Breakdancing and Science - Parallels

Before reading this post, watch a little bit of this:

My fellow dancers from back in Australia

Breakdancing IS a science. It is a collection of physics problems waiting to be solved, each with a complex set of variables which your mind has to consider and then instruct the body to interpret. Its frustrating, haunting, joyful, scary, painful and addictive.

So why do it? 

The ‘error’ in the trial and error hurts; and I mean really hurts. Sometimes all we do is get up again so we can smash ourselves into the ground again!

However, with refinement and perseverance we discover ‘the equation’. I tell you - there is no other feeling like achieving the move we have set out for. Its probably how Einstein felt when he published his theory of relativity.

Foundations

In the same way we build on previous scientific findings to produce new bodies of work, so too in breakdancing is there a logical progression of moves which build upon other foundational moves:

The baby freeze -> the windmill -> flare -> the airflare -> ?

Serendipity

In the same Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, many of the moves that you breakdancers do are the result of accidental discovery.

Findings

Here are some facts that I can reveal from my own trial and error that might be interesting to you:

• Once we ‘get’ a move, you often lose it soon after, and then once you go back to square one and get it back - it stays. This is because we tend to cut corners and forget those ‘foundations’.
• Sleep, smoking (all the best korean bboys smoke like crazy), stress from work, eating junk food -> doesnt really impact on the quality of the session. But emotional stability does. Whether you are depressed or ‘feelin the music’ impacts the most.
• Even though they say training everyday makes you good, sometimes when you’re stuck on a move and come back to it in a few weeks - you have it! (the brain must work in the background).

I’ve set myself the challenge of achieving the ‘Air Flare’. It haunts me to the point

where I cant sleep sometimes.

I Love/Hate Breakdancing…

Quantifying myself

This month has been great for learning new terms. I remember the last great term that I really liked was ‘Design Wank’ which I use now and again to describe the sometimes condescending elitist wanky attitude that I sense from some self proclaimed ‘designers’, which can be usually characterised by use of wanky jargon, or some image of some ridiculously impractical greenwash ‘Eco building’ which is eco because its got solar panels on it and only 0.025% of the population can afford to live in. 

Eco pods - Design wank random case file #1

Hermes Green Yacht - Design wank random case file #2

Below is NOT design wank:

William Kamkwamba a.k.a (a modern day legend) - The african villager who went to the library, learned about electricity and built a wind generator out of spare parts for his village because of lack of infrastructure. 

Sorry, I got side totally tracked!

The new term I picked up is called ‘Self Hacking’. I picked it up from a really interesting bunch of people that I met through a meetup group called ‘The Quantified Self’. http://quantifiedself.com/ This group originally started in San Francisco but has since moved on to London amongst other cities.

As the name suggests, its a group of people who aim to improve their quality of life and understand themselves through self tracking. We probably all do it in some way or another ie. write a journal etc. But once we collect information, what do we do with it? Do we even think of it as a dataset that can be mined? 

‘Self Hackers’ track all sorts of things such as sleep patterns, heart rate etc. I used to track my breakdance training sessions in a bid to find the perfect training formula (I quit when I realised I was just rationalising my procrastination).  

These days in the 2.0 era, it makes sense though that people are empowered to experiment on themselves and share their findings. Given that many studies are carried out over society and groups as a whole, it makes sense too that people are design their own experiments, since there is a big difference if group psychology and the individual as well as the fact that we have our own intricacies.

Hack your mood

Present at this event was one of the creators of http://www.moodscope.com/ Jon Cousins, who has been tracking his and other people’s emotions everyday since 2004. He has found that the tracking and sharing of emotion data with friends leads to a longer term sustained improvement in emotion. One of the smart things about the approach is that it doesn’t ask you ‘How do you feel?’ directly. Instead your emotion is derived through a card game, which is much harder to lie to.

Moodscope happiness trend ticker

Moodscope cards

One of the things that I learned from this group was that for issues such as stress or depression - the act or tracking itself (and rationalising) leads to quantifiable positive change.

More questions?

As with most things, the more you learn, the more questions you have.

1. As I mentioned in a presentation once before about visualisation, collecting and presenting data for the sake of collecting and presenting data doesnt necessarily lead to any positive change. Maybe in the case of human psychology, I was wrong?
2. It takes a certain type of personal mindset to bother to self hack (seek answers through experimentation as opposed to external sources). Is the data reliable, given that those bothering to self hack are those who would typically be actively seeking (and on their way to) improvement anyways? ie: why would people who dont care about energy want energy meters?
3. Can the self-hacking (personalised self analysis- > positive personal change) way of thinking apply to achieve sustainable outcomes at the aggregate level?