Video – Tami Monroe Canal, the founder of March Against Monsanto, talks about public initiatives that continue to threaten the GMO giant Monsanto, and what we can do to fight the DARK Act, which would take away US citizens’ right to self-reliance. [...]
Tag: talks (page 1 of 2)
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Excerpt from seattletimes.com
Elon Musk thought three major trends would drive the future: the Internet, the quest for sustainable energy and space exploration. He’s got skin in all three games.
The famous entrepreneur isn’t going to live here, at least not yet. But earlier this month he did announce plans to bulk up an engineering center near Seattle for his SpaceX venture. The invitation-only event was held in the shadow of the Space Needle.
If the plan happens, SpaceX would join Planetary Resources and Blue Origin in a budding Puget Sound space hub. With talent from Boeing, the aerospace cluster and University of Washington, this offers fascinating potential for the region’s future.
Elon Musk sounds like the name of a character from a novel that would invariably include the sentence, “he had not yet decided whether to use his powers for good or for evil.”
He is said to have been the inspiration for the character Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. in the “Iron Man” movies. He’s also been compared to Steve Jobs and even Thomas Edison.
The real Musk seems like a nice-enough chap, at least based on his ubiquitous appearances in TED talks and other venues.
Even the semidishy essay in Marie Claire magazine by his first wife, Justine, is mostly about the challenge to the marriage as Musk became very rich, very young, started running with a celebrity crowd and exhibited the monomaniacal behavior common to the entrepreneurial tribe.
A native of South Africa, Musk emigrated to Canada and finally to the United States, where he received degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School. He left Stanford’s Ph.D. program in applied physics after two days to start a business.
In 1995, he co-founded Zip2, an early Internet venture for newspapers. Four years later, he co-founded what would become PayPal. With money from eBay’s acquisition of PayPal, he started SpaceX. He also invested in Tesla Motors, the electric-car company, eventually becoming chief executive. Then there’s Solar City, a major provider of solar-power systems.
Musk has said that early on he sensed three major trends would drive the future: the Internet, the quest for sustainable energy and space exploration. He’s got skin in all three games.
At age 43, Musk is seven years younger than Jeff Bezos and more than 15 years younger than Bill Gates.
His achievements haven’t come without controversy. Tesla played off several states against each other for a battery factory. Nevada, desperate to diversify its low-wage economy, won, if you can call it that.
The price tag was $1.4 billion in incentives and whether it ever pays off for the state is a big question. A Fortune magazine investigation showed Musk not merely as a visionary but also a master manipulator with a shaky deal. Musk, no shrinking violet, fired back on his blog.
SpaceX is a combination of the practical and the hyperambitious, some would say dreamy.
On the practical side, the company is one of those chosen by the U.S. government to resupply the International Space Station. Musk also hopes to put 4,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit to provide inexpensive Internet access worldwide.
The satellite venture will be based here, with no financial incentives from the state.
But he also wants to make space travel less expensive, generate “a lot of money” through SpaceX, and eventually establish a Mars colony.
“SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multiplanetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we’re a true multiplanet species,” he said during a TED presentation.
It’s heady stuff. And attractive enough to lead Google and Fidelity Investments to commit $1 billion to SpaceX.
Also, in contrast with the “rent-seeking” and financial plays of so many of the superwealthy, Musk actually wants to create jobs and solve practical problems.
If there’s a cautionary note, it is that market forces alone can’t address many of our most serious challenges. Indeed, in some cases they make them worse.
Worsening income inequality is the work of the hidden hand, unfettered by antitrust regulation, progressive taxation, unions and protections against race-to-the-bottom globalization.
If the hidden costs of spewing more carbon into the atmosphere are not priced in, we have today’s market failure exacerbating climate change. Electric cars won’t fix that as long as the distortions favoring fossil fuels remain.
So a broken, compromised government that’s cutting research dollars and failing to invest in education and forward-leaning infrastructure is a major impediment.
The United States did not reach the moon because of a clever billionaire, but through a national endeavor to serve the public good. I know, that’s “so 20th century.”
Also, as Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon might argue, visionaries such as Thomas Edison grabbed relatively low-hanging fruit, with electrification creating huge numbers of jobs.
Merely recovering the lost demand of the Great Recession has proved difficult. Another electrificationlike revolution that lifts all boats seems improbable.
I’m not sure that’s true. But it will take more than Iron Man to rescue the many Americans still suffering.
The following statement has been posted by Tedstaff at blog.ted.com: "After due diligence, including a survey of published scientific research and recommendations from our Science Board and our community, we have decided that Graham Hancock’s and Rupert Sheldrake’s talks from TEDxWhitechapel should be removed from distribution on the TEDx YouTube channel... All talks on the TEDxTalks channel represent the opinion of the speaker, not of TED or TEDx, but we feel a responsibility not to provide a platform for talks which appear to have crossed the line into pseudoscience.
Response to the TED Scientific Board’s Statement
Rupert Sheldrake
March 18, 2013
I would like to respond to TED’s claims that my TEDx talk “crossed the line into pseudoscience”, contains ”serious factual errors” and makes “many misleading statements.”
This discussion is taking place because the militant atheist bloggers Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers denounced me, and attacked TED for giving my talk a platform. I was invited to give my talk as part of a TEDx event in Whitechapel, London, called “Challenging Existing Paradigms.” That’s where the problem lies: my talk explicitly challenges the materialist belief system. It summarized some of the main themes of my recent book Science Set Free (in the UK called The Science Delusion). Unfortunately, the TED administrators have publically aligned themselves with the old paradigm of materialism, which has dominated science since the late nineteenth century.
TED say they removed my talk from their website on the advice of their Scientific Board, who also condemned Graham Hancock’s talk. Hancock and I are now facing anonymous accusations made by a body on whose authority TED relies, on whose advice they act, and behind whom they shelter, but whose names they have not revealed.
TED’s anonymous Scientific Board made three specific accusations:
Accusation 1:“he suggests that scientists reject the notion that animals have consciousness, despite the fact that it’s generally accepted that animals have some form of consciousness, and there’s much research and literature exploring the idea.”
I characterized the materialist dogma as follows: “Matter is unconscious: the whole universe is made up of unconscious matter. There’s no consciousness in stars in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants and there ought not to be any in us either, if this theory’s true. So a lot of the philosophy of mind over the last 100 years has been trying to prove that we are not really conscious at all.” Certainly some biologists, including myself, accept that animals are conscious. In August, 2012, a group of scientists came out with an endorsement of animal consciousness in “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness”. As Discovery News reported, “While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it’s the open acknowledgement that’s the big news here.” (http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics/animals-consciousness-mammals-birds-octopus-120824.htm)
But materialist philosophers and scientists are still in the majority, and they argue that consciousness does nothing – it is either an illusion or an ”epiphenomenon” of brain activity. It might as well not exist in animals – or even in humans. That is why in the philosophy of mind, the very existence of consciousness is often called “the hard problem”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Accusation 2:“He also argues that scientists have ignored variations in the measurements of natural constants, using as his primary example the dogmatic assumption that a constant must be constant and uses the speed of light as example.… Physicist Sean Carroll wrote a careful rebuttal of this point.”
TED’s Scientific Board refers to a Scientific American article that makes my point very clearly: “Physicists routinely assume that quantities such as the speed of light are constant.”
In my talk I said that the published values of the speed of light dropped by about 20 km/sec between 1928 and 1945. Carroll’s “careful rebuttal” consisted of a table copied from Wikipedia showing the speed of light at different dates, with a gap between 1926 and 1950, omitting the very period I referred to. His other reference (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/lightandcolor/speedoflight.html) does indeed give two values for the speed of light in this period, in 1928 and 1932-35, and sure enough, they were 20 and 24km/sec lower than the previous value, and 14 and 18 km/sec lower than the value from 1947 onwards.
1926: 299,798
1928: 299,778
1932-5: 299,774
1947: 299,792
In my talk I suggest how a re-examination of existing data could resolve whether large continuing variations in the Universal Gravitational Constant, G, are merely errors, as usually assumed, or whether they show correlations between different labs that might have important scientific implications hitherto ignored. Jerry Coyne and TED’s Scientific Board regard this as an exercise in pseudoscience. I think their attitude reveals a remarkable lack of curiosity.
Accusation 3:“Sheldrake claims to have “evidence” of morphic resonance in crystal formation and rat behavior. The research has never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, despite attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work.”
I said, “There is in fact good evidence that new compounds get easier to crystallize all around the world.” For example, turanose, a kind of sugar, was considered to be a liquid for decades, until it first crystallized in the 1920s. Thereafter it formed crystals everyehere. (Woodard and McCrone Journal of Applied Crystallography (1975). 8, 342). The American chemist C. P. Saylor, remarked it was as though “the seeds of crystallization, as dust, were carried upon the winds from end to end of the earth” (quoted by Woodard and McCrone).
The research on rat behavior I referred to was carried out at Harvard and the Universities of Melbourne and Edinburgh and was published in peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Experimental Biology. For a fuller account and detailed references see Chapter 11 of my book Morphic Resonance (in the US) / A New Science of Life (in the UK). The relevant passage is online here: http://sciencesetfree.tumblr.com/
The TED Scientific Board refers to ”attempts by other scientists eager to replicate the work” on morphic resonance. I would be happy to work with these eager scientists if the Scientific Board can reveal who they are.
This is a good opportunity to correct an oversimplification in my talk. In relation to the dogma that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works, I said, “that’s why governments only fund mechanistic medicine and ignore complementary and alternative therapies.” This is true of most governments, but the US is a notable exception. The US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine receives about $130 million a year, about 0.4% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) total annual budget of $31 billion.
Obviously I could not spell out all the details of my arguments in an 18-minute talk, but TED’s claims that it contains “serious factual errors,” “many misleading statements” and that it crosses the line into “pseudoscience” are defamatory and false.
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Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, disastrous" movement to stamp out the drug trade. He gives two big reasons we should focu...
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| The 10-meter South Pole Telescope and the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) Telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which detected evidence of gravitational waves, is seen against the night sky with the Milky Way in this National Science Foundation picture taken in August 2008. |
By Ben P. Stein, Inside Science
Harvard researchers rocked the science community last March with an apparent discovery of gravitational ripples that gave credence to cosmic inflation theory – a finding that met as much skepticism as enthusiasm. Now, further analysis raises more doubts.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This phrase, popularized by the late Carl Sagan, kept going through my head on March 17, the day that researchers involved with BICEP2, a telescope in Antarctica, made a big announcement at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The researchers reported that BICEP2 detected gravitational waves from the first moments after the big bang, a feat, which if confirmed, would open up a new field of study and would surely be recognized in a future Nobel Prize.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time. They're created when any object with mass accelerates. However, they're extremely weak, making them very hard to detect directly. Even for the most massive and cataclysmic events, such as the collision of two black holes, their effects, observed from Earth, are very hard to detect.
If you're looking for a detectable gravitational wave signal, what bigger event can there be than cosmic inflation? According to inflation theory, the universe multiplied its size by as much as 10 trillion trillion trillion times in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. Inflation would have generated lots of gravitational waves. In turn, gravitational waves can subtly change the properties of light that they pass through. Specifically, they can slightly affect the polarization of light, the direction in which light's electric fields vibrate. The universe's rapid expansion during inflation would have amplified the waves' imprint on the early light in the universe.
The state-of-the-art BICEP2 experiment, which uses super-sensitive superconducting sensors, could detect tiny changes in polarization in the cosmic microwave background, the very first light released in the universe, which is still reaching us today. The BICEP2 researchers reported a very high polarization signal, known as B-mode polarization after its characteristics, in the cosmic microwave background, which they interpreted as a strong gravitational wave signal in the early universe.
Detecting this polarization signal was a striking result, announced in a series of scientific talks and a press conference shortly after a preprint of the paper was posted online. Notice these last two points: announced at a press conference, and a preprint posted online. A preprint is a written paper that has not been formally reviewed by independent peers or published in a scientific journal.
Nonetheless, scientists and reporters alike reported excitement over the results. If true, they would provide the greatest experimental support yet of cosmic inflation, and the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Previously, gravitational waves have been detected indirectly, such as in observations of pairs of stars falling towards each other: they were losing energy in the form of gravitational waves.
On the day of the BICEP2 announcement, and for many days afterward, people were largely accepting the results as correct and already jumping to the implications of the BICEP2 results for what appeared to be a new era of gravitational-wave cosmology.
In writing my story for Inside Science News Service, I was fortunate to get an early voice of skepticism from David Spergel, a theoretical cosmologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. He commented:
"Given the importance of this result, my starting point is to be skeptical. Most importantly, there are several independent experimental groups that will test this result in the next year."
Spergel explained that the new gravitational wave measurements did not appear to agree with those of previous experiments, known as WMAP and Planck, unless the simplest models of inflation were replaced by more complicated ones. On the first day and week of coverage, I became very disappointed with the many commentators who disregarded or underemphasized that the earlier measurements from instruments on WMAP and Planck, which had been reported and covered for years.
Sure enough, in the weeks that followed, other researchers pointed out that the signal that BICEP2 detected may have been attributable to the polarization of light caused by dust in our galaxy. The BICEP2 team certainly knew that dust could also polarize light in a similar way to gravitational waves, but they used a model, based on the data that was available from the Planck satellite, that, the other researchers pointed out, may have underestimated the amount of dust in the part of the sky they were studying.
The BICEP2 paper underwent peer review and was published in Physical Review Letters. As a result of the peer-review process, the researchers made revisions, including removing the model that contained the lower estimates of dust based on the earlier Planck data, and thereby reducing the certainty with which they could state that they accounted for signals from interstellar dust.
During the summer, the BICEP2 and Planck collaborations agreed to work together to analyze their data, to help determine if gravitational waves had really been detected.
This week, the Planck team issued a preprint, based on an analysis of much additional data, showing a comprehensive map of dust in the sky. According to their analysis, the signal in the part of sky that BICEP2 analyzed could be completely attributable to dust and not to gravitational waves.
But, the story is not over. For starters, keep in mind the new preprint, like all newly posted publications, still needs to undergo formal peer review.
And the latest data do not completely rule out the possibility that the BICEP2 group detected a gravitational wave signal. If the evidence holds up at all, it would likely be a weaker signal, after accounting for the dust. Or, the gravitational-wave signal may completely turn to dust.
It may be possible to detect primordial gravitational waves in a different, less dusty part of the sky, or with new measurements by BICEP2, Planck or the many other experiments that are looking for them. Just as the first reported detections of exoplanets turned out to be false, perhaps this is a prelude to an actual detection of gravitational waves.
"You cannot ignore dust," he quotes from Planck scientist Charles Lawrence of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The biggest lesson, to me, is that no one should rush to make announcements and pronouncements, whether big or small, even in the face of intense competition and the alluring prospects of launching a new field of study and winning a Nobel Prize.
Scientists, and the rest of the public, should follow the time-tested scientific practice of subjecting claims to sufficient levels of scrutiny, and waiting for other groups to validate results, before making bold statements. At the very least, there have been major caveats and qualifiers in announcing new data with potentially huge implications.
There has been many questions and confusion as of late as to how the Ascension Process is going, what has happened, and what has yet to happen. The process of Ascension (also referred to as raising consciousness or raising vibration) is being activated by a Universal energy known as the Photon Belt.The Photon Belt has been named Dark Matter by the scientific community, and is currently being studied by those in the fields of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The Photon Belt appears as a dark st [...]
According to the research of David Wilcock, there is an impending shift going on within our solar system that will give us all the opportunity to make a quantum leap in consciousness.I was watching a "Contact In The Desert" video featuringDavid Wilcock and he brought up some information that is quite fascinating.The following is an excerpt from "The Brown Notebook" which is a channeling from Walt Rogers that was done in the 1950's. Much of what was channeled is proving to be tr [...]
In “She Used to Be In A Wheelchair – The TED Talk That Comes With a Warning” I showcase Dr. Terry Wahls who successfully reversed her debilitating multiple sclerosis with the application of nutrients and meditation. She talks about the importance “minding your mitochondria” and how lifestyle, diet and environment can switch genes on or off. Similarly, there are people reversing ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease using similar methods.What’s [...]
Have you ever seen some energy out of the corner of your eye and when you looked, nothing was there? More and more people are talking about seeing shadow people and are wondering who they are and what their purpose is. Who are shadow people? Shadow people are commonly reported as being seen through peripheral vision and while you may feel something was there, the shadow person is either gone or quickly moving away from you by the time you turn your head. Parallel dimensional beings I [...]
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The Inner Earth & Realm of Aghartha
Aghartha In The Hollow Earth!
By Dr Joshua David Stone
The biggest cover-up of all time is the fact that there is a civilization of people living in the center of Earth, whose c...
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