Mindnever Inspiration

John Delaney: Wiring an interactive ocean

Rudolf Getel — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:25:04 +0000

Oceanographer John Delaney is leading the team that is building an underwater network of high-def cameras and sensors that will turn our ocean into a global interactive lab — sparking an explosion of rich data about the world below.

John Delaney leads the team that is building a cabled network of deep-ocean sensors that will study, over time and space, the way the ocean’s complex processes interact. By networking the… Full bio and more links

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

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything

Rudolf Getel — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:21:06 +0000

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world’s creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.

TED: David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve

Rudolf Getel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:41:01 +0000

As his career grew, David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall. He asks: Does the venue make the music? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock, he explores how context has pushed musical innovation.

David Byrne builds an idiosyncratic world of music, art, writing and film. Full bio and more links

TED: Peter Tyack: The intriguing sound of marine mammals

Rudolf Getel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:37:23 +0000

Peter Tyack of Woods Hole talks about a hidden wonder of the sea: underwater sound. Onstage at Mission Blue, he explains the amazing ways whales use sound and song to communicate across hundreds of miles of ocean.

Peter Tyack studies the the social behavior and acoustic communication in whales and dolphins, learning how these animals use sound to perform critical activities, such as mating and locating food. Full bio and more links

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

TED: Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

Rudolf Getel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:27:21 +0000

At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 — the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.

Benoit Mandelbrot is the pioneer of fractals, a broad and powerful tool in the study of many forms of roughness, in nature and in humanity’s works — including even art. Full bio and more links

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

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

Rudolf Getel — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:52:05 +0000

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness.

Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters (TED Prize winner!)

Rudolf Getel — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:26:27 +0000

The SETI Institute’s Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish: to accelerate our search for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she and her team listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.

Link to this talk

David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think

Rudolf Getel — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:08:02 +0000

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables – cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

link to this TED talk / Devid Merrill’s Siftables project / Devid Merrill at MIT Media Lab

History of the Internet

Rudolf Getel — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:22:15 +0000

“History of the internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

Voice-over by Steve Taylor http://voice-pool.com
You can get more information on this movie on my website
http://www.lonja.de/motion/mo_history…
or on the PICOL-Project site where you can download a pre-release of the icons.
http://blog.picol.org/

Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up

Rudolf Getel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:37:58 +0000

Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit — when no one’s giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.