So what it is about? This is often a dreaded question regardless of whether it concerns your thesis, you new book, or suggestions and ideas to change your company. Many ideas are difficult to put into words. We may know very well what it is all about, yet explaining things is not always that easy.
Scientific ideas are never easy to explain to non-scientists.Yet the same is often true of other ideas and suggestions. The competition Dance your Ph.D. Thesis challenges scientists to explain their research through interpretative dance. A wide range of dance styles is used such as ballet, break dancing, and flaming hula-hoops. Below is a selection of videos with entries to the competition.
Shifting the medium we use to explain something may not only make it easier for others to understand the idea – it may also increase our awareness of the idea. So how do you turn your thesis or suggestion into a dance? Changing the medium that we use to represent something, challenges us to search for the essence to the idea. We have to Think Dive deep and pull out the core concepts of the idea. Extracting concepts from an idea is hard especially if the suggestion or research is abstract. Your idea may be all about maths and figures. So you need to find a way to explain the idea with an example. You also need to become the dance and use your body to communicate the idea.
Children often think by using their body and instead of focusing on costumes, the idea is to explore dance as a medium. Dance is a non-verbal way of communicating. A photographer expresses his or her thoughts by suing the camera, and a painter uses painter. Exploring and expressing ideas by using both verbal and non-verbal communication is not only fun by also a way to Think Dive into different seas. Each sea teaches us different things and new insight may be gained.
Photo: “Breakdance” by graur codrin
thinkibility 
By Merlijn Kerkhof 31 oktober 2017, 02:00. De Volkskrant
How does it sound when you make the ocean compose a piece of music? ©
Sometimes total chaos, sometimes anxiety: the romance of the ocean is now heard. Because a composer went to sea with an oceanographer.
How does an ocean sound? And sounds, say, the Atlantic other than the Pacific? The young composer Stef Veldhuis (25) wants to hear the oceans. No, by hanging on microphones and recording sounds, but by making compositions based on the data of three thousand probes that float across the globe.
The salt and temperature data collected by this vast network of floating buoys is usually used for weather and climate forecasts. Now, these data form the basis for musical elements such as rhythm, pitch, duration and dynamics. During a symposium on oceanography at Utrecht University, this afternoon at Gasthuis Leeuwenbergh in Utrecht, a string quartet of conservatory students brings Music by Oceans to premiere.
Listening can penetrate something much better than when you look at something
It is not merely an artistic expression, because the compositions also have a purpose: to make an insight into how places in the oceans differ. “We usually do that with charts,” explains oceanographer Erik van Sebille, 36, “but listening can help you to penetrate something better than when you look at something. With Stef we try to make complex patterns recognizable. ”
Eight pieces made Veldhuis. Some are long, some are short. Each is based on the information of one of the probes. Van Sebille, who researches the way plastic is transported by ocean currents, will always tell something about the place in the ocean. Then Veldhuis explains how he has converted the data into notes and plays the music.
Sometimes something came out what did not sound, but to leave such a composition?
How the composer has been working? “The extreme temperatures I connected to one lowest and highest note, the other time I chose to connect them to dynamics: then -5 degrees Celsius, for example, Pianissimo and 15 degrees Fortissimo. I have also used different scales. Composing is a difficult term in this case because I did not have full control over the material. ” And what does it sound like? “Sometimes you hear total chaos, a dead cacophony, sometimes an adjustment,” Veldhuis says. “Sometimes something came out what did not sound, but to leave such a composition? That would have been cheating. I surrendered to nature. ”
Van Sebille heard recordings of rehearsals. “For the ordinary visitors it’s about the romance of the ocean. It is still full of riddles; there still have to be