Sydney Opera house

After studying 3D fundamentals, i can better understand and appreciate the beauty of the sydney opera house and how far the esplanade stands, by comparison.

Did the architect connect opera with full sails on purpose?

Morrocan cheese

Will be interesting to go and draw perspective drawings of the angular terrain in a foreign country.
How does each culture decide their architecture?
It looks neat and it looks like cubes of feta cheese that I'm not sure if it's part of their cuisine. Feta is greek I think.

扬州八怪

http://baike.baidu.com/subview/2326/4987555.htm

One of the most creative group of artists, loosely connected, but all of the Qing Dynasty. Including Luo Ping who claimed to have seen the ghouls and ghosts he drew. This picture below depicted all of them together, which is also a figment of the artist's imagination and a forced connection that was made. For the 8 artists never conferred together like that.

Hammer head wears teeshirt

Sharks rule!

Reflection on Video: "Happy secret to better work"

http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work?language=en

Here are some interesting points and reflections derived from the talk.

The importance of Outliers
They illustrate the manners or ways to rise above the average.Though they don't fit neatly in theories and thus inconvenient to explain or acknowledge.

Focusing on the average
There is a tendency to focus on the average or the normal. Even if the "normal" is above a greater average - for example in a class in one of the best schools.
Actually the idea of streaming in school in Singapore is similar to what he said about sitting in a class of smart peers in harvard or yale. people will just tend to feel less special or accomplished (as being a part of an increasingly homogeneous group) and benchmark changes. which in turn affects happiness as well.

Formula for success in singapore context?
The formula for happiness is not: if you work harder > become more successful > more happy
As that means your goalpost keeps shifting further in the other side of the next triumph or success.
Perhaps that's why the singaporeans are not so happy because we are always compelled to do better than our peers, and then streamed according to the results and so on.

Strategies to improve happiness
If we reverse the formula > positive training that will make you more success.
"3 gratitudes" exercise > will help train the brain to scan our environment for good things.
The critical attitude - the need for authority, supervisors, to "value add" by criticising the existing > results or corresponds to the way a sense of authority naturally comes with the one who would give pointers or a new perspective.
The correlation of authority and criticism is confounding, i think.
We ought to reexamine this relationship.
For true and worthy deference and respect is never given resentfully or offered in compensation to escape from a sense of inferiority from the, well, inferior.

Anyway, it's worthwhile to pursue these strategies to be happy and ignore the conventional measures of success such as status, promotion, money, and ostentatious luxuries, such as recognition and fame.

Propaganda

Sometimes propaganda makes forced connection
E.g. linking one's own country progress and greatness to declaration/ justification of war

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/11/north-korea-propaganda-machine-us-boiled-pumpkin/

Forced Pinocchio

PINocchio

Forced salad

Forced fruit feta cheese salad!

Dixit

This is a board game that requires lots of forced connection thinking.
Players will try to connect their pictures with a term/reference, sometimes forcibly.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixit_%28card_game%29

Forced Connections definition

As powerful as the traditional brainstorming is, it has a drawback: All the participants have a common understanding, a collective mind frame that traps them equally in the same box or comfort zone. They all think about the problem in the common terms, and as a result, the normal process of associations eventually becomes unproductive. This is when you need to switch to another Power Thinking technique: Forced Connections.

DEFINITION
Forced connections are based on the brain’s ability to link two disparate items -such as words, objects, feelings, and ideas - and then use the new language generated by the linkages to think through the problem. It is called Forced Connections because it relies on random external triggers that force people to make a connection between the problem at hand and the trigger. These triggers cause people to broaden their perspective.

Extracted from https://brooklynbilbao.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/forced-connections/

9th Week: Forced connection

Group 4 groupwork done in class. Illustrate Pencil, candle, cup with the following adjectives:

1. Passionate
2. sad
3. Brave
4. Creative
5. Greedy
6. Hardworking