing someone's voice without permission should be banned.. the same with their likeness, but LLMs are never going to write clear and compelling scripts given how they work.   They can and do write scripts and tens of thousands of GPT generated books have flooded Amazon, but clever and compelling, they're not.

 

There will be people who figure out how to use these technologies for art of one form or another of varying degrees of cleverness.  Unsurprisingly there's already a lot of effort in pornography, artificial voices to narrate audiobooks, ML driven image editing tools like Photoshop and even smartphones. 

 

One of the more interesting areas is in the storytelling part of console type computer games (arguably some of that is coming to phones, but perhaps the high end is more interesting in the short term).   There's interest in making NPC (non-player character) interactions more realistic.  These are the extra characters you can't control, but they're in the world space of the game.   I'm aware of a few sort of rough approaches    Down the road a bit NPCs may have more realistic interactions, but it's still much more structured that - say - telling the computer to just put together something without structure.  

 

Like the art of today I don't think you'll see much success in the long tail. Something special - often a combination of luck, talent and timing - will still be necessary.   Students studying the arts won't be wasting their time any more than they are today.  Actively doing art can fire your imagination and increase your ability to sense and think about the world.  Even a modest background can be useful in any number of fields.  And I suspect we'll see and hear a few wonderful expressions of human creativity along with a lot of garbage - just like today.

 

If you're interested in the technology and art of where all of this may be going the best resource I know is Lynn Cherny's Things I Think Are Awesome substack. I've known Lynn since the mid 90s.. she's always been deep in these areas.  $6 month/$50 year  

Also Amy Goodchild shows how she generates meaningful nonsense as an artform using a simple homebrew generative system.  

 

 

 

higher order terms of good

A few days ago Om pointed to a fascinating video

Scott Yu-Jan designed and then 3d printed a nifty and, from a cool design point of view, iPad dock for his Mac Studio.  Chatting with Om I mentioned 3d printing (albeit metal printing) is used in ultra-low volume production of bikes - a track bike an Olympian would use in Paris in a few months starts around $30k with wheels going for several thousand each.  Om replied Everything good isn’t cheap. So there is that. I mean that is how everything works now sadly. 

 

I think he's right to first order.. thinking about it afterwards there rarer higher order terms where "good" can be inexpensive within bounds.  Before the 70s there was a rich DIY tradition supported by dozens of magazines aimed at everything from homemade boats to clothing and everything between. If you wanted something of quality you needed time and had to develop your own crafting and sometimes even design skill.  Now we tend to buy finished goods. Quality design and craft tends to come at a price.  

 

There are exceptions - the higher order terms.  Often skill and tools are involved: woodworking, car restoration (I'm looking at you Bryan), dress design and making (now looking at you Jheri).  I do a bit of DIY work myself, but wouldn't call it 'good' as it lacks craftsmanship and good design.  Not having the skill is probably true for most of us,  but there are options.  If you learn how to use and have access to a good 3d printer, you can support Scott Yu-Jan.  He makes his living with popular YouTube video as well as support from patrons who get access to the digital files to his designs you can copy them yourself.  And there are many others.  

 

It's the tip of an iceberg most of us ignore. Kickstarter has hosted developing labor of love projects. Here's one I funded today as a gift:  a deep dive into how comicstrips are made. Over the years I've sponsored about ten Kickstarters.  A few have been amazing delights.   Etsy is another path to inexpensive low volume good if you look around.  And you can support artists and musicians.  Ask around art and music schools to see if there are students looking for work.  It's a calculated risk, but I've done this since grad school with projects ranging from homemade paper to the composition and performance of a piece of music. (way more satisfying than going the GAI route).

 

Om is absolutely right for the vast majority - the first order - of things and experiences we pay for - good comes at price.  But hunting the tail for the higher order terms of good is not only fun, but can lead to surprises. 

 

breadth and depth

His parents were Danish, hers Swedish.  By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities.  Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year.   He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week.  He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it.      We'd sit in his yard and listen.   Some were short, some took a half hour.  They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places.  They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections.  Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.

 

My sister is a visual storyteller.  It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder.  She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize.  I suspect my Dad was a big influence.  He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions.  He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple.  Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad. 

 

A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range).  He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:

Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:

“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”

Raducanu added this:

“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”

 

Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing.   Epstein goes into depth in both of his books.  Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs.  These people have built the tools they need to think creatively.  They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.

 

 I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again.  I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12.  I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life.  Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices.  The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular).   One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.

 

I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects.  Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work.   They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth.   There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia.  Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.

 

Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects.  Many of you have your own diverse lists.  My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports.  Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you!   It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later.  You find yourself becoming more creative with age.  Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres.  Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or...  the list goes on and on...   

 

Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.

 

 

mother's day

She enjoyed having to wait.  People around her would become characters in stories she'd make up.  Story making was a hobby of hers.  Often she'd invite you to join in.  As you gained experience, she'd take greater leaps.  Simple things on the street would develop complex plot twists and even find themselves in other eras or places.  

 

She was a bit on the quirky creative side and some of that may have rubbed off on me and my sister.  Here are a few lessons I learned:

° It's good to have some boredom in your life. It encourages you to try something new.

° It's fine to not be great at something if you enjoy it.

° You need several very different interests because they'll have conversations with each other if you just listen.

° Don't worry about names and dates in school. "How" and "why" are better.

° chocolate is good, pie is good, ice cream is good.

° Your friends may turn out to be at least as important as your family.  Find the good ones.

 

We were never pushed to do homework school. My parents were busy enough that our upbringing was more semi-supervised free range.  There were a lot of books and trips to the library.  The reward for a good report card we'd get an ice cream cone from Dairy Queen.  Perfect marks scored a banana split or milk shake.  And even if she didn't understand our interests, she'd support us how best she could. 

 

When I was about fifteen I read Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland - probably the book that had the biggest impact on me until I went to college.  As I  described the world Abbott created, Mom ran with it and developed a richer story and asked some "how" questions.  Those questions started me down a path  that taught me a little engineering - subjects she was unfamiliar with.  I began to see the value of story telling - particularly those visual stories.

 

Besides stories she enjoyed drawing and painting.  She wasn't very artistic, but spent a lot of her free time playing with projects.  I wondered why as my sister's art was much better.   Then I went off to college and found myself drawn to sketching.   I was and still am terrible, but it's a form of play that can take me to a state of flow.  I realized she was probably doing the same thing.  My sister became an accomplished artist - some her pieces have been described as snapshots of quirky short stories.   She picked up a lot from Mom too.

 

We celebrate those important ones through memories and  recognition of how they helped us become who we are.  Even now I find myself watching people and imaging stories when I'm waiting and everyone else is studying their phone.  She would have laughed at how unimaginative smartphones are.

 

Happy Mother's Day Mom.

 

the power of the liberal arts

a minipost

Tomer Hanuka of the School of Visual Arts in New York asked his third year illustration students to create a post-pandemic New Yorker cover.   Some of the pieces were so moving that he posted them on Twitter where they quickly went viral.   So viral that an article appeared in The Washington Post.

 

The power of art never ceases to amaze me.  I'm clearly not an artist, but think visually.  The few beginner art classes I had in school as a teenage played a big role in how I think abstractly.   I don't understand why art, and for that matter liberal arts in general, are on the cutting block these days.  Somehow they're not seen as relevant for the job market.  I think they're necessary if the student is preparing for life long learning.  Of course I'm biased as I was a liberal arts major (physics and math are liberal arts).

 

I've spent some time trying to link art and physical science programs in a couple of colleges. No details as it's been political and was interrupted by the pandemic, but I'm still enthusiastic.  The fact that one of the physics professors is in a rock band helps..

 

getting down to the bedrock

Some areas are built on foundations of fundamental principals that can be built upon.  For example many of the world's religions have a form of the golden rule in their bedrock.  Physics has a few of these cornerstones that are so deep they're considered beautiful and have become guides.  I've been thinking about one of them - complementarity -  a lot recently.  Particularly as it appears outside of physics in many areas probably including some you're used to thinking about.

 

Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein were contemporaries - peers actually.  Both were great sources of quotes.  Einstein's fame is such that it's difficult to figure out exactly what he did say without original sources. Bohr's lack of fame outside of physics makes it easier. Here are a few:

 

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think”

“A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.”

“There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

 

None were meant to be flippant and the last one is one of the richest quotes I know.  Really deep ideas have meanings that go beyond the surface.   As an example consider this question

 "is light a particle or a wave?"

 It turns out it's both, but sometimes it's most useful to describe it as a wave while other times you treat it as a particle.  It's impossible to apply both descriptions at the same time.   The essence of complementarity is there are different ways of looking at the world and each can have its own language and domain where it's true. 

 

You can step back a bit and look at a satellite in orbit.   Physics developed by Newton are good enough to put it there and predicting where it is to good precision, but if you're worried about the accuracy of its clock you need to bring in relativity.  Einstein and Newton offer very different theories that describe orbital motion and how clocks keep time.  Relatively turns out to be richer, but Newton's ideas are good enough for almost everything people normally do - that and I'd hate to describe the motion of a volleyball using special and general relativity.  

 

I won't go into quantum mechanics, but complementarity is at the core how you think about things.  That and like Newton and Einstein's models, there are boundaries where one is more useful than the other.  The trick is knowing both and where the boundary lies.  It's for another discussion, but I think complementarity is a good basis for talking about the concept of free will. 

 

Bohr was so taken with the idea of complementarity that he made it part of his coat of arms with a nod to Eastern religious philosophies and the Order of the Elephant.  (how's that for clickbait?)

 

Light offers another example. Newton used a prism to break whiteish sunlight into a spectrum of colors.  Later Keats objected to the beauty of science claiming Newton unwove the rainbow.  

Do not all charms fly/at the mere touch of cold philosophy?/There was an awful Rainbow once in heaven. 

 In reality something deeper is afoot.

 

 Consider a yellow light on your desk.  The wavelength of the light makes it look yellow, but if you are moving towards at a constant velocity you observe a shorter wavelength.  If you're moving fast enough it looks blue.  Faster still and it's ultraviolet.  If you're moving away the wavelength lengthens and it shifts towards the red.  In fact by selecting your velocity with respect to the light, the wavelength can be anything you want.   In this view of nature the color of light only depends on your velocity relative to it.   It may not seem useful, but it turns out to be one of the most important tools for measuring the size and age of the Universe. 

 

Complementarity appears all over physics and turns out to be a useful way of thinking about new phenomena.   Over time I've come to think of it in areas outside of physics.  The spoken word and a television show can both get across their own versions of something.  Neither is complete and understanding both can lead to a deeper appreciation.  Picasso and Rembrandt had very different portrait styles and both tell us something deep about their subjects in very different ways.  Mix different forms of art - a piece of music might describe the feeling of Winter quite differently from a painting, but both can offer deep if incomplete views of the feeling of the season.   Sports are offer many examples.  Movement in a sport can make statements that added with the emotion of the crowd give a more complete picture.

 

You can't use a flat Earth, geocentric universe, or being able to turn off gravity for an hour tomorrow.  The descriptions have to be valid in some domain  in the first place.  But having two good but very different representations of something in your head at the same time may just lead to a deeper understanding.  Usually you're not thinking about deep truths, but that's fine.  This doesn't come easily, at least not to me, but it's a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. 

 

 

a kid redesigns the olympic symbol

I was in the basement with the brand new Motorola 21 inch color TV and a children's telephone.  The wires snaked out and up to the roof where my Dad was on the other toy phone braving the Montana Winter as we tried to get a usable signal.  It was my first year of high school and the Winter Olympics would be on in a day or two.   The Olympics and we had a COLOR TV!  

 

We sort of got it working by the time the broadcast began.  The Olympic symbol was displayed and the story given

 

... the six colors [including the flag's white background] combined in this way reproduce the colours of every country without exception. The blue and yellow of Sweden, the blue and white of Greece, the tricolor flags of France, England, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Hungary, and the yellow and red of Spain are included, as are the innovative flags of Brazil and Australia, and those of ancient Japan and modern China. This, truly, is an international emblem.

 

It's a very clean design, but it offended my sense of mathematics.

 

My sister had very long hair at the time.  Long enough to sit on.  She was always working on various braids.  The year before I was curious about knots and braids and learned that a simple three strand braid becomes very interesting if you connect the ends.  Take three strands here colored red, blue and green.  Wrap them in a standard braid and go through one cycle so the colors end up where they've started.  (I like to think of braids as musical rounds)

 

 

Rather than repeat the process like my sister, bend them back and connect red to red, blue to blue and green to green.  You'll be left with three loops that are fully linked, but if you remove one the whole works falls apart.  Here's a nice image.  Note that they're not really two dimensional circles as they have to pass over and under each other.  Making this forces you to use three dimensions.  

 

Technically these are a special case of brunnian links - a nontrivial link (a link is a grouping of the loops here) that becomes a set of trivial (unconnected) circles if you pull out one of the loops.  Cut any loop and the whole thing can easily be pulled apart.  Do it with five loops and you'd have powerful symbolism for the Olympic movement - or so I thought.   I knew you can make brunnian links for any odd number of loops so it was time to draw.

 

I sketched a five loop version.  Cut and remove any loop and it all comes apart.  All I had to do was find some way of making a nice drawing.  My sister is the arty one.  She had all of the right kit including some high quality colored pencils.  She also happened to be smart enough to not let me use them - even if I had noble intensions.  

 

Plan B.  Every kid has Crayola crayons.  I selected five and, after a couple of tries, I had it.  

 

(pretend the colors are accurate.  my drawing here is pretty bad, but so was the crayon version)

 

The drawing went into a special international airmail envelope with an explanation of the math and symbolism.  It was addressed to the Olympic organization in Lausanne..  I have yet to hear from them.  Apparently crayon drawings from 15 year olds don't make the cut.

 

I draw quite a bit.  It's an integral part of how I think.  It isn't pretty and I consider it an ephemeral part of thinking and trash it as soon as it's served it's purpose.  If you want meaningful design it's best to use a real designer.

 

I'm looking forward to the games!