The Edge Foundation has some smart guy inside it who asks smart people interesting questions and puts them on the web. This year he or it asked "What are you optimistic about?" See the answers at www.edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html.
One guy's optimistic that it's probably impossible to completely eliminate life on earth. That's not so hugely optimistic, really: he means whatever catastrophe might occur, at least part of the biosphere would endure, even if it's only some kind of plankton-thingy near a heat-crack ten k down inside the earth.
Another is optimistic about skeuomorphism, and offers both a new word and an interesting thought. He is talking of artificial corks that look and function like traditional ones, and he means it is a good thing that new technologies often make quite a substantial effort to imitate or preserve traditional practices or preferences. Some are predictable (I know Cory Doctorow's mostly anti-skeuomorphic work, so I knew precisely what he would say -- and he does), but the great contribution of Edge is that it offers ideas from a lot of very smart people you don't know. Worth a look. (Though it's hard to be optimistic about gender equality in leading-edge Western academic-intellectual circles when you see how few women are in the survey.)
What's to be optimistic about in Canada? Well, like the plankton, it will probably survive!
I felt optimistic to read of "an international conference to re-conceptualize the discipline of Canadian history." It's organized on the belief that Canadian history has been divided between political historians, who insist on the centrality of politics to Canadian questions, and social historians, who insist on microhistory and including the marginalized. Its solution is to bring together some bright young academic scholars who should be impatient with that polarity, and see what they come up with.
I'm not sure the polarity is an adequate description of what Canadian history is doing. Surely the other significant trend has been the post-modern turn, the habit of writing less about the past than about "discourse" on the past: who defines the past, who controls the past, who shapes the questions and frameworks.
Still, I like the idea of letting bright young people run free with ideas. Too bad the conference is in London, England, (in May 2007) and only available to Canadianists with that kind of travel subsidy. Details are and will be available from the website of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, one of the organizing institutions.
