ouroboros

Got to do a short TED talk...

I was chosen by curator Chris Anderson to deliver a short talk during TED2009 on the coping strategies we've developed to deal with how "available" technology has enabled us to become.

I talk about an emergent 'culture of availability' - a culture that doesn't just allow or enable always-on connectivity, it expects it.  The more connected we CAN be, I argue, the higher the obligation/expectation to reciprocate when someone seeks to connect with us. 

Consider the "acceptable lag" between receiving a voicemail and returning a call, receiving an email and replying, receiving a text message and replying or receiving a direct tweet and replying.

With all this connection comes the danger that in our mad rush to be everywhere, we end up  nowhere.  That the technology we use to connect, actually separates and isolates.

I've been meaning to post that presentation and the commentary behind it, but TED.com beat me to the punch and put the talk up today.  Here it is:

BTW - here's a pic of the TED theater, when I came in the day before for a soundcheck and left with my innards frozen in icy terror.

 

TED 2008 - Session 10 - "What Moves You"

I'm writing this from the Monterrey airport, where I will miss the last two sessions of TED, like a jerk.  More on that if anyone is interested.

I was able to sit in the room for session 10.  And it was amazing.  Even now, a day later, by brain is humming.  And as lame as this may sound, my heart is too.  There are posts in many places, TED does a great summary of them.   So I won't try to capture it all.  Instead, I'll poorly summarize each talk in one sentence.

• Rodger Farnsworth:   Having your fingers chewed off by a horse sucks.
• Helen Fisher, neuroscientist, author of Why We Love - Love is a biologic cocktail of Dopamine, Estrogen, Testosterone and Serotonin (videos)
• David Griffin, NAt'l Geographic photo editor: Artists can use static images to tell powerful stories, because the medium emulates the way our minds freeze moments
• Peter Diamandus, space pioneer and visionary: Stephen Hawking loves zero-G (his site)
• Chris Abani,Nigerian novelist, poet, musician:  We are never more beautiful than when we are most ugly, because that's when you learn what you're made of" (interview)
• Benjamin Zander,conductor of the Boston Philharmonic: Ask: "Who am I being that I am not surrounded by shining eyes?" and "If people don't do what you want, its because you didn't enroll them."

What was this session like?  Imagine rooms full of smart interesting folks tearing up while belting out pig german:

TED 2008 - Session #8 'What's Out There'

Brian Cox tips off Session #8, 'What's out there'. 

Below, a shot of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), going online shortly in a quest for Higgs particles (amongst other things...)

Some notes -

Ernest Rutherford said  "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - that is, you can discover particles, but unless you understand the underlying reasons why, you've only collected stamps, not done science.  The LHC is built to understand.  Cox shared an anecdote - when funding was sought for the LHC, Margaret Thatcher said "if you can explain, in language a politician can understand, what you guys do [with the LHC], you can have the money".  So they used a party metaphor - imagine a room full of people at a party.  Someone unpopular can move through easily, particles will move out of the way to let them pass.  Conversely, someone popular will get clogged in people who will gravitate to them.  Known particles of matter are believed to be heavy because they collect theorized, but as yet undiscovered, particles - Higgs particles.  The LHC is meant to help find them.

"What does particle physics mean to me?  It's given us a wonderful narrative, a creation epic for science - at least as valid as the creation myths of the peoples of the high Andes, and frozen north."

Brian Cox's creation myth of science:

Below, Brian in the LHC, from Google images

Robert Ballard, geo-physicist and explorer, goes next.  He asks,"why are we ignoring the oceans?"

"NASA's one year budget would support NOAA's efforts for one thousand years.  Why are people afraid of the ocean?  Or uninterested in 72% of the earth's surface?  Most oceanic discoveries were found by accident...they were looking for  one thing, but found something else.  And by the way, there were more ships exploring the southern hemisphere during Captain cook's time."

50% of the US lies beneath the sea.  And we have better maps of mars than we have of this part of the US mass.
The greatest mountain range on the Earth, 42,000 miles long, is under the water.  Almost a quarter of our planet is  a mountain range we hadn't even visited until after we went to the moon.  The Rift valley is the "boundary of creation".  Photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean (12,000 feet).

Along the Galapagos rift they found heat vents and pipes - a pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean.  massive heavy metal deposits, large commercial grade ore along the range.  But that discovery was dwarfed by the life forms they found.  New life forms - Clams with different organs, that had been taken over by alternate biologic systems using chemosynthesis rather than photo synthesis.

Developed a new system of telepresence to replace the up down 5hr commute of the submersible - automated submersibles began discovering vast undersea edifices they dubbed the "Lost City"...just off San Torini, in a caldera nearby, they found phenomenal vent systems just 2 miles from where folks were sunning themselves on the shore, completely unaware.  And more and more - undersea brine pools and methane volcanoes.  They've discovered our past as well - the Bismarck, the Yorktown, Titanic, Phoenician ships laden with amphorae, ships carrying pre-fab stone temples.

Now they have a boat - decommissioned US naval ship the Okeanos Explorer (below)

Okeanos Explorer will be run like a emergency command center - live hardwired into the 12 universities with oceanic research departments - the boat will be a command center for feeding information from the sea into our minds...

I will not let an adult drive my remote underwater submersibles...they don't have enough video gaming experience..but I will let a kid drive.

We want the children involved, because when you get a jaw drop, you can rewrite that mind...

Why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea?  Why do we have programs to colonize the moon and mars?  Why are we not looking at colonizing our own planet when the technology is at hand?"

Q. are we ready to spread the human meme underwater?

A. Yes.  And we will preserve as well - are building under sea museums - immersionpresents.org, streamed live to visitors online...

Next up, a 3 minuter - Dialog in the Dark - you enter the experience with a dog and a guide - the only way to learn is to encounter...

Then comes Paul Stamets.

This one made my head hurt.  Still trying to figure out what happened.  if you do, let me know.

"Mycyleum infuses all landscapes.  Grand molecular disassemblers of nature.  We are most closely related to fungi than any other kingdom.   we share the same pathogens.  8 miles of mycyleum cells can fit in a single square inch of soil.  They are microfiltration membranes...essentially externalized stomachs and lungs.  Extended neurological membranes.  Mycyleum is the earth's internet - membranes broken will be repaired by the system.  It is system sentient - if you walk a mycyleum field,it will leap up to capture debris after your path.  The Internet, then, is a pattern built on a previous proven system."

Fungi gives off Oxalic acid, which crumbles rock, and creates soil...

Fungi, he suggests (and the fossil record seems to support) inherited the earth after the impact and extinction event - they use radiation as a source of energy, like plants use light.  They grew over twenty feet tall (see above).  Forests of fungi.

In Eastern Oregon, apparently, lives the world's largest mycyleum colony - 2200 acres in size and one cellwall thick...

Fungi are gateway species that open the door for other species - spores attract insects, insects lay eggs, larva are born, birds come, bring seeds and fertilize creating a green field...

We should save old growth forest as a matter of natural defense - the fungi that grow within house incredibly powerful anti-viral pathogens

We need to engage with mycyleum to save the world."

Joshua Klein -  on crows, co-existence, and vending machines for adaptive training

"Crows aren't just surviving with human beings, they are thriving with human beings.  And adapting in pretty unusual ways.  He shows a video of a New Caledonian crow using and improving tools to retrieve foods.  In Tokyo they've learned to drop nuts into traffic so cars can crack then.  Then they stand by the sidewalk until the light changes so they can go out into traffic to retrieve the food safely.  They are learning - from situations then from each other.  And they teach each other as well.

The vending machine as training tool:

They can be trained - what about trash removal?  search and rescue? he's excited by possible of interacting with other species and finding ways to co-exist and mutually support - rather than exterminate..."

Richard Preston, author of Hot Zone, now 'Wild Trees'

"Coastal Redwoods grow up to 380 feet tall, and the oldest living ones may be 2500 years or more old (contemporaneous with the Parthenon).  In recent times (the 70's through the 90's), 96% of the US coastal redwood forests were cut down...about 4% of the primeval forest remains in a string of small parks along the coast of Northern California. 

The redwood seem to exist in their own time.  They are constantly in motion, upward, articulating and filling redwood space over redwood time.  Standing at the base you can't know the tree - like a mouse looking at the foot of the elephant - the bulk is above you.  It was believed that the canopy was a 'redwood desert', but when the first free climber scaled a giant, they discovered a wildly biodiverse 3-dimensional redwood labyrinth, where you lose the ground and the sky - hundreds of feet above the ground.

...Children don't seem to have the same fear of heights as humans [laughter]...

A redwood is a fractal.  They "reiterate", that is, limbs will grow out then spawn a new redwood at the end of the limb which in turn grows up.  If we reiterated like them, our fingers would sprout independent humans.  They also spawn buttresses - limbs that grow across between trunks and re-enter, connecting and supporting.  If portions of it rot, it sends new roots into the rot to extract the nutrients.  They are finding crustaceans living in the soil off the redwood canopies - the same that baleen whales feed off in the oceans.  What they are doing there, no-one knows."

TED 2008, Blog notes for Session #7 - "How We Create"

Thanks to Matthias Hollwich of HWKN, I had a pen and one sheet of paper to capture Session #7.

How We Create?  Read about it on TED.

TED talks in a sentence:

Jay Walker, Priceline founder: My library is cooler than yours.  Forever.

John Knoll, Visual Effects God, creator of Photoshop: Visual effects is creating what doesn't exist (BoingBoing post)

Yves Behar, designer: Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal (FC profile)

Robert Long, origami futurist: "Toes have become an Origami Meme"

Amy Tan: Ambiguity is the cosmological constant, and a question is focus.

Tod Machover:  Music is (a) better if you make it, (b) transformative and (c) shows who you really are

Kaki King - Guitar God - TED 2008

OK.  I'm a newly minted fanboy.  Because Kaki King rocked the goddamn house @ TED.  Visit her MySpace page.  Buy her album.  She's at SXSW, then she's coming to PDX - Doug Fir 3/22.  She could have won that guitar battle from Crossroads, when Ralph Macchio (as Eugene Martone, channeling Ry Cooder) took on Steve Vai (as Jack Butler).  I mean like kicked their asses, combined.

         

TED post #1

OK.  Renny's sort of in heaven right now.  Down here @ the TED bloggers alley in Monterrey.  I feel incredibly lucky to be here, so here is my best attempt to share what I am seeing/hearing.  Typing as I go.  My apologies for typos.

So far:

• Demo of kluster technology - crowdsourcing tool they are using to try to develop a product over the course of TED in a single 72 hour period - seriously check it out.  Kluster leverages game design principles to the brainstorming process - funky
• Lunch sponsored by Nokia, Annsi Vanjoki presenting

1st presenter in the Who Are We bucket:

Louise Leakey, granddaughter of Louis.  Couple of quick notes -

• until 30,000 years ago, we shared earth with at least two other walking apes
• what makes us us?  She suggests collective intelligence, language, consciousness, advanced tool use + the ability to communicate with each other any where in the world...
• avg 'Homo' species has lasted about one million years, but look at us - in only 200K years, 6.5 B people, growing by about 80MM/year.  Technology, she notes, has removed our checks and balances
• "we are most certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our species" - Louis Leakey

Palette cleanser - it costs a lump of coal to transmit one megabyte of data.  That's funky - shows a bag of coal (200 lumps) equating it to one 200Mb file.  Yikes.

Wade Davis got off strong, stayed on a roll:

'We coexisted with neandrathals, but left them in our dust...according to proto-shamanists, cave paintings are 'postcards of nostalgia', not direct artwork reflecting active culture..all of humanity descended from 1000 people who left Africa...there is no progression - different cultures are just different options.   Polynesia - 10K islands.  Wade traveled with Navigators who can determine island group by wave patterns against boat...they know 250 stars by name, can feel 32 different sea swells against the hull of the boat from the inside...if you apply everything it took to get to the moon, to the sea? you get Polynesia.  western science is a major response to minor needs.  our billboards sell underwear, theirs, prayer walls."

Talks about the 4 noble truths:

• all life is suffering
• cause of suffering is ignorance
• ignorance can be overcome
• delineation of a contemplative practice

Said one monk "we may not believe you went to the moon, but you did.  you may not believe we achieve transcendence in a lifetime, but we do"

Andean rituals - go into the mountain as an individual, but you emerge as a community.  Machu piccu was never a "lost city" always linked into road system, but also into the sacred places - rhythms of land play into sacred models - their prayers and their prayers alone maintained their world and society.

Wade spent 6 weeks with the "elder brothers" a deeply religious Peruvian priesthood - that "live and breathe the realm of the sacred chewing .5lbs of coca leaves/day - they pray for the dead with spinning motions, all weaving and look, descendants from the goldsmiths of central America, retreated into the mountains.  Keep men in the sacred field for 18 years, two cycles of 9 years each.  The world is an abstraction
had to be cleansed before visiting - holy men wear no shoes - must never break contact with the earth

For the Inuit, blood and ice are affirmations of life, not signs of death

the world is not flat - it remains a rich tapestry, topography of the spirit - these societies are not failed attempts to be you, they are different answers to "what does it mean to be alive"

industrial society has existed only 300 years - a shallow culture by comparison

Chris Jordan - HOLY COW - takes issues from the raw language of data to make them stories that are meaningful to us.  So we can ask, as a people, "How do we change?"  How do we take responsibility for the one thing we are in charge of - which is our own behavior.

Here's one photo:

detail:

yep, those are plastic cups.  1MM of them.  Same as is used in 6hrs by the US airline industry.

Breast augmentation is becoming the most rapidly growing high school graduation gift.

His "Can Seurat" depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

and the detail shot:

and up close:

 

Next up:  Sxip Shirey, audio artist.  Amazing.  My words suck compared to what sounds he makes.

Then

Stephen Hawking via telecon to Cambridge, addresses four questions:

1. Where did we come from

2. How did the universe come into being

3. are we l alone in the universe

4. is there alien life out there

what is the future of the =human race

Odd to hear a telecon of a virtualized voice talking about the beginning of the universe...thought the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts

Under extreme conditions, time can behave like another dimension of space.  removes distinction between time and space.  means initial laws of evolution apply to creation.  the universe can be created out of nothing.  if fact, we can predict the likelihood.  we think we have solved the mystery - "perhaps we should patent it"

Are we alone?  we believe life arose spontaneously on the earth, so we can assume it has also originated in other places.  but we don't know how life first appeared.  Life appeared on earth within a half billion years of it being possible.  Has been about 10B years - if probability was low, it would have taken longer to form

Are we alone?  well, we haven't meant anyone. doesn't think there are other civilizations at or higher than our level within a few hundred light years.

what is the future of the human race?  we should make sure we survive and reproduce, our use if the planet resources are growing exponentially.  Our genetic code carries a selfish and aggressive instinct - it will be difficult to avoid trouble...Our future is in space.

Thankful his physical condition hasn't been a handicap in his pursuit of knowledge...

[film showed the 7 minutes and the user interface Hawkins uses for answering]

Jill Bolte Taylor - Brain scientist - Neuroanatomist - - starts riffing on Triple Immunofluorescence

Had her own brain hemorrhage 12/10/1996. Lost her left hemisphere, effectively.

Pulls out a brain with dangling spinal column.  seriously.  Audience freaks out.  then she describes the hemispheres.

• right hemisphere - parallel processor - this present moment, right here, right now.  thinks in pictures.  learns through kinestesiology, sensorial input.  we are energy beings connected to each other via our right hemispheres
• left hemisphere - Serial processor - the past and the future.  Pull details out of present moment associates present to past (what we have learned) and projects possibility into the future.  thinks in language, not pictures.  calculating intelligence.  Says "I am", which makes me single and separate from the energy flow, separate from you.

The morning of the stroke, she became aware of her body...she began experiencing her own body from a  distance.   And felt a bad headache coming on.  Standing in her bathroom, she could hear her own internal dialog about which muscles should expand and contract,  Then realized she couldn't define where her body began and ended,  the molecules of her body connected, bled into the molecules of the wall...then left hemisphere brain chatter went silent...

captivated by the energy around her - felt enormous and expansive - then left hemisphere came back on line "we got trouble! we have a problem! we need to get help!" then it drifted back out and she was back in la-la land - had just shed 37 years of emotional baggage, then left hemisphere comes back on line "get help! gotta get to work! can I drive?"...she then realized she was having a stroke, then thought - "omg - this is so cool - how many brain scientists get to study what they study from the inside?"  then left hemisphere said "i don't have TIME for a stroke" - long process to get a colleague on the phone.  In her mind she said "I need help" but sounded like a golden retriever - she didn't know she couldn't speak or understand language until she tried to use it.  Got to the hospital.

Then she woke.

Sensory input was an overload - lights too bright, sounds huge - couldn't identify her own body in space...felt there was no way she could squeeze the enormity of herself back into her body.  Felt like she had found Nirvana.  Could people step to the right of there left hemispheres?  transcend?

2.5 weeks later, they removed a hemorrhage, a blood ball the size of a golf ball.

Her message:

"We have two cognitive minds - we can choose who and how we want to be in the world - and you do choose.  we do choose.  to be single and alone, apart , or together part of the universe."

Session 1 comes to a close.