IdeaFestival

Business next: When atoms become like bits

Check out Wired's story, "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits," which highlights a key business and manufacturing macro-trend: Atoms are increasingly being manipulated as easily as information bits.

Applied to the competitive landscape, innovative ideas can take a more direct route from concept to manufacture. Whether that future happens or not remains, of course, to be seen, but with print-on-demand 3D objects increasingly common, the entrepreneur with a novel idea stands a better chance today than, say, Professor Bob Kerns, who futilely took on Detroit in his quest to manufacture the intermittent wiper blade in the movie, Flash of Genius. Wired :

Today, Kearns would do it differently. As before, he would have made the first prototype in his basement. But rather than building a factory, he would have had the electronics fabbed by one company and the enclosure made by another. He then would have paid a wiper manufacturer in China to create a custom assembly with these components. They would have shipped straight to his customers, the car companies, and the whole process would have happened in months, not years — too fast for big companies to beat him. No factory, no lawsuits, no madness. He could have fulfilled his dream of turning his invention into a company without tilting at windmills.

Related, can post-institutional methods first pioneered on the web match this emerging post-industrial landscape?
Wayne

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

An Owl in flight, Bullet time

Wow. Just wow.

As a raptor, the owl enjoys a number of natural advantages, not the least of which is its stealth, the very meaning of which seems to be embodied in this image.

It also brought to mind the film making technique "bullet time" popularized by John Gaeta in The Matrix.

Hat tip: TYWKIWDBI via Clive Thompson

Wayne

Civilization survival tool

Is the "speculative fiction" found in Sci-Fi a civilization survival tool?

Wayne

Congressional legislation an avalanche

How is Congressional legislation like an avalanche? There are some obvious differences between thinking, reflective members of Congress and a non-thinking physical system (I know, it's a stretch), but a pair of researchers have modeled how legislation gains co-sponsors, and it turns out that it "can be accurately simulated by the avalanches that occur when grains of sand are dropped onto each other to form a pile."

At least for the legislation being studied, the pattern is similar to the Devil's staircase.

As suggested by the physics arXiv blog at Technology Review, the next step might be to replace members with actual grains of sand.

Wayne

Louisville to host Star Stryder

Noted astronomer Pamela Gay will be in Louisville on Friday, April 2 to talk about the discovery of hundreds of new worlds, the possibility of finding life as well as another Earth, and the emergence of "citizen scientists," a bottom-up movement of people contributing their time and clock cycles to advancing the science in fields as diverse as ornithology, particle physics and, through projects like Galaxy Zoo, astronomy.

Pamela Gay is well known and very active in the astronomical and science community, and blogs under the pseudonym "Star Stryder," where the IdeaFestival first encountered her. You may also follow Pamela @starstryder on Twitter.

She also answered "Five Questions" in a 2008 email interview posted elsewhere on the IdeaFestival blog that you might find interesting.

More information about her April appearance will be forthcoming, so mark that date on your calendar. And for the very latest, follow us @ideafestival on Twitter.

Wayne

Video: E.O. Wilson on Human Nature

Famed biologist, entomologist and colleague of 2009 presenter and behavioral biologist Bert Hölldobler, E. O. Wilson is featured in this video from SEED. In it, he offers a definition of behavioral biology, a subject addressed as well at the 2008 IdeaFestival by University of Louisville professor and author of the "Altruism Equation" and, more recently, "Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose," Lee Dugatkin.

"There is such a thing," as he says, as "human nature."

This seemingly common sense idea idea was in direct opposition to much 20th century thinking (that sounds so long ago!) that the human mind was a blank slate, or the view that humans are born without any built in mental content, that all knowledge came from an individual's experience of the world. Of course, "human nature" is an old idea idea to followers of the monotheistic faiths, but, as described by Wilson, the serious study of its biological roots has contributed - in fact, made possible - subsequent studies in behavioral economics.

It's a moving portrait of one of the towering figure in the recent history of science.

Wayne

Link miscellany: Mars' horizon, Moscow's dogs and killer TV

Some links taken from my feed reader this morning:

As planetary scientist Emily Lakdawalla writes, there's an unprecedented amount of visual and sensor data being returned from robotic missions to the corners of our solar system. A lively group of amateur image processors has sprung up to connect the images to the public. The picture above is a composite of eight images taken by the Mars rover, Opportunity.

In Moscow, many of the stray dogs have learned to ride the subway in search of food.

Can TV actually kill you?

Can this chef change the way we think about fast food?

It's a little late for the traditional New Year's speculating, but check out this round up of 2010 technology predictions.

You've probably heard of ways to have a star named for someone. But this adopt a star effort is far different. For $10, your pick in Kepler's field of view will show up in Google Sky. As the orbiting observatory makes new discoveries, information about potential planets around that star will be emailed to you.

Finally, Ethan Zuckerman offers his take on Google's "China move."

Wayne

Image: Data: NASA / JPL / Cornell; Processing: Michael Howard / Glen Nagle

About me (it's not good)

Describing the web author as a "multiple problem child," a serial rule breaker and someone who "should be seen in psychotherapy," this has to be one of the most original about me pages you will ever read. The "Innovative Educator," Lisa Nielsen, uses the page and biography to argue that educators should fix boring schools, not students who are bored.

The kid? Aaron Iba is 26 and just sold his software company to Google.

Wayne

Tidying up conversation

Johnnie Moore connects the art of Jackson Pollock to his practice of facilitation, which reminded me of this very, very funny video of Ursus Wehrli "tidying up art" (and having his own Jackson Pollock moment) so that it's understandable. Straightening up messy art as well as honest conversation can be no improvement at all.

Wayne