Ancient Aliens Debunked

Posted on October 11, 2012 by RichardPrins

Ancient Aliens Debunked is a 3 hour refutation of the theories proposed on the History Channel series Ancient Aliens. It is essentially a point by point critique of the “ancient astronaut theory” which has been proposed by people like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin as well as many others.

The film covers topics like ancient building sites: Puma Punku, The Pyramids, Baalbek, Incan sites, And Easter Island.

Ancient artifacts: Pacal’s rocket, the Nazca lines, the Tolima “fighter jets”, the Egyptian “light bulb”, Ufo’s in ancient art, and the crystal skulls.

Ancient text issues: Ezekiel’s wheel, Ancient nuclear warfare, Vimana’s, the Anunnaki, and the Nephilim.

All the claims are sourced at the website. It was produced by Chris White and includes commentary from Dr. Michael Hesier.

It is distributed for free on the internet and is a completely non-profit project. Viewers are encouraged to share, and burn copies to DVD, as long as they do not profit from its distribution.

Thoroughly referenced and worth watching, even though it’s three hours long. Hat tip to Skeptic.com for pointing out its existence.

George Dyson – Turing’s Cathedral

Posted on April 7, 2012 by RichardPrins

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Dyson’s account of the origins of modern computing, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.

How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne: The Theory That Would Not Die

Posted on August 23, 2011 by RichardPrins

A new Authors@Google Talk by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne:

“The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy”

Bayes‘ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.

In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of numerous books, including Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries and Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. She is a prize-winning former reporter for Scripps-Howard, Gannett, Crain’s, and other newspapers and has spoken at many scientific conferences, national laboratories, and universities in the United States and abroad. She lives in Seattle with her husband, George F. Bertsch, professor of physics at the University of Washington.

Also see John Allen Paulos’ review of the book in The New York Times.
To get a great intro on the Bayes Theorem read Elizier Yudkowsky’s An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.
Finally, there’s a visual introduction to Bayes’ Theorem by Oscar Bonilla.

David Cannadine: The Construction of National Identities

Posted on August 1, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC’s Big Ideas:

The wartime memoirs of Charles de Gaulle open with a celebrated evocation of his native land: “a certain idea of France”. The words express the widely-held view of the nation as the most significant focus and resonant form of collective human identity, the end point to which the whole of history was inexorably tending, initially in Europe, and eventually throughout the whole world.

In the course of his lecture at Melbourne University’s Festival of Ideas, British historian David Cannadine looks at the evidence for such a proposition and the evidence against. He also explores the part historians themselves have played in the creation and the undermining of national identities. Will the notion of the nation survive in an increasingly globalised world where boundaries are more porous and less defined than ever before?

Sir David Cannadine is the Whitney J Oates Senior Research Scholar within the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is also a history lecturer and author working within the university. Cannadine is the author of twelve books, including “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy”, “Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire”, “Mellon: An American Life” and “Making History Now and Then”.

Izzeldin Abuelaish: I Shall Not Hate

Posted on July 30, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC:

Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish‘s three daughters were killed by an Israeli rocket yet he vowed not to succumb to bitterness and hate, even as he poured out his grief live on an Israeli television program. He tells his incredible story in his book, “I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity“.

At this Sydney Writers Festival session, he’s speaking with magazine journalist David Leser.

Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and infertility expert who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He trained in Egypt, London, Israel, Italy, Belgium and the US, and spent most of his working life working in Israel. Abuelaish worked as a researcher at the Gerner Institute at Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv. He now lives with his remaining family in Toronto.

David Leser has been a journalist for 32 years, working as a feature writer in North America, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. He has been nominated four times for the Walkley Award, winning it in 1999. He has won the Magazine Publishers Association award for feature writing three times. Since 2000 he has been writer-at-large for the ‘Australian Women’s Weekly’. He is the author of four books.

Length: 53 minutes 48 seconds

Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age / Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology

Posted on July 22, 2011 by RichardPrins

Another book discussion, this time in the UC Berkeley series Conversation with History:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly to discuss their book, “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.”

Drawing on their reading of Western classics, Dreyfus and Kelly analyze how different epochs offered unique answers to the question of what is sacred and what can provide meaning for human existence.

They explore the examples of Homer, Jesus, and Melville to highlight differing paradigms of culture practice. Dreyfus and Kelly then trace the transition to the secular age in which nihilism prevails.

They conclude by identifying how a sense of meaning emerges from heroism, athletics, and craftsmanship.

The above playlist (of two videos) also has an episode of the same programme from 2006 that features Hubert Dreyfus discussing “Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology”:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosopher Hubert Dreyfus for a discussion of why machines cannot become human. In their discussion, they talk about the role of philosophy in clarifying what it means to be human.

Also see Sean Kelly’s contribution to The New York Times’ philosophy blog The Stone.

Steven Levy: Inside Google: The Myths, the Culture and the Secret Sauce

Posted on July 18, 2011 by RichardPrins

Via ABC/Fora.tv, a look inside the internet’s powerhouse, currently rolling out Google+, by Steven Levy:

Is it the five-star chefs, free laundry and on-site masseuses that are the secret to Google’s success? Perhaps its unique management style and innovative team? Either way, the revolutionary search engine has so deeply impacted our work and culture that we have turned the company name into a verb.

Despite being one of the most successful and celebrated companies in history, Google maintains an air of mystery, and cultural myths abound. How has Google stayed innovative and cutting edge while making the transition to tech giant? What exactly happens inside the elusive Google campus? Levy took a deep dive into Google management, its products and its company culture. Join us as he shares untold stories and unpacks the mythology behind Google.

Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. Levy is a senior writer for Wired. Previously, he was chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has had articles published in Harper’s, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Rolling Stone. He is regarded (along with Walter Mossberg) as a prominent and respected critic of Apple Inc.

Levy has won several awards, including the “Computer Press Association Award” for a report he co-wrote in 1998 on the Year 2000 problem. In 1984, he wrote a book called Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in which he described a “hacker ethic”, which became a guideline to understanding how computers have advanced into the machines that we know and use today. He identified this Hacker Ethic to consist of key points such as that all information is free, and that this information should be used to “change life for the better”.

Length: 62 minutes 46 seconds

A few more videos on YouTube of similar talks on the book (and Google): Authors@Google 1, Authors@Google 2, Computer History Museum, and The Churchill Club.

Update 20110729: How Google Dominates Us (James Gleick reviews four books on Google for The New York Review of Books)

James Gleick: Bits and Bytes

Posted on July 17, 2011 by RichardPrins

Another one from ABC/Fora.tv:

Former ‘New York Times’ writer James Gleick (the man who popularised “the butterfly effect” in ‘Chaos’) has produced the definitive history of the age in which we live, ‘The Information’.

In Gleick’s book ‘The Information’ he speaks about the information “flood”. He talks with Robyn Williams, presenter of ABC Science and ABC Radio National.

We are in a predicament where we have the ability to reach out and get facts easily. Although we may have access this does not necessarily bring with it knowledge. The gatekeepers of information are more important than ever, due to our reliance on these authorities for truth.

This event was presented by Sydney Writer’s Festival 2011

James Gleick is an author, journalist and biographer whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. His books have popularised concepts such as “The Butterfly Effect” and sold bucketloads around the world. His most recent book, “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood”, is being hailed as his crowning work. Gleick is also the author of the bestselling books “Chaos”, ‘Genius’, ‘Faster’ and a biography of Isaac Newton. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and have been translated into more than 20 languages. James divides his time between New York City and Florida.

Robyn Williams has presented science programs on ABC radio and television since 1972. He is the first journalist to be elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, was a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and is a visiting professor at the University of NSW.