The United States government does not want billboards in space.
The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits "obtrusive" advertising in zero gravity.
Keep your space-based advertising tasteful, folks. Think quaint New England hamlet ...
HOME is an ode to the planet's beauty and its delicate harmony. Through the landscapes of 54 countries captured from above, Yann Arthus-Bertrand takes us on an unique journey all around the planet, to contemplate it and to understand it. But HOME is more than a documentary with a message, it is a magnificent movie in its own right. Every breathtaking shot shows the Earth - our Earth - as we have never seen it before. Every image shows the Earth's treasures we are destroying and all the wonders we can still preserve. "From the sky, there's less need for explanations". Our vision becomes more immediate, intuitive and emotional. HOME has an impact on anyone who sees it. It awakens in us the awareness that is needed to change the way we see the world. (HOME embraces the major ecological issues that confront us and shows how everything on our planet is interconnected.)
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will look deeper into the nature of the universe than anything that has gone before, and its’ vast experiments are certain to change our understanding of the world around us. The scale of the engineering involved can sometimes obscure the fact that the project is designed and run by people - hundreds of teams of researchers and collaborators, all driven by the simple desire to increase our understanding of the universe we live in.
‘Colliding Particles’ is a series of films following just one of the teams of physicists involved in the research at the LHC. The project documents their work at the frontiers of particle physics, exploring the human stories behind the research and investigating the workings of the scientific process itself.
From a September 2008 letter to Harper's:
The Reading presents what appears to be a factual affidavit [from one Luis Sancho, about the chances that the earth will be destroyed should the Large Hadron Collider be activated]. Is this a misapprehension on my part? Is this an inside joke that is funny to the editors because you don't believe a word about the danger described? Is your magazine so sophisticated that you would simply report, without comment, the possibility of the careless destruction of the world by a group of scientific researchers?
According to the crack reportage of the Times:
Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.
Just in case:
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?
A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the contestants take turns. But what if the contestants write down their numbers simultaneously, neither aware of the other’s? To introduce a talk on "Big Numbers," I invite two audience volunteers to try exactly this.
Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm. Are you ready? Get set. Go.
Have you read Rucker's classic?
A captivating excursion through the mathematical approaches to the notions of infinity and the implications of that mathematics for the vexing questions on the mind, existence, and consciousness.
It is in the realm of infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.
What about Penrose's The Road to Reality?
"What a joy it is to read a book that doesn't simplify (*), doesn't dodge the difficult questions, and doesn't always pretend to have answers."
Granted, it's not for everyone:
The film opens with her visiting a bookshop and fingering a copy of Roger Penrose's book, The Road to Reality. "Don't want to go there," she mutters to herself. Meanwhile, outside, her bicycle is being stolen.
(*) Ah, Lisa:
Grandma: I saw all your awards, Lisa. They're mighty impressive.
Lisa: Aw, I just keep them out to bug Bart, heh.
Grandma: [reproachful] Don't be bashful. When I was your age, kids made fun of me because I read at the ninth-grade level.
Lisa: Me too!
Grandma: You know, Lisa, I feel like I have an instant rapport with you.
Lisa: [gasps] You didn't dumb it down! You said "rapport".
Like many exceedingly bright people, Marc Weber Tobias has the exhausted air of a know-it-all.
Michael Lopp:
You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.
Decius:
It's a good feeling to team up with a group of smart people and produce something useful over the course of a weekend. More hacking less talking.
John Lanchester:
A common mistake of very smart people is to assume that other people’s minds work in the same way that theirs do.
Paul Graham:
Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.
Malcolm Gladwell:
They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.
James Suroweicki:
The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do.
One lesson of the current market chaos, then, is that it’s hard to get incentives right.
Eric Schmidt:
The "smart people on the hill" method no longer works.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Topic: Science
7:51 am EDT, May 11, 2009
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of David Grann's new book:
In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale.
This is a relentless age we’re living in, a time when innovative solutions — or any solutions, for that matter — to our seemingly infinite problems seem in short supply.
So how do we come up with new ideas? How do we learn to think outside of normal parameters? Are the processes in place for doing so flawed? Do we rely too much on computer models? On consultants? On big-idea gurus lauding the merits of tribes and crowds or of starfish and spiders? On Twitter?
At the risk of sounding like a big-idea guru myself, I can’t help thinking that we’re all so mired in it that we’ve forgotten how to get out of it — how to daydream, invent, engage with the absurd.
David Brooks finally got around to watching Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk.
We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.
What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.
Richard Sennett:
It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?
Back to Brooks:
The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.
The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played ...
David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.
Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.
Gladwell, from last October:
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.
Nir Rosen, in Rolling Stone:
"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."
