Click to read the pages. I’m writing and illustrating a picture book to bring to a conference in New York City next January. The Red Cow is a children’s book about Adam’s quest to rescue his family cow. When Mamo gets swept away in a flood, Adam must rely on his new friend, a schoolboy who comes from a different culture. The two boys and a helpful parent work together to save Mamo. This story combines realism and fantasy to show a child’s seamless grasp of the natural world and technology.
The binary state. It’s on or off. The need to quantize information arose through electronic communication, accurately recreating a signal from one location in a distant place.
Reason assumes form. It can be expressed in words. Awareness is soft by comparison with reason. It can be a feeling, an intuition. Humans are unique in being aware of awareness, but what is aware? Who are you, really?
Each individual is unique and at the same time modular. We can sit in a chair and walk through a door. Our hands grip the tool as well as another. Different people can drink from the same cup.
People tell themselves stories about nature. Stories can transfer information from place to place and from generation to generation. We have the ability to develop our knowledge through culture. New instruments, new data, and new means of communication result in new interpretations of reality. Data visualization is a medium for exploration and storytelling. We use computers to map the genetic code. As billions of people interact online, we use statistics and probability to understand human behavior. Our ability to measure change in population, weather, natural resources leads us to a new understanding of civilization.
It’s a challenge to talk about the atomic structure of matter because our language evolved from a sensual experience of the physical world. Looking at atomic models and saying they’re spherical, there is a tendency to think of a solid. But rather, it’s an energetic polarity that bounds the shape of things. When we talk about the quantum world we use mathematics, statistics, and probability to describe how the particles of the atom behave. For physicists, “particle” refers to elements with behavior much different than we expect from particles in the physical world.