TED Thyself

I love TED Talks; everybody should. Experts giving lectures in their fields, streamed online for free... what's not to love? I've posted some TED stuff before, so when I saw Dr. Sebastian Wernicke eviscerate the polarities of TED Talk popularity, it was begging to be shared.

"... If you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go!"

Dr. Wernicke illustrates his points so well that you can't help but giggle at all the silly humans, or be inspired to apply his methods. For instance, TED user Claudio Furet commented on the video with a guide to getting "really high votes" on your TED comments.

Get your own tedPAD and start being an expert today.

Scientific Morality

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, presented a TED talk called "Science can answer moral questions" earlier this month. While Harris' disdain for religion is evident and may consequently offend some people, I think his examination of the common themes in human values reaches an important conclusion:

"Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim. This is something we could be right or wrong about. If we've misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience, well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects."

We Are The Machine

Today was the first day I heard the term "Semantic Web" even though people have been talking about it - as far as I can tell - shortly after the creation and implementation of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in web development (officially recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, in 1998). Semantic Web, often referred to as Web 3.0, is driven by metadata, simply defined as "data about data." If you're having trouble understanding, I found a simplified explanation on YouTube.

The most interesting thing about Semantic Web, for me, is that language is at the heart of it. Definitions and organizations of words will ultimately determine how efficiently the internet works for everyone based on their respective searches. It's not that words aren't at the heart of search engines already, but there is a logic being built in metadata that will allow more specific returns (reactions) to queries. Each of us will contribute to a global meta-consciousness through our actions on the Semantic Web. In short, we are collectively paving the way for artificial intelligence: programs with the wealth of the world's prepackaged data at their disposal.

Geekier Than Thou

If you've ever worried about your nerdy hobby or been concerned about your OCD kicking in, just rest in the knowledge that Adam Savage is somewhere out there pushing the envelope. He's also probably attempting to recreate the envelope from pictures in his spare time. But that's only because he destroyed the original envelope on Mythbusters... you know... trying to see if he could make it burn underwater or something.