Viral Video - for those who like ideas

In this golden era of public speaking, all those viral presentations range from enlightening (e.g. the best TED talks) to absurd flim-flam (e.g. the worst TED talks)… all the way to the hilariously on-target Onion Talks. I’ve certainly been kept busy in this new century, giving “chatauqua” blather that — I suppose — spans that entire range. Now, some of my best recent talks are available, online!

1. Otherness: Will we supply our own new diversity? Suppose we don't meet aliens. Might we satisfy our thirst for "otherness" anyway, by widening the range of who "we" are? The greatest discovery of recent, scientific civilization has been tolerance. Inclusion of all types, races, genders of people as full citizens, contributing fresh perspectives and wisdom. That task of human-expansion is not complete! But already we're discussing the next phases. Incorporating intelligences that are artificial, or human variants, or uplifted animals. What are the dangers and opportunities?

Explore these Big Ideas along with David Brin's assumption-shattering talk at the Smithsonian, in May 2014.

Alas, the editors of this slide-heavy talk chose to focus mostly on my boring face, which may prevent you from making out the clever illustrations. But you can follow along on Slideshare! Just open the window alongside and click along with me. (Some overlays and animations don't play.)

2. “Indignation, Addiction and Hope: Does it help to be “Mad as Hell?” My talk at TEDxUCSD finally offers a public version of this disturbing notion I’ve been discussing for years — that an unseen addiction is destroying our civilization.

Recent science exposes this as a scam that has produced the most disastrously addictive force in civilization…. a veritable plague of sanctimony that is pushed by cynical media, selling fear while poisoning our native ability to negotiate with one-another.

For a generation, we’ve been taught that the best way to deal with any problem - personal or national or worldwide - is to get mad as hell! 

Oh, certainly problems sometimes merit indignation! But are we abandoning our greatest gift – the ability to actually solve problems?

Again, the TED-itors chose to emphasize my boring face. So here are the slides.  (Most multi-layer and animated slides don’t flow; you’ll just have to imagine!) And see links to some other cool videos, below.

== The ideas get even deeper! ==

 Robert Kuhn’s television series Closer To Truth “gives you access to the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover the fundamental issues of existence. Enjoy new ways of thinking. Appreciate diverse views. Witness intense debates. Express your own opinions. Seek your own answers. Get smarter.”  Wow… that’s a pretty hefty promise!  So why not check out this fabulous series, now fully available online!  

I contributed a few bits to the program, on topics ranging from cosmology and SETI to religion to ESP.  My segments - sorted by show episode and category - can be found here. 

But scan the impressive lists of other folks Kuhn interviewed, some of them WAY smarter than me!  Such as David Deutsch, Freeman Dyson and Francisco Ayala. Mind-blowing stuff.  

== What does it take to be “ethical?” ==

Elsewhere, the topic came up… to what extent is it fair to judge men and women of the past by OUR modern moral standards? And to what extent does that set us up for rebuke by much better descendants?

Certainly some who engage in the modern drug high of sanctimony chide their neighbors partly to lower their own "karma" … but also as a kind of aggression. (See my video on this: cited above!)

And yet the world does need to be saved! And we owe much to heroes who stood up -- in days past -- to question the "common wisdom" of their own times, when it came to racism, sexism, classism or environmental neglect.

There is a litmus that I apply to historical figures and I am willing to see it applied to myself.  Yes, they were products of their times — as am I.  Hence, what I ask is "did you try to be at least two standard deviations BETTER than your times?"

Did you try -- and succeed -- to shift the momentum or arc of your times in better directions?  By that metric, Thomas Jefferson gets some added slack and Abraham Lincoln is let completely out of purgatory.  Sure it's self-serving. This standard lets me continue to eat meat, for example, so long it is judicious and sparing and I keep a nagging conscience affecting how I behave as a much-reduced carnivore. And so long as I am part of the movement to keep applying pressure for better empathy and treatment of animals… plus the technological push for tissue culture meaticulture that may take away the ethical conflict with our evolved natures… I don’t feel too guilt-wracked.

Or is that rationalization? Sure, my pisco vegetarian wife has better karma than I do. She’ll live longer, too! I expect I'll reevaluate next year... and the next.

Likewise, I fight for a better world hard enough to know that I am trying and I cannot be judged as not having cared... yet I still fly in airplanes, drive a car.  I’m not in this to lord my virtuous nature over others, nor to win your approval.  I am in it to be (as Jonas Salk demanded) a "good ancestor."

== Other Cool Media ==

The brainiac philosophers at "A Partially Examined Life" have posted both the two hour podcast of our interview and their followup notes. "What’s the point of thinking? David Brin sees the future as a pressing threat, and Existence speculates that the reason we don’t see evidence of life on other planets is that no species survives its technological adolescence. The solution? We need to be smarter than our parents and work to give our kids the tools to be smarter than we are. In the book, the ultimate hope comes from a concerted effort to develop and diversify the coalition of Earth’s intelligent life, to make “humanity” encompass more than just the biological humans that we currently are."

I tried hard to offer my best stuff since these are the alphas who actually did something with their philosophy majors! Maybe I tried too hard to impress em. Did talk a mile a minute, trying to cover a lot?

And now… here are the cliffs of Torrey Pines north of San Diego .  These men release their  hawks, and then soar with them. way cool.

Of Buddies, Offpspring and Artificial Mythology: A stunningly beautiful video/art riff by renowned artist Bob Vanderbob contains this background remark -- "These (are) times of accelerating change, ill-defined angst, collective paralysis , anger and all sorts of regressive behavior. Times that are scary but also full of potential. It is important that we stay calm. One way to do that is to put our lives into perspective. Look at the big picture. That is what mythology does." -- while he presents images that are gorgeously evocative and thought-provoking.

Your Digital AfterLives: Here’s an interesting rumination, by Eric Steinhart, on the notion that we may be living in a simulation. Some subtleties.

== Miscellany ==

 Overstepping Artifacts, by Musicians with Guns, is a way-cool video that illustrates another great riff on fractal space. I'd love to use this as a basis for the ever-changing metal corals under the seas of Kithrup, in a Startide Rising flick.

See MyDream: a cool build-your-own universe/world game system recently funded on kickstarter.  It seems compatible with what Sheldon Brown and I have been working on... the Exorarium Project.

Are indoor shopping malls vanishing? No new one has been built in the US since 2006 and maybe half of them might disappear soon. For a generation, they were our town square. By all appearances (especially in the age of video arcades) in may be that GenX was the best of all times to be young and hang out.

Science - Technology Roundup

The “High Quality Research Act,” sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), would strip the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process, inserting a new set of funding criteria that is significantly less transparent. Smith, sponsor of the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would expand U.S. oversight over copyrighted intellectual property on the internet, published an editorial in Roll Call describing how his vision of science funding is based not upon the impacts new research may have on the scientific community, but whether that research will “create jobs.” He went on to boast about how much of the House science committee’s $39 billion in agency budgets gets dumped onto nuclear, fracking and “clean coal” projects. Smith has no background in science.  But then, neither do any of the members of the majority party on the House Science Committee.

Deepak Chopra weighs in upon the firestorm over whether TED, the organization that stages wildly popular international Chautauqua lectures, was right to ban from its site talks by psudo-science promoters and "alternative medicine" hucksters.  From my language, you can tell that my sentiment runs against the tide -- the tsunami -- of howls crying out "repression of free enquiry!"  A storm that Dr. Chopra joins.

But no, I won't.  As author of The Transparent Society, I am hugely in favor of openness, transparency and reciprocal accountability.  But the aim of having a wide-open civilization is not - as some would have you believe - that all opinions are equal.  It is that true Reciprocal Accountability is the way that pearls rise out of manure piles.  It is how we figure out which revolutionary or impudent ideas merit further attention and which sink into the simmer of crap, of which Ted Sturgeon called "90% of everything."TED has proved itself to be a marvelous center of entertainment, ideas and discussion.  It should be wide open to concepts that have at least some, tentative balance of evidence in their favor and demonstrably repeatable phenomena to convey.  But we do our fellow citizens, many of whom have proved stupendously gullible (e.g. vaccination panic and climate denialism) no favors when we have ZERO pre-vetting according to the scientific standards that have served our civilization so well.

Impudence?  Yes!  Tilting at paradigms?  Sure thing. Quasi-religious quackery by men who have spent fifty years evading accountable and verifiable experimental disproof of their bald-faced jabber?  Um… I think that, having proved that I am liberal minded, I don't have to drop all of the standards I was trained, as a scientist, to bring into a world that desperately needs them.

==Human Nature and the Blank Slate==

Prof. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature (proving that violence has declined, steeply (per capita), worldwide since 1945), does a TED talk about Human Nature and the Blank Slate -- a topic he dealt with in his his older tome The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Fascinating as usual.

Our children will have so many diagnostic tools to focus on THEIR kids than we clueless parents had.  For example: new research from Bristol and Cardiff universities shows that children whose brains process information more slowly than their peers are at greater risk of psychotic experiences. These can include hearing voices, seeing things that are not present or holding unrealistic beliefs that other people don’t share. These experiences can often be distressing and frightening and interfere with their everyday life.

==Marvels of Earth and Space== 

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered more than 2000 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. Planets with a known size and orbit are shown in this animated graphic from the New York Times, including five planets orbiting Kepler 62, two of which are only 50% larger than Earth and orbit in their somewhat smaller sun's Goldilocks Zone.  These are only the confirmed exoplanets.  There are more than a thousand potential candidates. You live in a civilization that does stuff like this!

Ponder that again. You live in a civilization that does stuff like this! Did that feel good? Now, get righteously pissed off at the fools (of both right and left) who seem hell-bent on repressing anyone, at any time, from feeling the way that you just did.

== And now more ==

Sunjammer spacecraft will 'sail' toward the sun next year -- using a 13,000 square foot sail, a collaboration of the UK Space Agency and NASA.

New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun's surface.

A major mystery of life on Earth is that organisms are exclusively made up of left-handed amino acids (Chirality). One theory is that star-forming regions sometimes exhibit circular polarization of the light from a powerful star, and this polarization may affect the molecules forming near other new stars in the region, causing most or all of the pre-biotic "soup" molecules to prefer one orientation over the other.  Hence, sibling systems born from the same nebula might tend all to be the same molecular twist… and another region will be opposite, with nothing for the first group to eat.

Off the coast of Sri Lanka, photographer Shawn Heinrichs captured a dramatic battle between sperm whales and orcas.  Nature is important and beautiful.  But also very tense and not sweet.

Earth warmed more in the last three decades of the 20th century than it has during any 30 year period in the last 1,400 years. Over the past 1,400 years, the Earth experienced a gradual cooling, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. Between 1971 and 2000, all of the cooling was entirely reversed.

Investors in carbon-intensive business could see $6 trillion losses as policies limiting global warming stop them from exploiting their coal, oil and gas reserves. Excuse me while I fail to weep.  It used to be "conservative" to want efficiency and to believe in waste-not, and to dislike fouling one's own nest.

==Technology Advances==

An Eye Tracker in every smart phone? Gaze and eye tracking are becoming ever-more off-the shelf. Someday I'd like to explore whether my idea from SUNDIVER exploring the latency effects of the unconscious recognizing scenes before the conscious mind does, might lead to a lie detector and personality profiler.  A terrible curse if monopolized by some elite but the best tool to save the Enlightenment, if shared by all.

The small molecule universe, or SMU is the set of all feasible organic molecules below a certain weight. Now, Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh created a virtual library of every compound that could exist. The sections are all marked out--now chemists can get to work filling them in.  Mind you, much attention is now shifting to proteins and large molecules.  Still, the SMUniverse is ripe with opportunities and this may help researchers organize their efforts.  E.g. "the team found vast regions of emptiness, small molecule dark matter, where countless new compounds may fit in like unknown puzzle pieces."

A fascinating article about some NASA engineers meticulously disassembling an Apollo era F-1 Saturn engine and digitizing it so that a new version (modernized) might be reborn in the new Space Launch System (SLS).

MIT's solar cell turns one photon into two electrons -- via singlet exciton fission.

The end of the spacesuit? Nano suit (now only in the larval stage)  could revolutionize space travel.

OpenWorm: an Open Source Virtual Worm simulation, accurate in biology and behavior, to help researchers in biology research.

A filter based upon NASA technology is so powerful it gets rid of everything in the Coke that makes it Coke, and turns it into ... plain water.

Alan Alda is teaching new scientists on how to speak plainly and how this will benefit science.

New methods of generating large volume high density toroidal air plasmas. Just envisioning it gives me the willies!

Roundup… the most-used herbicide… is it a danger to your health? In 2007, as much as 185 million pounds of glyphosate was used by U.S. farmers. And Europe bans three commonly-used pesticides in an effort to protect honeybee colonies.

The marvelous xkcd on scientific outreach !!!!!

Final note:  I'll be talking about this later, but the implications just to science are chilling.  How our ability to deal with modern problems with traditional American agility is being dragged down by those who believe (fervently) that the End of Times are nigh.

A potpourri of ironies for the weekend

Baseball fans, here's a unique (true?) tale of how - just after World War II - a baseball team consisting of Stratford-on-Avon actors and ex-POWs would dress in Elizabethan blouses and crush teams from nearby US air bases. "A dream team "with Paul Robeson (Othello) on first base, Sam Wanamaker (Iago) on second, Laurence Olivier (Coriolanus) on third and Peter O'Toole (Shylock) at shortstop. Albert Finney (a utility player) used to catch for me while Charles Laughton (King Lear) was the plate umpire. When Laughton said, 'Strike three, you're out!' nobody argued."  How I hope some time traveler secretly recorded their baseline trash talk and banter.  What a cute moment for a short story setting. Read: The Strangest Baseball Team in History.

And while we're on the Bard… Ah, consistency. Here is a hilarious moment of aha! realization… something we always knew, but without ever putting the pieces together. You will slap your forehead and cry "d'oh!"

== Inspirational ==

John Cleese has a very large brain! This speech about "how creativity works" is incisive and brilliant! "Telling people how to be creative is easy. It's only being it that's difficult."

Also watch Richard Turure on TED: My invention that made peace with lions. An inspiring young fellow.

One public servant I very much admire… retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates… talking about another who I deemed (elsewhere) to have been the "Man of the 20th Century," George C Marshall. There are grownups in this world. Amid all the preening and posturing, take solace in that fact.

Okay, name for me another species that can do this sort of stuff.  All right, I can't do any of it either… still…

British humor site The Poke presents The Internet: A Warning from History -- an optimistic vision of the future in which humankind has managed (by 2068) to break free from the shackles of YouTube, Flash plug-in crashes, and even, somehow,  cat videos.

Best rope-jumper in the world!

== And disturbing ==

Great big conspiracy flow chart.  It covers almost 15% of the crazy space!

Fascinating how gender imbalance and the one-child policy are affecting weddings and the "bride price" in China.

== And scientific ==

An auspicious anniversary? On 25 April, 1953, Nature published "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by J.D.Watson and F.H.C.Crick, setting out the double helix structure of the molecule of heredity. This year is DNA@60.   Now watch the estimable Roger Bingham interview James Watson in an enlightening Science Channel Show. Or read Watson's The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

As the world’s first building powered by algae, the 15-unit Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House generates biomass and heat with the assistance of 129 integrated glass bioreactor panels (read: micro-algae harvesters). The algae flourish and multiply in a regular cycle until they can be harvested. They are then separated from the rest of the algae and transferred as a thick pulp to the technical room of the BIQ. The little plants are then fermented in an external biogas plant, so that they can be used again to generate biogas.

A stunt, you say?  I know the folks at Heliae, who have announced the launch of their patent pending micro-algae production platform, using sunlight and waste carbon to produce high-value products from algae.

The "Grasshopper" reusable rocket prototype shattered its own record, reaching a height of 820 feet. That's more than triple its previous record.  Oh, and ain't this the way a rocket ship s'pzed ta be?

== Sci fi items ==

Daniel H. Wilson, the young scientist author of engaging novels such as Amped and Robopocalypse gives a talk at Carnegie-Mellon about robotics in science fiction and how it relates to both real technology and our visions of the future.  Bright and funny.  Also,  he reminds me SO much of myself at that hot new author phase… including the hat!

Star Wars on Trial is available on Kindle, and only 99 cents!

…and miscellaneous…

Seven billion people on one browser page (one mile long). Don't send this to your printer...

View inside a Redbox Kiosk.

And finally, compiled by Cracked.com: Five excellent Sci Fi short films worth watching.