Benjamin Bratton TEDx talk (text of video here)

“I think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” says the noted cultural theorist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5cKRmJaf0Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: New Perspectives – What’s Wrong with TED Talks? Benjamin Bratton at TEDxSanDiego 2013 – Re:Think (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5cKRmJaf0)

 

 

Kevin Kelly uploaded on 11/4/13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqRdGfDPCDE&feature=em-uploademail-ot/Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 production in Saline Valley, CA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqRdGfDPCDE&feature=em-uploademail-ot/)

This is about 20 minutes of super 8 film that Stewart Brand shot in the winter of 1971. It documents the production of the January 1971 “Difficult But Possible Supplement” to The Whole Earth Catalog. Supplements were 60-page long magazine-like periodicals that appeared seasonally between the many-year cycle of the book-like Catalogs.

This films shows (briefly near the end) the simple tools used to make the catalogs: paper, wax, an IBM Selectric typewriter, and a Polaroid reproduction camera.

There were 6 staff from Whole Earth, and 2 from Ant Farm, an art collective. Ant Farm built the structures. The camp was centered around a beautiful wild hot spring. 70 miles to the nearest phone. They erected a dome in the desert and then battled the winds while trying to erect an inflatable structure. It was Burning Man 40 years ago.

The wind came up ...

– As part of masters degree program in Education at the University of Massachusetts, worked with leading New England educators and large suburban real estate developers exploring how to design and build new kinds of educational communities (Discovery at Briggs Pond, 1970) and Supplemental and Alternative Programs (SAP Directory, 1972)

– Established one of the first futures research consulting firms with Jerome C. Glenn and leading futurists including Alvin Toffler, Herman Kahn, Ted Gordon, and Willis Harman  (Future Options Room, 1974)

– Designed one of the first microprocessor-base computers for children (Smart Alec, 1978)

– Designed and co-developed  some of the first consumer applications of the microprocessor licensed to Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers ,and other toy and game companies (Scientific Entertainment Company, 1979)

– VIX (Video Information Exchange), a pioneer in the sharing of information over cable (1983)

– Formed a non-profit foundation to provide a variety of educational materials, programs, and funding to support researchers and students in neurosciences and bioengineering  (Brain Research Institute,1984)

– Created an incubator for the artificial intelligence industry which brokered management, marketing, and technical services for the nascent AI industry (AI Group ,1985)

– Designed web-based knowledge/research portals for aggregating information and knowledge on ...

Brain Pickings  5/29/13 Maria Popova

Intuition Pumps: Daniel Dennett on the Dignity and Art-Science of Making Mistakes

“The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself.”

“If you are not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks,” Debbie Millman counseled. “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before,”…. Daniel Dennett, one of our greatest living philosophers, offers a set of thinking tools — “handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus holders” — that allow us to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions” — to enhance your cognitive toolkit. ……

Though most of his 77 “intuition pumps” address concrete questions, a dozen are “general-purpose” tools that apply deeply and widely, across just about any domain of thinking. The first of them is also arguably the most useful yet most uncomfortable: making mistakes.

Dennett echoes Dostoyevsky (“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”) and offers the key to making productive mistakes:

The chief trick to making ...

Brain Pickings April 2013 by Maria Popova

How to keep one of the greatest human gifts from becoming one of our most cumbersome curses.

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider,” 

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