Here’s something I didn’t see coming. Remember the MIT Open Courseware class on Gödel, Escher, Bach I discovered and wrote about a month ago? Well, that day I submitted it to /r/cogsci on Reddit to bring it to the attention of some people I thought might appreciate it. I expected it to generate little interest, since it wasn’t formal cognitive science narrowly construed, such as a link to an article about cogsci research. Well, I was wrong.
That link became one of the most upvoted submissions to /r/cogsci in recent memory, and generated tremendous interest. Someone cross-posted to /r/philosophy. Around this time I submitted it to Wubel, where it became the featured submission for a few weeks. Then a redditor announced he was going to lead an online scheduled reading of the book with anyone who was interested. His home for this reading, /r/geb, mushroomed from 4 members to over 2700. Big class!
It looks like I launched a kind of online GEB movement. Quite a response to nothing more than free course materials for a beautiful but very intellectually challenging book! I’m happy to see it. Class starts today.
Heather and I with Reichart in the Barn (as seen on the show), not long after the screening.
From Reichart’s Invention USA premiere party the other night. Reichart screened the first two episodes of the show. The show really is great. It’s a little like Mythbusters, at least in spirit, except the “myths” are spun by inventors and its their job to prove if it works, not the hosts. Their job is to be the tough-but-fair judges hewing strictly to science and engineering.
Each episode features two inventions under consideration for further investment. Reichart tends to evaluate it from a business perspective, with an eye towards possible commercialization (as he’s done for years without any TV show); Garrett brings his hard-science skepticism and cheerful willingness to be the adventurous subject of the contraption. The two of them have a natural chemistry that’s very entertaining and cerebral, and how cool it is to see that now on TV. (Well, once I get a copy of the show. I have no TV myself… neither does Reichart.)
It’s not every day that a couple of your friends launch a new TV show, so this is worth mentioning. The History Channel has greenlighted a new show called Invention USA. The hosts are Reichart Von Wolfsheild and Garrett Lisi. They basically search the country for new inventions and technologies that may transform people’s lives. I think they make Garrett the guinea pig. Knowing how these guys think and act, I expect it to be interesting and entertaining.
If you want to watch it–and you should–the pilot premieres this Friday, 12/9, at 10pm/9pm Central. Break a leg guys.
Meet CubeStormer II. Ready to do the job that nobody wants to:
I love how the Rubik’s Cube retracts into the center of the robot and gets secured in place. Then when solved pops out like a car wash. So Hollywood sci-fi. And goddamn it’s fast.
This is a time-lapse video of Black Rock City as it appeared for Burning Man 2011:
There’s something very soothing about the playa experience presented this unique way, as a familiar object from an unfamiliar perspective. It seems like a beautiful cyclical fluorescence, a city coalescing, glowing and dissipating like a desert flower that only blooms once each year. From this perspective, far afield and with day and night flying by in just seconds, the direct, intense, high-energy immediacy of the experience–people, art cars, theme camps, fire, music–dissolves into the large-scale emergence of Black Rock City as a kind of annual organism, torn with whorls of dust in the sunlight, and at night, a radial reactor of high-energy multicolor electric bolts shooting within the city’s great arc. And throughout, the rituals are followed: setup, early arrival, arrival, the man burns, the temple burns, and exodus. Rather than a hyperactive explosion of consumption and hedonism, it almost seems like a religious gathering. Amazing.
