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Josh Silver already has a better way to correct vision, and at a much cheaper cost too. No need for an optometrist either.
Movie demonstration: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses.html
Text Article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=adjustable-eyeglasses-poor

Relevant TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/saul_griffith_on_kites_as_the_future_of_renewable_energy.html I haven't actually watched it but my brother said it pretty much blows all other renewable energy resources out of the water.

Right, because the Scopes Monkey Trail clearly showed how much science was respected 80 years ago.

There are lots of reasons people have lost faith in science, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Vioxx, WMDs, Cold Fusion, and the general lack of trust in authority that has grown since the 60s. Michael Specter makes a good analysis of it here. And really there is no reason to blindly believe scientists or anyone else: it's kind of health to ask for proof, as long as you don't keep denying once you receive it.

Incidentally, you blame corporations, but a lot of the anti-science movement corresponds to the anti-corporation movement as well: the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO propaganda isn't coming from corporations any more than the anti-evolutionists.

There's a great TED talk on the intelligence of crows.

Actually, it is not.

It may violate your ethics, moral guidelines, religion or what-have-you. But it is not stupid. On the contrary, successful cheating does require considerable mental ressources, especially if you want to keep the affair going (and secret) for a long time.

It is also a built-in drive, the same way that hunger and thirst are. Look up Helen E. Fisher and read a few of her books, she is the foremost authority on the biology that drives lust, love and attachment. Here's a great TED talk of hers on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html

Interesting point. Maps are always useful. Here's a great TED talk on maps which specifically delves into the question of the Russia / China border. I forget where it is in the vid, but the whole vid is interesting and it seems as though you might find it a good speech.

http://www.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_maps_the_future_of_countries.html

Viacom has partial content ownership, yes? So, the more Viacom squirms, the more they lay waste to the argument that copyright law is (functionally and intentionally) to protect the creators.

In this case it can only be seen to protect the intermediary party -- what do you think the artists say about this? I'm sure they're appalled with the new Youtube policies. Many of you have already seen this

.

High school students have spent over ten years of their life being judged by teachers and their peers and evaluated on their conformity to external norms. It's a factory-military processing model intended to turn out bulk standardised product regardless of the input.

I won't argue that this is sometimes the case. It is certainly within our institutional memory, but I think if you went into high performing schools, like the one where I teach, you would find the majority of the staff rejecting that model outright. There are a few teachers that still espouse that old philosophy, but they generally find themselves swimming against the current.

Where you really see that mentality is in central offices who aren't willing to take the risk to move away from standardized tests and other evaluative measures that actually encourage the kind of philosophy you are mentioning. It's such an obvious problem that a lot of university schools of education are beginning to teach our future educators to be "subversive" teachers.

My suggestion to you and anyone else who is truly concerned about what is happening in education is to either pester your local board of education, or run for a position on it. We need people who see the inherent value of education to get involved.

Here are two videos on TED that look at the concerns that are voiced by a lot of classroom teachers today. This one addresses the need for creativity in our schools, and this one is a look at the lack of wisdom in our institutions today.

High school students have spent over ten years of their life being judged by teachers and their peers and evaluated on their conformity to external norms. It's a factory-military processing model intended to turn out bulk standardised product regardless of the input.

I won't argue that this is sometimes the case. It is certainly within our institutional memory, but I think if you went into high performing schools, like the one where I teach, you would find the majority of the staff rejecting that model outright. There are a few teachers that still espouse that old philosophy, but they generally find themselves swimming against the current.

Where you really see that mentality is in central offices who aren't willing to take the risk to move away from standardized tests and other evaluative measures that actually encourage the kind of philosophy you are mentioning. It's such an obvious problem that a lot of university schools of education are beginning to teach our future educators to be "subversive" teachers.

My suggestion to you and anyone else who is truly concerned about what is happening in education is to either pester your local board of education, or run for a position on it. We need people who see the inherent value of education to get involved.

Here are two videos on TED that look at the concerns that are voiced by a lot of classroom teachers today. This one addresses the need for creativity in our schools, and this one is a look at the lack of wisdom in our institutions today.

Very cool indeed, saw his speech and demo on TED.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses.html

There's some really fascinating research going on with Cellular Automata by Biologists and Chemists. For instance Seeman, Winfree and others have investigated building cellula automata cells directly out of DNA, and encoding the rules of the CA as dangling "sticky ends". This means that as the cells float around in a test tube (or whatever) they have single strands of DNA reaching out into the solution. If two of these strands come together which have complementary bases (they are designed to complement if they represent a valid rule application) then they pair up to form a double strand, which sticks the two cells together. This makes a physical cellular automata, where a spatial dimension is incremented in place of time.

For a non-in-depth video see here http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/paul_rothemund_details_dna_folding.html

For a bit more meat you can see a physical cellular automata made of DNA here http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl0722830
and a discussion of the computational power of DNA crystallisation here http://www.dna.caltech.edu/Papers/self-assem.pdf . There is LOADS of cool research on this here http://www.dna.caltech.edu/DNAresearch_publications.html

I'm fascinated by this stuff, and used it as the topic for a University essay that I may as well shamelessly promote here http://chriswarbo.webs.com/DNAEssay.pdf ;)

"Linked Data is a sub-topic of the Semantic Web". Its latest technical effort, imho, is RDFa. So, its not like what you portrayed, more like a machine readable way to access web addressable data for re-purposing. See http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

It sounds like it's more related to this TED talk, rather than skipping over a "content provider's" "branding" to "steal" their "content". The model would likely require a more active sense of purpose towards participation and making the data available, rather than having stuff online and some random person linking to it without "permission"

I wonder if this would help out Lisi's theory that the organization, and expression, of particles lines up with the mathematical E8 Lie group?

Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything | Video on TED.com

I just watched a very good and quite relevant TED talk by Lawrence Lessig, about fair use and the freedoms that are being eroded by excessive copyright legislation

I encourage you to watch it too, even though it's a bit long (20min).

Re-examining the remix
http://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed.html

This is relevant.

I give you the first ever TED debate

It may be relevant to your interests.

I thought Pranav Mistry already did something like this with his SixthSense technology?
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

This sure looks like the gimzo that Pranav Mistry developed at MIT. Here's a link to the demo of same at TED, last year: http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

That's really interesting, as was this, last year: http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Why? You mean that making babies costs lots of energy?
...oh wait, it does.

On a more serious note: nice overview of the energy <-> population issue here (by none other than our beloved mr. Gates).

the modern [...] education system [...] attempt[s] to provide broad-ranging bases of abstract knowledge to the students who actually want to learn, and are capable of doing so.

(Editing mine)

Sure. And there is are degrees for that. Math degrees. Physics degrees. Teaching abstract stuff is useless unless you explain, at some point, how those theories can be applied to real world situations.

What you end up with are stupid problems where all the variables are given (or easily findable) in the context of the problem, and absolutely NO "education" of how to find the variables, nor anything else. What you end up with are kids (or young adults) who can probably work a Laplace transform with their eyes closed (90% of the transforms we had to work with were Z-transforms, in other words, ideal scenarios you will NEVER come across when measuring crap), but would never realise that they can use a Laplace transform (and the inverse to calculate the phase delay of a [insert something here].

Current schools (and more specifically, current math and physics, at least in France), do not ask students to formulate questions, or the problems they have to solve themselves. Everything is spoon-fed. The "application of math processes to the world around us" is a sham, a complete utopia that very few teachers have been able to achieve, and sadly I've never met a single one.

Dan Meyer summarises this exceptionally well.

• Lack of initiative: After finishing a lecture, immediately 5 hands go up; students asking to re-explain the whole thing at their desk.
• Lack of perseverance
• Lack of retention: Teachers have to re-explain concepts every 3 months or so. Once they've remembered the formula and aced 10 exercises, they think they store it, but really, the same memory spot gets used for whatever the teacher will explain next.
• Aversion to word problems: Students are usually unable to explain how the problem is setup. They can't paraphrase, because they don't understand.
• Eagerness to formula: Students just want to take their TI-5billion, store a small app that will spit out the result.

The problem is that when students get fed bite-sized problems, that are solvable within 10 minutes (so that the teacher can do a handful in an hour), you completely kill the student's ability to think for longer than 10 minutes. And we do this again, and again, and again. What's even worse, the studies I was talking about in my previous post (GP), we received a "cheat sheet" that had all the formulas for the duration of the degree. Want to know what's even worse? The damn cheat sheet was provided during the exam. Don't believe me? Here is a copy of the exam paper I had a few years ago. Pages 8 'till 14 are standard formulas to help us. That's 6 pages in a 14 page exam.

How do expect people to use the hardcore math they're being taught[1] in real life applications when you *never* ask them to find the variables themselves, *never* ask them "what would be interesting to know about this [insert object]?".

[1]: I shall put aside for once the fact that is utterly ridiculous to try and teach the inner workings of Fourier and Laplace to guys who just got a degree in a branch because they failed math and physics. You don't need Fourier, Laplace and whatever we were taught in order to write java sockets. PS: I loved maths when I lived in Belgium. I participated in what is roughly the equivalent of spelling bee but for maths. Competition math, on a national level. When I moved to France, I started hating it with a passion. Coincidence? Racist maths? I think not. Stupid education system where theoretical knowledge trumps real-life application, yes sir.

With a closed product, the employees have some incentive to come up with the best possible product because bonuses could hinge on good sales and because any team member could get rewarded even more if they came up with a brilliant innovation which set the product apart from the field.

Dan Pink says it doesn't work that way:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

The issue of Foie Gras is much more complicated than just "PETA said so." That's a deliberate cover-up of the truth. In reality, the method of making Foie Gras (gavage) is so grossly inhumane it's sad we continue doing it just because "it tastes good". If anyone is interested, there's a fascinating talk on TED about it.

You are giving without even the hope of having any effect, and you claim to not be empathetic?

You are the reason this test is absurd: indeed, the most selfless generation in 60 years does not consider itself "good". Because if they did, they would not be selfless!

But rejoice, the world is not going as bad as you think it is:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Here is an excellent TED talk that talks about genetically modified food and the fear it creates. He makes the point that fear of the foods is causing significantly more harm than those foods ever have. He compares it to vaccine boycotters, and how each group gets their sense of danger completely out of proportion (really, the danger of measles is much worse than the danger of the vaccine).

In the case of these foods, there isn't even a danger that it will get out into the wild and reproduce or anything like that. If they turn out bad, we can stop making them, it's as simple as that. The risk is really quite modest.

I didn't watch some woman blather for fifteen minutes, when if I had the opportunity, I could read the same shit in three. Posting video links is stupid, Ted Talks is stupid for not having transcripts, and their website sucks for requiring Javascript.

I was sure Ted Talks did have transcripts. I'm sure I remember making a similar objection in the past and somebody putting me in my place with a link to exactly that. On this occasion, however, I scoured the page and couldn't see one. So either I'm being really dim, or you're absolutely right.

(The one time I was persuaded, on the basis that TED talks are really intellectual and insightful and whatnot, to set aside my "videos are (usually) a fucking retarded means of information intake" prejudice and watch a TED talk, some guy rambled for several minutes restating the same tiny concept which could have been stated in a sentence shorter than this one. Seriously, five minutes to cover 10, maybe 12 seconds worth of reading time... even if you're the type who needs to use a finger and move your lips. That's where I reinstated my prejudice and regular policy of ignoring video links.)

The grand finale episode of MacGuffin Island. No real answers, just emotional manipulation. Essentially the same ending as a recent cop show on the BBC, fwiw. J.J. Abrams has a TED talk where he talks about his mystery box. Because he never opened it, he doesn't know what's inside, he prefers the mystery to the reality. It seems like he treats his shows the same way; he doesn't know what the mystery really is, just that mystery itself is interesting.

I don't understand why they bothered to wrap everything in Science Fiction clothes if they weren't going to respect that and instead resolve with a character-driven "spiritual" conclusion. With the ending they gave, the bulk of the series could have been a western, a cop show, a medical show... The LOST writers seemed to have used science fiction trappings only to tell a story in a "weird" way. I would have found the "Bardo church" conclusion much more acceptable, if they had at least _tried_ to address some of the science fiction /mystery aspects first. I think that they really dropped the ball by treating almost everything that drove the characters for the past five seasons as _only_ being a crucible for the formation of relationships. When you have a myth that spans millennia, to have its importance reduced to the relationships between a busload of people does the myth a disservice, as well as being disrespectful to the audience. What made this a "water-cooler" show was not the relationships, but the mysteries.

I can almost picture it... Early on, one of the show runners sticks his head into the writers room and says "We're going to base this partially on that thing by Ambrose Bierce." The writers say "Great!" and then head to the bookstore. The only trouble is that they aren't sure what "thing" the show runner meant, so half of them pick up "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and the other half pick up "The Devil's Dictionary." They'll fix it in post.

The LOST finale was _almost_ like you had been keeping up with Sherlock Holmes stories, but in those Sherlock Holmes stories there was never any resolution to the mysteries contained within. There was a promised extra long finale story that was going to prove that the author(s) knew what they were doing all along. When that finale arrives, you discover that the mysteries had no real solutions, and that the stories were written to get Holmes and Watson laid a lot. If you were only really committed to Holmes and Watson, you found this a satisfying ending, but if the mysteries were much of the reason you were following things, you felt cheated.

It strikes me that they could have explained a couple things fairly easily that would have made for a more balanced myth/character conclusion. Even some expository lump, vague hand waving about the origin of the Dharma Initiative and the relationships between Dharma / Hanso Foundation / Widmore Industries, etc. would have gone a long way, for me. I would have happily traded half the time from the Richard Alpert backstory for some Dharma / Hanso backstory. They've had a few seasons to plan for this, why did it feel slap-dash and rushed?

What's that writing rule? Something like If you see a gun in the first act, it has to be used by the third? The trouble with LOST was that it showed so many "guns" early on, then in subsequent acts those guns turned out to be spears, or maybe fish, and eventually they didn't even matter, anyway. It's funny that almost all the things that fans obsessed over for the last six seasons don't matter, given this ending. Maybe that's the point: let go. Still, LOST was the only show that has been worth talking/thinking about for a long time. This ending only partially makes me regret watching the series.

The Chalkboard from the Simpsons on the same night as the finale: "End of 'LOST': It was all the dog's dream. Watch us." If only that had been true.

Abrams has been pretty open about this: he values mystery more than he values resolution.

Or maybe you just watched JJ Abrams' presentation at TED and forgot about it?

If you've never done hydroponics, it's a fascinating hobby (and not just for pot). High pressure sodium lights are great and all but 85W CFLs work just fine too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murashige_and_Skoog_medium

That might lead you to tissue culture. I enjoyed this book:

Plants From Test Tubes: An Introduction to Micropropagation http://www.timberpress.com/books/plants_test_tubes/kyte/9780881923612

Experiment with signalling chemicals. See, e.g. http://www.phytotechlab.com/

Also, don't forget the fungi. It is rumored that even Paul Stamets started out with Psilocybes, but fungi offer many other gifts to humans. Get some confidence with the PFTek, read the book "The Mushroom Cultivator" and move on to grain transfer methods and casing. Explore other uses for the fungi, e.g. biomass, or thermal depolymerization (fungi to oil).. isolate useful industrial chemicals or unique organic molecules. See this TED talk: http://blog.ted.com/2008/05/paul_stamets.php

If computers and electronics are your thing, instrumentation of your experiments can be very rewarding. With the information from instrumentation, you can build models and have active feedback (e.g. adjust pH, light cycles, automatically adjusting nutrient balance, adding water, you name it). See Norbert Wiener, et al..

It always amazes me the power of buzz-words. I work in medicine and every few years you have a new buzz-word. A few years ago it was "anti-oxidants", and now angiogenesis is starting to pop-up, promising to cure everything from cancer, through impotence all the way to ingrown nails. And then some time passes, and you have some studies done and you find out that "Yes, it is good for some stuff, but isn't a Panacea."
The same thing is happening in IT. You get some concept, in this case open-source, that is good for some things. But then comes along someone who claims it is good for everything! For OS, and file systems, and backup, and web servers, and netbooks, and economy, and biology, and social science, and history (cue Texas joke), and sports, and sex (that should be an xkcd comics).
Of course open source is good for some of those things, and it may be good for what the article is proposing, but please, people, try to use some common sense and see when it is useful and when it isn't.

When Bill Gates was in charge of the Microsoft empire, his goal was to serve the empire. Once he quit and started thinking full time about how to make the world a better place, he has become a hero of mine. I don't mean that in any ironic sense; there is no other prominent voice in the world which is advocating for all the right stuff the way Gates is. If you want to see Gates at his best, watch his 2010 talk at TED. Almost never do I hear a talk like this, where I am prepared to endorse pretty much every word, down to his enthusiastic advocacy of traveling wave reactors.

I found this video interesting:

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement.html

You'll see how they modded a live crab so it could run across a mesh net at near full speed, no change in gait, whereas previously it would have problems.

This video was done in 2005 so the "rethink" definitely happened way before 2010 ;).

Jeff Han in 2006:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1901178468684079368#

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html

Here, build one yourself; http://www.ted.com/talks/joe_derisi_hunts_the_next_killer_virus.html

I've been emailing the office of the prime minister for over two months in regards to the ACTA.

You are doing it wrong.

It's the old adage that you have to teach every new generation what the old one already knows.. if you don't, you get bouts of dark ages.

There's no guarantee that what one person researches and discovers gets shared with all the people who need to know so they don't make mistakes in what they do, the biggest example is of course medicine and doctors, no one wants mis-diagnosis, but it happens, and the problem is that there isn't a educational system which makes sure that people who need to know, know.. you know?

There's a pretty great ted talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html - why isit relevant? because if you want to generate the most competent next generation, you have to motivate them, and to motivate someone, you should know how to motivate people.

We need to motivate people to do the right thing, and to know how to do that, we ourselves need to know how to be properly motivated to see how to do it right.

I also like this ted-talk because it's right, but goes against normality in how we think about motivation. And guess what, if people don't learn this, we'll time and time again get sucked back into the ignorant way of doing things.

There are plenty of professions where there is a real dark-age in how some people know how to do things better, but the profession doesn't change for one reason or another. Probably yours, dear reader, is a part of it and you yourself.

At least, superficially related in that it's to do with how the brain interprets visual data, which covers a similar topic to the New Yorker article:

TED Talk: Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see.

If you haven't already seen it.

Paul Stamets at TED, 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World

"Battelle Laboratories and I joined up, in Bellingham, Washington, there were 4 piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste. One was a control pile, one pile was treated with enzymes, one pile was treated with a bacteria, and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium.

The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes — peroxydases — that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These’re the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So the mycelium become saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned 6 weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark, and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms – and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes re-manufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates — fungal sugars.

But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other 3 piles were dead, dark, and stinky, and the PAH’s — the aromatic hydrocarbons — went from 10 thousand parts per million to less than 200 in 8 weeks. The last image we don’t have — the entire pile was a green berm of life. "

This is truly profound. This soil was not only cleansed of diesel fuel, but returned to a viable healthy ecosystem that attracted other forms of life to re-colonize it.
Can't recall exactly how, but an oceanic solution was touched on during the talk as well.

Agreed. I've counted votes. Writing on the ballot papers is not only useless, it increases the risk of your ballot paper being declared invalid.
If you feel strongly about this, or any other political issue then you might want to watch this TED talk by Omar Ahmad on Political Change with Pen and Paper.
He talks about the best way to get your voice heard by politicians, which turns out to be a hand written letter once a month.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Why? It seems like a damn good idea to me.

Ob: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html

Embarrassing to be Canadian. Well, at least the Pope isn't Canadian, although to hear what he had to say about the internet, he might be on board this paper thing.

What the Domtar dipshit didn't take into account is embodied energy. People tend to have wacky ideas about embodied energy, unless you bother to work the numbers.

Catherine Mohr builds green

Next time I see a solar powered logging truck, I'll think "damn, John Williams was so right".

What's that funny metal pipe, daddy? That's called a muffler, Sally. Back in the day, most logging trucks had one.

Here are some nice photos about how the logging industry used to look before petroleum was banned.

TJ's Woodshop - Logging Photos

Anyone remember the good ole days. Three part equations, observation, experiments hypotheses you know, this sort of stuff as opposed to this sort of stuff

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Many have called Stephen Hawkins a genius and whilst I don't doubt he's a very clever guy (indeed smarter than I), I'm not sure what observable proof of his science we've had to date? On this latest offering/musings on ET - I'm interested in how this thread seems to mostly reflect the view of staying quiet and even mentions (godwin alert) killing hitler as a baby and wiping out other civilisations as an act of compassion as all life is likely to compete itself to death.

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Maybe look at this for some hope in human evolution and violence whilst the evidence presented isn't perfect, it is at least an attempt at evidence not just a single mind kind of making stuff up...

> And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale(...)

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

This is exactly the kind of thing he's famous for doing, so i really wouldn't put it past him.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_branson_s_life_at_30_000_feet.html

There are indeed.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_randi.html

Here you go: Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps