creative inspiration – Matthew D. Futter

The Living Root Bridges of Meghalaya, India are a fascinating wonder to behold! Grown naturally and yet carefully cultivated by the trained Khasi and Jaintia tribes who live there, these bridges can withstand the monsoon season. Of course they also avoid rot! Most bridges built from traditional materials would deteriorate swiftly in such a wet locale.

The eleven Living Root Bridges in place today are nearly 180 years old, though the roots are known to last up to 500 years once fully established. As some roots in the bridge age and weaken, the trees are constantly growing others, which can take their place and keep the bridges strong enough to support around 50 people at one time.

Another daily screensaver image led me to this beautiful discovery. There is even a double-decker bridge over one stretch of water!

Update: there may be many more of these beautiful, growing structures in place. A three-year study from 2015-2017 apparently examined dozens of them (and their history), considering applications in modern cities around the world. More ecosystems than simple structures, these Living Root Bridges demonstrate harmony and care that could provide even more obvious benefits to urban areas than the greenery alone, if such a concept could thrive elsewhere.

Something fascinating happened to me today, and for once, I had the awareness to document the journey.

Older readers might remember actually browsing a dictionary or even reading an encyclopedia. Younger readers might never have held such a heavy hardback volume in their hands. But now, everyone with internet access can share in the joy of serendipitous discovery!

I started with a simple article on LinkedIn that looked interesting, on what COVID-19 has taught the IT industry.

After reading that through on a publication site, I found a link to an arresting title on the sidebar: Fusion Fuel Holds The Promise Of Limitless Clean Energy To Power The Planet. Not having read much on fusion lately, and then mostly just theory, the concept of new fuel research gripped me at once.

This second article referenced something else new to me: the AEC SNAP 10A reactor, a nuclear reactor that we apparently sent to space in 1965!

That historical overview filled me in and mentioned two new curiosities. Here’s where my tabs started to pile up:

eutectic NaK alloy used as a coolant – I was today years old when I learned this word
ion thruster propulsion – demonstrated in the 1960s and applied with further success in the early 1970s
- this differs from plasma propulsion engines
- ion thrusters use a Coulomb force
  - we can use this to derive Gauss’s law, and vice versa
  - this is analogous to Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation
    - that was derived from observations by inductive reasoning
      - which contrasts with deductive reasoning
      - and differs from mathematical induction (proof method)
        
        which can be closely related to recursion when extended
        
        recursion appears in language (and humor), mathematics, computer science, biology, and art
        
        examples include an infinite loop in programming, which can be caused by these events:
        
        thrashing
        
        possibly leading to silly window syndrome
        
        deadlock
        
        access violations
        
        other examples include infinite regress, mise en abyme, and the strange loop, which seems to have countless applications and examples in its own article

I explored every one of those links in a single reading session, diving further into each until I either came to something that was so specific that I could not follow it at all, or until it made sense and left me without further inspiration (i.e. it closed the loop of my curiosity). This is one way that I love to learn, and I make clips of subjects that inspire me to return to them for writing or research later on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to start a new reading tree with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (a subset of the fascinating strange loop overview above). There are some terrific references to follow in the third paragraph alone!

Tag: creative inspiration

Briefly: A Symbiotic Wonder of the World

Expansive Thinking