Accordiing to The Atlantic, Jason Silva is a ''full-time walking, talking TEDTalk." Being exposed to his ideas has, for me, been akin to a Zen type of immediate satori enlightenment. Finally the universe and everything in it begins to make some sort of cosmic sense.
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The Virtual Revolution is a British television documentary series presented by Dr. Aleks Krotoski, which began airing on BBC Two on 30 January 2010. A co-production between the BBC and the Open University, the series looks at the impact the World Wide Web has had since its inception 20 years ago. The series took a different approach to BBC documentary making by encouraging an open and collaborative production.
Par1 1 "The Great Levelling?"
"The first programme examines the idea of the World Wide Web as a "great leveller", and how this has shaped the development of the web.
Looking at the web as an empowering tool and the access provided to knowledge, Krotoski visits Einar Kvaran, contributor to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. To understand how the web gave rise to Wikipedia, she looks at early online community The WELL, which flourished from the counter-culture and libertarianism of the 1960s, speaking to founder Stewart Brand and John Perry Barlow, who spoke up for online freedom.
Al Gore speaks about blogs and expressing ideas, and Krotoski visits Ory Okolloh, founder of Ushahidi, which gave people a voice following the unrest after the 2007 Kenyan elections.
She then talks with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about inventing the World Wide Web while he was at CERN in the 1980s. Kenyan farmer Kudjo Agbevi discusses empowerment, and Berners-Lee, Barlow and Andrew Keen speak about the lack of a controlling authority and hierarchy. ,,,,,"
The Virtual Revolution Part 1 of 4
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The Amazon rainforest is the epitome of a last great wilderness under threat from modern man. It has become an international cause celebre for environmentalists as powerful agricultural and industrial interests bent on felling trees encroach ever deeper into virgin forest. But the latest evidence suggests that the Amazon is not what it seems.
As more trees are felled, the story of a far less natural Amazon is revealed - enormous manmade structures, even cities, hidden for centuries under what was believed to be untouched forest. All the time archaeologists are discovering ancient, highly fertile soils that can only have been produced by sophisticated agriculture far and wide across the Amazon basin. This startling evidence sheds new light on long-dismissed accounts from the very first conquistadors of an Amazon teeming with people and threatens to turn our whole notion of wilderness on its head. And if even the Amazon turns out to be unnatural, what then for the future of wilderness?
On December 26, 1541, Francisco de Orellana sailed up the newly discovered Amazon River with the Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal who chronicled the expedition. De Caravajal wrote of vast cities with roads and highways, and yet they had all disappeard within 20 years. The book "Relacion del Descubrimiento del Rio Grande de las Amazonas" was not rediscovered until 1895 but was considered to be primarily myth and fabrication.
Secrets Of Eldorado - TERRA PRETA - Horizon [Note, video ends at 0:48:31]
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This is from the third installemt of the BBC documentary series [Unnatural Histories] about the unknown history of the Amazon .
Amazon - Terra Preta [BBC]
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The Thinking Allowed series aired on as many as 120 public TV stations in the U.S. and Canada for more than 18 years. The program features many of the world's leading scholars, researchers, writers and teachers and covers a broad range of topics
In this video 'Synchronicity and the Holographic Universe', Dr. Jeffrey Mislove talks with Michael Talbot.
Michael Talbot was the author of the very important, and successful book 'The Holographic Universe'. He also authored four novels. This program was taped approximately six months before his untimely death in May 1992.
[The Thinking Allowed channel on Youtube has more than 160 fasscinating videos from the PBS broadcasts.]
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"Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature.
A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity.
Fractals: they're famously found in nature and artists have created some incredible renderings as well. Fractals are purely a wonder -- too irregular for Euclidean geometry; iterative and recursive and seemingly infinite. They turn up in food and germs, plants and animals, mountains and water and sky."
I discovered computer fractal design in 1996, some 18 years ago, and have been joyfully playing with the creation of fractal design since that time. The first software program which I used was the venerable Ultrafractal and have used other programs since that time including Mandelbulb3d.
Fractals - Hunting the Hidden Dimension [PBS Nova]
A Timothy Leary for the Viral Video Age [The Atlantic]
"Meet Jason Silva, the fast-talking, media-savvy "performance philosopher" who wants you to love the ecstatic future of your mind.
If you ever wondered what would happen if a young Timothy Leary was wormholed into 2012, complete with a film degree and a Vimeo account, you have your answer: Jason Silva. If Silva, who was born in Venezuela, seems to have natural screen presence, it's because he's no stranger to media; he worked for six years as a host at Current TV before leaving the network last year to become a part-time filmmaker and full-time walking, talking TEDTalk.
Like Leary, Silva is an unabashed optimist; he sees humankind as a species on the brink of technology-enabled transcendence. Silva is an avid evangelist for the technological singularity---the idea that technology will soon bring about a greater-than-human intelligence. ....."
"We Are The Gods Now" was Jason Silva's keynote speech at the "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" - which took place at the Sydney Opera House in December 2012.
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"Fourteen-year-old programmer and software developer Santiago Gonzalez might just be the next Steve Jobs. He already has 15 iOS apps to his name and dreams of designing for Apple. At age 12, Santiago became a full-time college student and is on track to earn his bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering by age 16. By 17, when most teenagers are excited to just have their driver's license, Santiago will have his masters degree.
A self-professed computer nerd, Santiago is fluent in a dozen different programming languages and thousands of people have downloaded his apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Learn how Santiago's parents overcame a rigid school system that left their son intellectually stifled and depressed and instead followed an unconventional pathway to nurture his incredible gifts. Santiago's story is truly inspiring and his family's experience provides a powerful model for parents of exceptionally gifted children."
I recall that during my 4 years of high school in Southern California, though certainly not gifted, I was considered a 'nerd'. This was primarily because my interests did not reflect the values of majority of my classmates. A personal interest in science, foreign languages, history, and high academic standing was considered 'nerdy' behavior.
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"Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210. Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America", he rose to prominence in 1999 while working as a bouncer on Long Island. Langan has developed his own "theory of the relationship between mind and reality" which he calls the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)"
Mr. Langan lives a simple life on a horse ranch in Missouri with his wife and numerous animals.
Langan has said that he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let [his] logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma", yet he does believe in God. He has stated that that "we all exist in what can be called "the Mind of God", and that our individual minds are parts of God's Mind. They are not as powerful as God's Mind, for they are only parts thereof; yet, they are directly connected to the greatest source of knowledge and power that exists. This connection of our minds to the Mind of God, which is like the connection of parts to a whole, is what we sometimes call the soul or spirit, and it is the most crucial and essential part of being human".
Live Moderated Chat: Christopher Langan
Interview with Chris Langan - Part 1 of 3
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
"The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.
A veteran journalist's acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.
In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.
With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.
With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated."
Question:
You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?
Charles P. Pierce:
My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?
It has become increasingly evident that evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity has become a major factor in the dumbing down of the USA. The most powerful nation on the planet has also become the most stupid. and that is unbelieveably sad . , , , , , ,
Idiot America How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Audio Book
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"The Birds-of-Paradise Project reveals the astounding beauty of 39 of the most exquisitely specialized animals on earth. After 8 years and 18 expeditions to New Guinea and Australia, Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman succeeded in capturing images of all 39 species in the bird-of-paradise family for the first time ever. This trailer gives a sense of their monumental undertaking and the spectacular footage that resulted."
Explore more: http://www.birdsofparadiseproject.org
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