Here’s an awesome talk by Lawrence Krauss on the structure of the Universe, the current state of Cosmology, and why what our remote descendants will eventually conclude about the Universe — based on observation — will be completely wrong:
Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.”
One of my favorite Lawrence Krauss quotes comes from this talk:
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
This is definitely one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen, and by far the most interesting lecture. Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon university who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, talks about what’s important in life and how to achieve the dreams you had back when life was simpler. It’s lengthy, but I dare you to listen for five minutes and try to stop:
This is one of my favorite passages from Carl Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot — the sequel to Cosmos:
We were hunters and foragers.
The frontier was everywhere.
We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.
Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.
We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?
By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re… an adaptable species.
It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.
They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.
If you hold down Left Arrow while watching a video (in the new player), you can play a snake minigame:
The video has to have focus/be ‘active’ in the browser first; the easiest way to accomplish that is to pause and resume the video, then holding down left arrow — or pausing, holding down left arrow, then hitting space to resume the video.
Not that you’d need to play Snake while watching this interesting talk on MINIX 3 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Quantifying happiness isn’t an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being.
First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score from 1 to 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged. Subjects that reported high scores were considered “thriving.” The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings.
In this picture (click for full size), the Sun, which is 109 times larger than the Earth, represents only a single pixel. Think about that for a second. Now consider that the largest star shown, YV Canis Majoris, isn’t even the largest we know of; that title belongs to R136a1, a massive star that shines 10 million times brighter than the Sun and has a surface temperature of roughly 40,000 degrees celsius. Incomprehensible.
I wonder what these celestial monstrosities would be to those of our ancestors who thought a god of our little pixel.
I try to refrain from discussing politics — especially U.S. politics — but I couldn’t resist replying to this chain mail I received from a friend of mine:
From: Michael
To: <Many recipients>
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 00:43
Subject: Letter to Obama
By Lou Pritchett, Procter & Gamble
A LETTER FROM A PROCTER AND GAMBLE EXECUTIVE TO THE PRESIDENT*
THE LAST SENTENCE IS THE MOST CHILLING
Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America ‘s true living legends- an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world’s highest rated speakers. Successful corporate executives everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change management.. Lou changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as “partnering.” Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history.
AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA
Dear President Obama:
You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.
You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.
You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.
You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.
You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.
You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don’t understand it at its core.
You scare me because you lack humility and ‘class’, always blaming others.
On the way home from work, I walked past three kids. They all looked about 6-8 years old. One of the kids — a boy — looked at me and said “Hey Mr. Zombie man!”, then smiled widely at me. I kept on walking, confused, when another one of the kids — a girl this time — turned around and said, “Hey, you! Sorry, he’s a little… you know”, circling her finger around the side of her head. “Oh, don’t worry”, I said.
It took a few seconds, but then I realized: He wasn’t anything — but spot-on.
— the sequel to 
:
