The next Categorically Not! is Sunday 7th January. The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with ocassional exceptions). It’s a series – started and run by science writer K. C. Cole – of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. There’s a website of past and upcoming events here. You can also have a look at two of the last two descriptions I did of some events here and here, and the description of a recent special one on Uncertainty that was held at the USC campus is here.
Here is K.C. Cole’s description of the upcoming programme:
Movement: You can’t leave home without it. In fact, you can’t get anywhere without it—whether you’re trying to bring about political change, compose music, send a robot to Mars, or merely make your way across a room. You can’t even think without movement. Yet movement is so ingrained in our lives that we rarely consider how social changes really occur; how our brains and muscles engage in endless neural conversations to perform the most simple tasks; how robots can be endowed with human-like movement.
For our January 7th Categorically Not! we’re delighted to have Carolee Winstein, Professor of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at USC and co-author of the recent EXCITE clinical trial published in JAMA. A movement scientist for the past 20 years, she will talk about human movement in the context of rehabilitation medicine, neuroscience, and the recent case of a tragic loss of life due to a bizarre malfunction of movement in everyday life: the elderly man who ran his car into the Santa Monica farmer’s market.
Robots can tell us a lot about human movement, so we’ll be joined by Carolee’s sometime collaborator Professor Maja Mataric, a roboticist at USC who creates intelligent, socially engaging, machines to help us better understand people, which in turn helps us design machines that can better aid people in rehabilitation, special education, and more. She will talk about the difficulties of getting a robot to move purposely and safely, a task that involves everything from neuroscience (how is movement produced?) and even philosophy (why move at all?)
For a perspective on mass movement, we have Jim Lafferty, the political firebrand who has been much honored for his work as Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles. Jim also hosts the The Lawyers Guild Show on KPFK, and has been leading peace and social justice movements for the past 45 years. He will talk about mass political movements: how they are built and what they have and can accomplish by way of significant political and social change in this country.
As usual, it is held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, come at 6:00pm for drinks, cookies and a look around the space, and there’s a 6:30 start, and they’ll ask for a small donation. Please contact Sherry Frumkin to tell us if you’re coming. Call 310-397-7449 or email sherry [at] santamonicaartstudios.com. If you don’t get around to letting her know, do come anyway! For more information, visit the Categorically Not! website.
I hope to see some of you there, although I am not sure if I can go yet. I may report on it here after the event, and -as usual- you can come and chat about it in the comment thread of this post or the post I do about it.
-cvj
