IdeaFestival

The secret to LOST time

One of the 100 most creative people in business according to FAST Company, JJ Abrams has produced one of the most original and compelling stories on television. Here's the secret. He's not just writing a story about time travel - the subject matter is as old as television, after all - but creatively tearing apart the story telling timeline to accomplish that end.

'It's intriguing to play with exactly when you learn elements in a story,' says the Emmy-winning writer-director-producer, referring to Lost, his biggest hit on the small screen. 'It engages audience members in a puzzle where they begin to question everything. It makes them look for clues in what they're watching in a way traditional narrative doesn't.

Wayne

JJ Abrams

Saturn moon harboring life?

In a four minute return engagement, planetary scientist Carolyn Porco tells the audience at this year's TED that the particular heated chemistry of the Saturn moon Enceladus could be an indication that the the small moon with the big geology might harbor microbial life.

Wayne

Cassini

Kentucky chainsaw incident produces blood and Frost

You know you're a literary geek when you have a disagreement with a chainsaw (chainsaw won) and the first thing that comes to your mind is not what to do when a chainsaw rips across your fingers, but a poem by Robert Frost, specifically the first lines from "out out"...

It's true. In my quest to create a very specific, free form table of solid oak, i requested that my husband help me cut up the very large tree limbs which had fallen from an ancient oak tree. He readily agreed and during one fateful moment when I thought i could help by helping to balance the tree limb, "The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard" and then "As if it meant to prove saws know...leaped out..or seemed to leap...However it was, Neither refused the meeting."

"And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled".....

Thank goodness my husband knows what to do in such an emergency.... During the run to the garage for triage i caught a knowing glance which said "this is definitely an emergency room visit," but all i could think of was those damned lines from "out, out" and "the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled." Some might say that the trauma affect of the accident caused me to go to a happy place, but i confess, poetry isn't really my thing. Or at least i didn't think it was.

Unlike the fateful ending in the poem, i'm mending quite well. I'm even typing now with only 6 fingers (the others are all there just incapacitated at the moment.) I'm sure all will be fine but for some odd reason now i want to read "mending wall." sigh.

Tina

Sensual science in the AlloSphere

There are some numbers that can only be known by experiencing them. Mentioned here a few weeks ago, visualcomplexity points out the the conceptual scale of the AlloSphere, a visual simulator the size of a large building designed for projects that overwhelm traditional computing environments. And therein lies the key difference: You don't just watch processes on screen, you engage them from the inside. Visualcomplexity:

Scientifically, it is an instrument for gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture: abstract, higher-dimensional information spaces, the worlds of the very small or very large, and the realms of the very fast or very slow, in fields ranging from nanotechnology to theoretical physics, from proteomics to cosmology, from neurophysiology to the spaces of consciousness, and from new materials to new media.

A TED video on the ambitious project is here. What, one of its creators asks, might be discovered if a team of physicists could stand inside the atom?

Wayne

Allosphere

Chalmers: "pretty well in the dark" on a theory of consciousness

In this 2007 video, philosopher of mind David Chalmers talks about the progress science has made toward decoding consciousness, as well as the difference between the "hard" (PDF) and "soft" problem of human experience. One of the foundational mysteries in an age of scientific and technical wonders, the first person, or subjective, experience of the world continues largely unexplained. Will science will ever relate sentience to the physical facts?

Wayne

For idealists, a Memorial weekend cookout

Warning: some of these ideas may need to be chewed thoroughly. Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

• Musicians remember better.
• I wouldn't mind working here: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang blogs an evening at experimental media and marketing firm Obscura Digital.
• The difference between explained and explained away is important to how we feel about the subject at hand, and is the subject of this post at The Splintered Mind.
• Cosmic Log provides an update on retrocausality experiment Washington physicist John Cramer has been trying to pull off in support of his transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics.
• Not to be maudlin, but when it comes to the best ideas we complete each other. It's true.
• From Freakonomics, this sounds like a parody: "Search giant, search thyself"
• Fantastic crews-eye view of the release of the Hubble after repair - in HD, no less!
• When it comes to global climate change, will science alone save us? Where are the anthropologists and sociologists?
• "Edge economist" Umair Haque: Is this the end of business as we know it?
• Two rival teams are locked in race to discover other Earth-like worlds. SEED has the story.
• Here's a question I'm sure you'll ask this weekend: Is the basis for reality grounded in information or quantum mechanics?
• Numbers that matter: Swivel graphs the amount of 1Q money spent by industry associations lobbying legislators on health care legislation.
• And finally, does recess improve classroom behavior?

Wayne

Other Earths among the Stars

With a shuttle landing all that remains of what by every account has been a fantastically successful mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope (check out this HD crew video of the release), it's time perhaps to point out that in just the last two plus months, not one, but three observatories have been launched to peer deeper and with more resolution into the heavens. Because the mission has a bearing on the question of life, the highly recommended blog Centauri Dreams, which comments on peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, has the following to say about one of them, Kepler.

The telescope has now begun an effort to locate Earth-sized planets in orbits around stars where water is likely to exist. Paul Gilster:

Expect the first discoveries to be gas giants close to their stars, easiest to spot and confirm using Kepler’s transit methods. Then things get even more interesting. This is a mission that should be able to find terrestrial worlds in the ultimate sense; i.e., planets that not only approximate ours in size but are also roughly at the distance required for liquid water to exist at the surface. We still call that distance the ‘habitable zone’ even though it’s becoming clear, as witness the case around Jupiter, that tidal forces can provide immense energies that could extend a different kind of habitable zone much farther from its star. And then there’s Enceladus…

Knowing what we now know about extremophiles, even that standard - must have liquid water - is being fudged. Life is stubbornly persistent. And having found 347 exoplanets over the past roughly dozen years, isn't it interesting that just as soon as our technology was capable of detecting exoplanets, there they were, waiting on open eyes? As Kepler stares at the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way, the latest technologies may begin answering some pretty old questions indeed.

Wayne

Hubble

WolframAlpha: Making all knowledge computable

Aiming to do for numbers what Google has done for text, WolframAlpha wants "to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything," and to make "all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."

Wayne

Wikipedia: numeracy

WolframAlpha

Apples, ideas and perspective

IFblog readers, Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin of the University of Louisville, 2008 speaker at the IdeaFestival and author of "The Altruism Equation" and the forthcoming "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America," recently passed this note. Since it fits the spirit of the festival so well, here it is:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange these ideas, each of us will have two ideas.

George Bernard Shaw

Dr. Dugatkin was also kind enough last year to supply some audio to the IdeaFestival on his work on the biology of perspective.

Wayne

Amy Chua, IdeaFestival Conversation: Diversity as Strategic Imperative

Author of the book "Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall," Yale Law School professor Amy Chua talks about diversity as a strategic national asset in the latest IdeaFestival Conversation.

Wayne