clockworkelves

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TED Mark Plotkin: What the people of the Amazon know that you don’t

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Well spoken Bitcoin "guru" (Andreas Antonopoulos) speaks with Senate of Canada. Good questions, good answers.

This is worth watching if you have the time.

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"Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say."

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"Most people think that Burning Man is a bunch of naked hippies doing drugs in the desert… and they are right. But Burning Man is also much, much more. It has become a giant social experiment. It has launched movements, shaped global organizations and brought creativity to a whole new level to those who are brave enough to face the heat and face themselves in the infamous dust."

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The Four Pillars of a Decentralized Society

Human based trust systems do not scale beyond "Dunbar's number". Technology based trust systems scale infinitely. Decentralized communications Decentralized law Decentralized production (materials and energy) Decentralized finance

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Merrill's mess

"The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

Google was required to delete a link to a factually accurate BBC article about Stan O'Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch.

Article: Merrill's mess

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President José "Pepe" Mujica

"We can almost recycle everything now. If we lived within our means, by being prudent, the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species." (source)

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Why does light travel?

Why does light travel? corpuscle634: "Everything, by nature of simply existing, is "moving" at the speed of light (which really has nothing to do with light: more on that later). Yes, that does include you.

Our understanding of the universe is that the way that we perceive space and time as separate things is, to be frank, wrong. They aren't separate: the universe is made of "spacetime," all one word. A year and a lightyear describe different things in our day to day lives, but from a physicist's point of view, they're actually the exact same thing (depending on what kind of physics you're doing).

In our day to day lives, we define motion as a distance traveled over some amount of time. However, if distances and intervals of time are the exact same thing, that suddenly becomes completely meaningless. "I traveled one foot for every foot that I traveled" is an absolutely absurd statement!

The way it works is that everything in the universe travels through spacetime at some speed which I'll call "c" for the sake of brevity. Remember, motion in spacetime is meaningless, so it makes sense that nothing could be "faster" or "slower" through spacetime than anything else. Everybody and everything travels at one foot per foot, that's just... how it works.

Obviously, though, things do seem to have different speeds. The reason that happens is that time and space are orthogonal, which is sort of a fancy term for "at right angles to each other." North and east, for example, are orthogonal: you can travel as far as you want directly to the north, but it's not going to affect where you are in terms of east/west at all.

Just like how you can travel north without traveling east, you can travel through time without it affecting where you are in space. Conversely, you can travel through space without it affecting where you are in time.

You're (presumably) sitting in your chair right now, which means you're not traveling through space at all. Since you have to travel through spacetime at c (speed of light), though, that means all of your motion is through time.

By the way, this is why time dilation happens: something that's moving very fast relative to you is moving through space, but since they can only travel through spacetime at c, they have to be moving more slowly through time to compensate (from your point of view).

Light, on the other hand, doesn't travel through time at all. The reason it doesn't is somewhat complicated, but it has to do with the fact that it has no mass.

Something that isn't moving that has mass can have energy: that's what E = mc2 means. Light has no mass, but it does have energy. If we plug the mass of light into E=mc2, we get 0, which makes no sense because light has energy. Hence, light can never be stationary.

Not only that, but light can never be stationary from anybody's perspective. Since, like everything else, it travels at c through spacetime, that means all of its "spacetime speed" must be through space, and none of it is through time.

So, light travels at c. Not at all by coincidence, you'll often hear c referred to as the "speed of light in a vacuum." Really, though, it's the speed that everything travels at, and it happens to be the speed that light travels through space at because it has no mass.

edit: By the way, this also covers the common ELI5 question of why nothing can ever travel faster than light, and why things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light. Since everything moves through spacetime at c, nothing can ever exceed it (and no, traveling backwards in time would not fix that). Also, things with mass can always be "stationary" from someone's perspective (like their own), so they always have to move through time at least a little bit, meaning they can never travel through space as fast as light does. They'd have to travel through spacetime faster than c to do that, which, again, is not possible..."

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Jeremy Rifkin interview on "Singularity 1 on 1" show "Jeremy Rifkin is a social activist, economist, futurist and best-selling author of twenty books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. ... During our 97 min conversation with Jeremy Rifkin we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: near zero marginal cost as the deeply embedded paradox in the heart of capitalism; the dematerialization (i.e. the digitalization) of material objects; The Third Industrial Revolution and the decline of capitalism; how US and Canada are becoming outliers while Germany and China are emerging as the new leaders; Dutch Disease and the risk of being a one-trick-pony-type of an economy; decentralization of power and bitcoin; Rifkin's biggest dream and greatest fear; AI and technological unemployment; empathy and the Turing Test..."

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Lecture by Jonathan Harris - Interaction Design

Cowbird

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"Guy makes a short video showing what is REALLY happening in Brasil"

Source and comments

Explanation

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Turbolenza - Out of the Blue

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“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nonconformity and the Creative Life - Shots of Awe

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Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

David Lynch

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POLYMORPHIA

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Free is a Lie

Designer and social entrepreneur Aral Balkan believes it is time to build an alternate future where we own our own tools, services, and data. And to do this we must create a new category of design-led, experience-driven 'technology'.

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Vlad the Astrophysicist