I've always been a fan of the random. Sometimes, the enjoyment is derived from knowing just for the sake of knowing. But the greatest pleasure of knowing things comes from their connection to our reality. I remember Ambeth Ocampo, the Philippine historian who taught our Rizal course back in college, prided himself of teaching us useless information.
Every lecture was a series of useless information about Rizal's quirks, Bonifacio's pants, and the Filipinos who have made trivial contributions to our history. But by the end of the semester, he made it a point to tell the class that the substance was never found in the information themselves, but in their connections with each other. It was never about the facts, but about how we made sense of them and what we are to do about their implications.
The same goes for the appreciation of these information. Facts are just facts. Numbers are just numbers. But it's the stories behind them that we're after. It's the insights that bring color to the otherwise dull and gloomy. And it's only by looking at what's behind the facts that we see them for what more they can be.
This is a list of and about things under-appreciated.
1. An excerpt from Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Let's begin with the largest thing we fail to fully appreciate, the Earth itself.
Carl Sagan was an astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and author. In his book Pale Blue Dot, he wrote a segment inspired by this photo taken by Voyager 1 from the outskirts of our solar system. Around 4 billion miles away from the Earth, Voyager 1 takes a photo of our planet as a mere speck among light rays.
I remember reading this feeling really small. It's easy to feel as if we do not matter because in the grand scheme of the universe, we are but a mere pixel in a photograph. It's easy to feel worthless.
But the exact opposite also follows. It is precisely because our only home is so small compared to the rest of the universe that it is worth so much. Basic economics would tell us, scarcity equals value. This is all we have. This is all we are.
Sagan says it best.
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
2. The Transformative Power of Classical Music, a TED Talk by Benjamin Zander
It's one of the few talks that never fail to leave me a little shiny-eyed after watching it a few times over. Benjamin Zander's talk goes way beyond classical music, and every replay is a different experience.
"You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. This is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath."
3. 99% Invisible Episodes 37, 49, and 108
The first list featured Roman Mars on the TED Stage with a deconstructed podcast done in front of a live audience. He is the host of 99% Invisible, a podcast on design. He and the 99pi team take the objects, places, and architecture that we see everyday and look at the stories behind their designs. While we see, they notice. While we stroll along, they observe.
Below are three podcasts about three objects that we see almost everyday.
Steering Wheel:
The queue:
Barcodes:
The magic in the mundane lies in the stories that make it what it is. The history that led to its current state and its trajectory towards the future, they all help us gain a much deeper appreciation and understanding of our world. And it's usually the simple things that conceal the most outstretched stories.
4. The Unheard story of David and Goliath, a TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell
There is no way Malcolm Gladwell doesn't get featured on this list. The man behind Outliers, Tipping Point, and the podcast Revisionist History, is the master of all things overlooked. His ability to connect and find meaning in the most obscure events in history, pieces of cultures, and social phenomena makes for great narratives and insights.
A lot of his books present simple ideas, ideas that are easy to grasp. The journey it takes to get there, though, is complex and winding, much of which contains tons of research and history. But when all these facts come together in the end, the insight becomes nearly impossible to forget. This is what makes Gladwell such a great writer and storyteller. Things that were once just pages in textbooks and a bunch of statistics become the outline for his mind-blowing ideas. Suddenly, you begin to question what you know as true.
This is Malcolm Gladwell with the untold story of David and Goliath.
The reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong.
5. Nerdwriter Video Essays
Evan Puschak is the Nerdwriter. He creates video essays on Youtube, anayzing ideas, artworks, films and culture. I've always been attracted to his thought process and delivery given that his work focuses on the parts usually unnoticed. The specifics are enlarged so we see what used to be hiding in plain sight.
Here are some of my favorites from his channel.