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imagine the following scenario you walk into your child's day care center as usual there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up but this time the children's faces look weirdly similar and you can't figure out which child is yours do you need new glasses are you losing your mind you run through a quick mental checklist no you seem to be thinking clearly and your vision is perfectly sharp and everything looks normal except the children's faces you can see the faces but they don't look distinctive and none of them looks familiar and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter this sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people it's called and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain
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oh my god oh my god oh my god last year bear vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in yosemite national park in it was viewed million times
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but he didn't actually set out to make a viral video bear he just wanted to share a rainbow because that's what you do when your name is yosemite mountain bear
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so you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video i hope rebecca black's friday is one of the most popular videos of the year it's been seen nearly million times this year this is a chart of what it looked like and similar to double rainbow it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere so what happened on this day well it was a friday this is true and if you're wondering about those other spikes those are also fridays
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michael j nelson from mystery science theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on but what's important is that an individual or a group of took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience accelerating the process and so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it and now there are parodies of friday on even in the first seven days there was one parody for every other day of the week
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so cat is a looped animation with looped music it's this just like this it's been viewed nearly million times this year and if you think that that is weird you should know that there is a three hour version of this that's been viewed four million times
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i'm kevin allocca i'm the trends manager at and i professionally watch videos it's true so we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters we all want to be stars celebrities singers comedians and when i was younger that seemed so very very hard to do but now web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture
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so we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters we all want to be stars celebrities singers comedians and when i was younger that seemed so very very hard to do but now web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture any one of you could be famous on the internet by next saturday but there are over hours of video to every minute and of that only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment so how does it happen three things communities of participation and all right let's go bear vasquez oh my god
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and this video had actually been posted all the way back in january so what happened here jimmy kimmel actually jimmy kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become because like jimmy kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience it's friday friday
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friday gotta get down on friday everybody's looking forward to the weekend weekend friday friday gettin' down on friday so you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video i hope rebecca black's friday is one of the most popular videos of the year it's been seen nearly million times this year
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what does it mean creative participating communities complete these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity i mean as mentioned earlier one of the biggest stars in the world right now justin bieber got his start on no one has to green light your idea and we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture and these are not characteristics of old media and they're barely true of the media of today but they will define the entertainment of the future
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over the past years i've studied technologies of mobile communication and i've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people young and old about their plugged in lives and what i've found is that our little devices those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do they change who we are some of the things we do now with our devices are things that only a few years ago we would have found odd or disturbing but they've quickly come to seem familiar just how we do things so just to take some quick examples people text or do email during corporate board meetings they text and shop and go on during classes during presentations actually during all meetings people talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're
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just a moment ago my daughter rebecca me for good luck her text said mom you will rock i love this getting that text was like getting a hug and so there you have it i embody the central paradox
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jesus melendez talking about poet pedro final moments we took off and as we were ascending before we had leveled off our level off point was feet so before we had leveled off pedro began leaving us and the beauty about it is that i believe that there's something after life you can see it in pedro danny to his wife annie married years danny see the thing of it is i always feel guilty when i say i love you to you and i say it so often i say it to remind you that as dumpy as i am it's coming from me it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house
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this is charley williams he was when this photograph was taken in the roosevelt put thousands and thousands of americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels but he also did something interesting which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour america to capture the stories of ordinary americans charley williams a poor sharecropper wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview but charley had actually been a slave until he was years old and the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories of human lived experiences filled with ex slaves anna smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us and three generations later i was part of a project called which set out to capture the stories of ordinary americans by setting up a booth in public spaces
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it was just an ordinary saturday my dad was outside mowing the lawn my mom was upstairs folding laundry my sister was in her room doing homework and i was in the basement playing video games and as i came upstairs to get something to drink i looked out the window and realized that there was something that i was supposed to be doing and this is what i saw no this wasn't my family's dinner on fire this was my science project flames were pouring out smoke was in the air and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire i immediately started yelling my mom was freaking out my dad ran around to put out the fire and of course my sister started recording a video
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i work with a bunch of mathematicians philosophers and computer scientists and we sit around and think about the future of machine intelligence among other things some people think that some of these things are sort of science fiction y far out there crazy but i like to say okay let's look at the modern human condition
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but if we think about it we are actually recently arrived guests on this planet the human species think about if earth was created one year ago the human species then would be minutes old the industrial era started two seconds ago another way to look at this is to think of world over the last years i've actually taken the trouble to plot this for you in a graph it looks like this
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let's ask ourselves what is the cause of this current anomaly some people would say it's technology now it's true technology has accumulated through human history and right now technology advances extremely rapidly that is the proximate cause that's why we are currently so very productive but i like to think back further to the ultimate cause look at these two highly distinguished gentlemen we have kanzi he's mastered lexical tokens an incredible feat and ed witten unleashed the second revolution
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some of my colleagues think we're on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate and that is machine artificial intelligence used to be about putting commands in a box you would have human programmers that would painstakingly handcraft knowledge items you build up these expert systems and they were kind of useful for some purposes but they were very brittle you couldn't scale them basically you got out only what you put in but since then a paradigm shift has taken place in the field of artificial intelligence today the action is really around machine learning
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so i'm in chile in the desert sitting in a hotel lobby because that's the only place that i can get a fi connection and i have this picture up on my screen and a woman comes up behind me she says oh that's beautiful what is it is that jackson pollock and unfortunately i can be a little too honest i said no it's it's penguin shit
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at this point she stops me and she says who are you what do you do and i was stuck because i didn't have any way to describe what i do and so in some sense this talk today is my answer to that it's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that i do and it's very hard for me to make sense of it so i'm not sure that you can it's the kind of thing that i sit up late at night thinking about sometimes often at four in the morning so some people are afraid of what i do some people think i am the nerd tony soprano and in response i have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector i'm not sure what these people think because i don't speak norsk
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now i'm also very interested in cooking while i was at microsoft i took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in france i used to work also while at microsoft at a leading restaurant in seattle so i do a lot of cooking i've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue but barbecue's interesting because it's one of these cult foods like chili or various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to there's tremendous traditions there's secrecy and i'm trying to use a very scientific approach so this is my latest cooker and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor that's because it is but if you get to play with all those knobs and dials and of course really the controller over there does it all on software you can make some terrific ribs
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so the seti institute with a little bit of help from me and a lot of help from paul allen and a variety of other people is building a dedicated radio telescope in hat creek california so they can do this seti work now i travel a lot and i change cell phones a lot and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is jill because i really don't want to miss the call
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i think paul simon is in the audience and he has he may not realize it but he wrote a song all about whale sex slip away that's kind of what it's like the other interesting thing that i learned about whale sex they curl their toes too
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and one thing that isn't a mystery actually was when i grew up because when i was a little kid i'd seen these pictures and i thought well why that look on the face why that brow i mean it's such a powerful thing where did they get that inspiration and then i met yoyo who is the native an guide and if you look at face you kind of figure out where they got it there's many mysteries these statues
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there's many mysteries these statues everyone wants to know how did they make them how did they transport them this woman in the foreground is jo anne van she's the leading archaeologist working easter island today and she has studied the statues for years and she has detailed records of every single statue the one on the page here is the same that's up there one interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard so this used to be completely smooth
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the one on the page here is the same that's up there one interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard so this used to be completely smooth in fact in many of the statues when you excavate them the backs are totally smooth almost glass smooth but after years out in the weather they look like this jo anne and i have just embarked on a project to digitize them all and we're going to do a very high res first because it's a way of preserving them second we have these ideas about how you can then learn a few of the mysteries about them how long have they been standing in what positions and maybe indirectly get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are while i was in easter island comet mcnaught was there also so you get a gratuitous picture of a with a comet
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now this is the normal way it's done it's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution it has a lot of disadvantages each one of these steps is extremely expensive it's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step cannot be performed in anyone's backyard which is a problem so our reactor eliminates these steps which if we can actually make it work is a really cool thing now it's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor there's no reactor's been even built to an old design much less a new one in the united states for years it's the kind of very high risk but potentially very high return thing that we do changing into a totally different field we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics particularly in an area called a is an artificial material which manipulates in this case electromagnetic radiation in a way that you couldn't otherwise
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changing into a totally different field we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics particularly in an area called a is an artificial material which manipulates in this case electromagnetic radiation in a way that you couldn't otherwise so this device here is an invisibility cloak it may not seem that but if you were a microwave this is how you would view it rays of light in this case microwave light come in and they just around the cell and they come back the other side now you could do that with mirrors from one angle the cool thing is this does it from all angles unfortunately a it only works on microwave and b it doesn't work all that well yet but are an incredibly exciting field
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this is a high speed centrifuge you should all have one in your kitchen beside your this subjects food to a force about times that of normal gravity and oh boy does it clarify chicken stock you would not believe it i perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food in this case trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are it turns out a it's useful and for a geek like me it's fun
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you would not believe it i perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food in this case trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are it turns out a it's useful and for a geek like me it's fun theory is red black is experiment so i'm either really good at faking it or this particular model seems to work so another random thing i do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or seti and you may be familiar with the movie contact which sort of popularized that it turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way in fact almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character a real person so the jodie foster character here is actually this woman jill tarter and jill has dedicated her life to this
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if you think about it the world is growing incredibly fast and with that growth comes a whole list of growing challenges challenges such as dealing with global warming solving starvation and water shortages and curing diseases to name just a few and who exactly is going to help us solve all of these great challenges well to a very last degree it is these young students this is the next generation of young bright scientists and in many ways we all rely on them for coming up with new great innovations to help us solve all these challenges ahead of us and so a couple of years back my cofounder and i were teaching university students just like these only the students we were teaching looked a little bit more like this here
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we started looking elsewhere what we found was that flight simulators had been proven over and over again to be far more effective when used in combination with real in flight training to train the pilots and so we thought to ourselves why not just apply that to science why not build a virtual laboratory simulator well we did it we basically set out to create a fully simulated one virtual reality laboratory simulator where the students could perform experiments with mathematical equations that would simulate what would happen in a real world lab but not just simple simulations we would also create advanced simulations with top universities like mit to bring out cutting edge cancer research to these students and suddenly the universities could save millions of dollars by letting the students perform virtual experiments before they go into the real laboratory and not only that now they could also understand even on a molecular level inside the machine what is happening to the machines
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now i don't usually like cartoons i don't think many of them are funny i find them weird but i love this cartoon from the new yorker never ever think outside the box
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so what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer sources of cancer or for that matter why you are who you are didn't make sense so let me quickly try and tell you why i thought that and how i went about it
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are a bunch of other of these cognitive biases that affect our risk decisions there's the availability which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind so you can imagine how that works if you hear a lot about tiger attacks there must be a lot of tigers around you don't hear about lion attacks there aren't a lot of lions around this works until you invent newspapers because what newspapers do is repeat again and again rare risks i tell people if it's in the news don't worry about it because by definition news is something that almost never happens
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couple years ago i was in south africa on safari the tracker i was with grew up in kruger national park he had some very complex models of how to survive and it depended on if you were attacked by a lion leopard rhino or elephant and when you had to run away when you couldn't run away when you had to climb a tree when you could never climb a tree i would have died in a day but he was born there and he understood how to survive i was born in new york city i could have taken him to new york and he would have died in a day
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last story a few years ago a friend of mine gave birth i visit her in the hospital it turns out when a baby's born now they put an bracelet on the baby a corresponding one on the mother so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward an alarm goes off i said well that's kind of neat i wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals i go home i look it up it basically never happens
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really we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word and what i want to do in this talk is to split them apart figuring out when they diverge and how they converge and language is actually a problem here there aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about so if you look at security from economic terms it's a trade off every time you get some security you're always trading off something whether this is a personal decision whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home or a national decision where you're going to invade a foreign country you're going to trade off something money or time convenience capabilities maybe fundamental liberties and the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer but whether it's worth the trade off you've heard in the past several years the world is safer because saddam hussein is not in power
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whether this is a personal decision whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home or a national decision where you're going to invade a foreign country you're going to trade off something money or time convenience capabilities maybe fundamental liberties and the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer but whether it's worth the trade off you've heard in the past several years the world is safer because saddam hussein is not in power that might be true but it's not terribly relevant the question is was it worth it and you can make your own decision and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it that's how you think about security in terms of the trade off now there's often no right or wrong here some of us have a burglar alarm system at home and some of us don't and it'll depend on where we live whether we live alone or have a family how much cool stuff we have how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft
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some of us have a burglar alarm system at home and some of us don't and it'll depend on where we live whether we live alone or have a family how much cool stuff we have how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft in politics also there are different opinions a lot of times these trade offs are about more than just security and i think that's really important now people have a natural intuition about these trade offs we make them every day last night in my hotel room when i decided to double lock the door or you in your car when you drove here when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it we make these trade offs again and again multiple times a day we often won't even notice them
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there's a lot to talk about in this chart the one thing i'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and and human that indicates female just look at the numbers the average human has sex about times per birth if that number seems high for some of you i assure you it seems low for others in the room we share that ratio with chimps and bonobos we don't share it with the other three apes the gorilla the orangutan and the gibbon who are more typical of mammals having sex only about a dozen times per birth humans and bonobos are the only animals that have sex face when both of them are alive
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i'm going to go off script and make chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation all right
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closely at the most embarrassing details amplify them make a sudden destructive unpredictable action incorporate these cards are disruptive now they've proved their worth in album after album the musicians hate them
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but right now vera was introducing keith to the piano in question and it wasn't going well jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily played a few notes walked around it played a few more notes muttered something to his producer then the producer came over to vera and said if you don't get a new piano keith can't play there'd been a mistake the opera house had provided the wrong instrument
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jocelyne this is amazing and i'm sure that right now there are several dozen people in the audience possibly even a majority who are thinking i know somebody who can use this i do in any case and of course the question is what are the biggest obstacles before you can go into human clinical trials the biggest obstacles are regulations
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so i'm a neurosurgeon and like most of my colleagues i have to deal every day with human tragedies i realize how your life can change from one second to the other after a major stroke or after a car accident and what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons is to realize that unlike other organs of the body the brain has very little ability for self repair and after a major injury of your central nervous system the patients often remain with a severe handicap and that's probably the reason why i've chosen to be a functional neurosurgeon
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we found carnivorous kangaroos it's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo but these are meat eating kangaroos we found the biggest bird in the world bigger than that thing that was in madagascar and it too was a flesh eater it was a giant weird duck and crocodiles were not behaving at that time either you think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing sitting in a pool of water these crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground we had in australia drop they really do exist
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it will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field right now the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you i have to use words i have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination with glass we can put that underneath a helmet and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at miles an hour your blood pounding in your ears you can get a sense of what it's like to have a man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being and i've been on the receiving end of that and it doesn't feel very good now i have some footage to show you of what it's like to wear glass underneath the helmet to give you a taste of that unfortunately it's not practice footage because the thinks emergent technology is what happens when a submarine surfaces but we do what we can
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so let's pull up some video go
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we are losing our listening we spend roughly percent of our communication time listening but we're not very good at it we retain just percent of what we hear now not you not this talk but that is generally true
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and then there is a whole range of filters these filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to most people are entirely unconscious of these filters but they actually create our reality in a way because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now i'll give you one example of that intention is very important in sound in listening when i married my wife i promised her i would listen to her every day as if for the first time now that's something i fall short of on a daily basis
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let's define listening as making meaning from sound it's a mental process and it's a process of extraction we use some pretty cool techniques to do this one of them is pattern recognition so in a cocktail party like this if i say david sara pay attention some of you just sat up we recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal and especially our name
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i said at the beginning we're losing our listening why did i say that well there are a lot of reasons for this first of all we invented ways of recording first writing then audio recording and now video recording as well the premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared secondly the world is now so noisy with this cacophony going on visually and it's just hard to listen it's tiring to listen many people take refuge in headphones but they turn big public spaces like this shared into millions of tiny little personal sound bubbles
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percent of all women by the age of would show moderate to severe cartilage degeneration to percent of the men in this audience would also have such signs so this is a very common disease well the second perk of being a physician is that you can get to experiment on your own ailments so about years ago we began we brought this process into the laboratory and we began to do simple experiments mechanically trying to fix this degeneration we tried to inject chemicals into the knee spaces of animals to try to reverse cartilage degeneration and to put a short summary on a very long and painful process essentially it came to naught nothing happened and then about seven years ago we had a research student from australia the nice thing about australians is that they're habitually used to looking at the world upside down
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i want to talk to you about the future of medicine but before i do that i want to talk a little bit about the past now throughout much of the recent history of medicine we've thought about illness and treatment in terms of a profoundly simple model in fact the model is so simple that you could summarize it in six words have disease take pill kill something now the reason for the dominance of this model is of course the antibiotic revolution many of you might not know this but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the united states
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but in a way the computer makes possible much more than what most people think and my art has just been about trying to find a personal way of using the computer and so i end up writing software to do that chris has asked me to do a short performance and so i'm going to take just this time maybe minutes to do that and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form
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it's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it david deutsch who's talking here in the fabric of reality embraces the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory because the worst that you can say about it is that it's wasteful it postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel mutually undetectable except through the narrow of quantum mechanical experiments and that's richard feynman the biologist lewis wolpert believes that the of modern physics is just an extreme example science as opposed to technology does violence to common sense every time you drink a glass of water he points out the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of oliver cromwell
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so it would seem the hardest densest rock is really almost entirely empty space broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count why then do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable as an evolutionary biologist i'd say this our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at we never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms if we had our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other it's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle sized world in which we have to navigate moving to the other end of the scale our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light if they had our brains would be much better at understanding einstein i want to give the name middle world to the medium scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act nothing to do with middle earth middle world
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most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are our hormones are the way they are we'd be different our characters would be different if our neuro anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different but we scientists are inconsistent if we were consistent our response to a misbehaving person like a child murderer should be something like this unit has a faulty component it needs repairing that's not what we say what we say and i include the most austerely mechanistic among us which is probably me what we say is vile monster prison is too good for you or worse we seek revenge in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter revenge which we see of course all over the world today in short when we're thinking like academics we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines like computers or cars but when we revert to being human we behave more like basil who we remember thrashed his car to teach it a lesson when it wouldn't start on gourmet night
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the reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water live in a surface tension dominated flatland we live in a social world we swim through a sea of people a social version of middle world we are evolved to second guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant intuitive psychologists treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next the economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful goal seeking agent with pleasures and pains desires and intentions guilt blame worthiness personification and the of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate like basil with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole
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my title queerer than we can suppose the strangeness of science queerer than we can suppose comes from j b s the famous biologist who said now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose i suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of or can be dreamed of in any philosophy richard feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories experimental predictions to specifying the width of north america to within one hair's breadth of accuracy this means that quantum theory has got to be in some sense true
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science has taught us against all intuition that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space and the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium so it would seem the hardest densest rock is really almost entirely empty space broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count why then do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable as an evolutionary biologist i'd say this our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at we never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms
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unaided human intuition schooled in middle world finds it hard to believe galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object air friction aside would hit the ground at the same instant and that's because in middle world air friction is always there if we'd evolved in a vacuum we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously if we were bacteria constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules it would be different but we middle worlders are too big to notice motion in the same way our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension
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we have this tendency to think that only solid material things are really things at all waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium the ether but we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in middle world where matter is a useful fiction
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it's what's technically known as a and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about meters per year it retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns what happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side and then as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge it cascades down on the inside of the crescent and so the whole horn shaped dune moves steve grand points out that you and i are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent thing
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it's what's technically known as a and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about meters per year it retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns what happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side and then as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge it cascades down on the inside of the crescent and so the whole horn shaped dune moves steve grand points out that you and i are ourselves more like a wave than a permanent thing he invites us the reader to think of an experience from your childhood something you remember clearly something you can see feel maybe even smell as if you were really there after all you really were there at the time weren't you how else would you remember it but here is the bombshell you weren't there not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you whatever you are therefore you are not the stuff of which you are made
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going to go right into the slides and all i'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that i do just very straight stuff and my ideas are in my head anyway they're very logical and relate to what's going on and problem solving for clients i either convince clients at the end that i solve their problems or i really do solve their problems because usually they seem to like it let me go right into the slides can you turn off the light down i like to be in the dark i don't want you to see what i'm doing up here
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this house in santa monica and it got a lot of notoriety in fact it appeared in a porno comic book which is the slide on the right
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and it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place they wanted a sense of place and so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into and it was my theory or my point of view that one didn't upstage the neighborhood one made accommodations i tried to be inclusive to include the buildings in the neighborhood whether they were buildings i liked or not in the i started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in bloomingdale's we even made flooring walls and everything out of cardboard and the success of it threw me for a loop i couldn't deal with the success of furniture i wasn't secure enough as an architect and so i closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like
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this and it was in this preliminary to these pieces of furniture that ricky and i worked on furniture by the slice and after we failed i just kept failing
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happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket and i put a piece of tape around it as you see there and realized you could sit on it and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on so it was an accidental discovery i got into fish
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the story i tell is that i got mad at at po mo and said that fish were million years earlier than man and if you're going to go back we might as well go back to the beginning and so i started making these funny things and they started to have a life of their own and got bigger as the one glass at the walker and then i sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what i was learning about the form of the fish and the movement and a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it accidental again it was an intuitive kind of thing and i just kept going with it and made this proposal for a building which was only a proposal i did this building in japan i was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed and i love sake and kobe and all that stuff and after i got i was really drunk i was asked to do some sketches on napkins
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and the client said why no fish and so i made a drawing with a fish and i left japan three weeks later i received a complete set of drawings saying we'd won the competition
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i started to get the head ok but the tail i couldn't do it was pretty hard the thing on the right is a snake form a ziggurat and i put them together and you walk between them it was a dialog with the context again now if you saw a picture of this as it was published in architectural record they didn't show the context so you would think god what a pushy guy this is but a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant couldn't find it so
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a for reasons we don't want to talk about it got delayed toxic waste i guess is the key clue to that one and so we built a temporary building i'm getting good at temporary and we put a conference room in that's a fish and finally jay dragged me to my hometown toronto canada and there is a story it's a real story about my grandmother buying a carp on thursday bringing it home putting it in the bathtub when i was a kid i played with it in the evening when i went to sleep the next day it wasn't there and the next night we had fish
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and i made a pedestal for a sculpture and he didn't buy a sculpture so i made one i went around toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother's and i put the fish in it was a joke
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with a fish hat the highlight of the performance was at the end this beautiful object the swiss army knife which i get credit for participating in and i can tell you it's totally an oldenburg i had nothing to do with it the only thing i did was i made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal because i love sailing
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was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at yale i thought it was fitting for me to be doing that this is a house next to a philip johnson house in minnesota the owners had a dilemma they asked philip to do it he was too busy he didn't recommend me by the way
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and we had the opportunity to build a building on this site there's a railroad track this is the city hall over here somewhere and the courthouse and the of the mall goes out burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built and so we followed sohio is on the axis here and we followed the axis and they're two kind of and this is our building which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company we collaborated with oldenburg and put the newspaper on top folded the health club is fastened to the garage with a c clamp for cleveland
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jay chiat is a for punishment and he hired me to do a house for him in the hamptons and it's got a fish and i keep thinking this is going to be the last fish it's like a drug addict i say i'm not going to do it anymore i don't want to do it anymore i'm not going to do it and then i do it
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you have to then try and get that back in some way and we studied many models this was our original model these were the three buildings that were the ideal the boston and berlin everybody liked the surround actually this is the smallest hall in size and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies our client doesn't want balconies so and when we met our new he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape and we tried many shapes trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical acceptable format we finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the with the sloping outside walls which the said were crucial to this and later decided they weren't but now we have them
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that's the idea and the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural and the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of from wherever you sit and create intimacy now this is not a final design these are just on the way to being and so i wouldn't take it literally except the feeling of the space we studied the acoustics with laser stuff and they bounce them off this and see where it all works but you get the sense of the hall in section most halls come straight down into a in this case we're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners and so it will be quite a different shape
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but this is how i do work i do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away and of course it's not going to look like that but it is the crazy way i tend to work and then finally in l a i was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of interstate bank tower the highest building in l a larry halprin is doing the stairs and i was asked to do a fish and so i did a snake
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in barcelona i was asked to do a fish and we're working on that at the foot of a ritz carlton tower being done by skidmore owings and merrill and the ritz carlton tower is being designed with exposed steel non fire proof much like those old gas tanks and so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it perverted it into the form of the fish and created a kind of a century contraption that looks like that will sit this is the beach and the harbor out in front and this is really a shopping center with department stores and we split these bridges originally this was all solid with a hole in it we cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel we showed this to the hotel people the other day and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the ritz carlton anymore because of this fish
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this is in venice i just show it because i want you to know i'm concerned about context on the left hand side i had the context of those little houses and i tried to build a building that fit into that context when people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they're photographed or seen in that space and then once i deal with the context i then try to make a place that's comfortable and private and fairly serene as i hope you'll find that slide on the right and then i did a law school for loyola in downtown l
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and then i did a law school for loyola in downtown l a i was concerned about making a place for the study of law and we continue to work with this client the building on the right at the top is now under construction the garage on the right the gray structure will be torn down finally and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we've created this campus and it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place they wanted a sense of place and so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into
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all been talking about i was thrown for a complete loop this was built in six months the way we sent drawings to japan we used the magic computer in michigan that does carved models and we used to make foam models which that thing scanned we made the drawings of the fish and the scales and when i got there everything was perfect except the tail so i decided to cut off the head and the tail
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made it into a sailing craft i've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing i do it because it's a curious thing in the culture when things are made in such great quantities absorbed in such great quantities and there's so much denial about them people hate it and i'm fascinated with that which like the paper furniture it's one of those materials and i'm always drawn to that
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and i'm fascinated with that which like the paper furniture it's one of those materials and i'm always drawn to that and so i did a lot of dirty things with chain link which nobody will forgive me for but claes made homage to it in the loyola law school and that chain link is really expensive it's in perspective and everything and then we did a camp together for children with cancer and you can see we started making a building together of course the milk can is his
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and you can see we started making a building together of course the milk can is his but we were trying to collide our ideas to put objects next to each other like a morandi like the little bottles composing them like a still life and it seemed to work as a way to put he and i together then jay chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in venice and i started with this three piece thing and you entered in the middle and jay asked me what i was going to do with the piece in the middle and he pushed that and one day i had a oh well the other way
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and he pushed that and one day i had a oh well the other way i had the binoculars from claes and i put them there and i could never get rid of them after that oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal it made my building look sick and it was this interaction between that kind of up stuff that became pretty interesting it led to the building on the left and i still think the time magazine picture will be of the binoculars you know leaving out the what the hell i use a lot of metal in my work and i have a hard time connecting with the craft
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i use a lot of metal in my work and i have a hard time connecting with the craft the whole thing about my house the whole use of rough carpentry and everything was the frustration with the crafts available i said if i can't get the craft that i want i'll use the craft i can get there were plenty of models for that in rauschenberg and jasper johns and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials i went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture and it was all of one material and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls the metalworkers for the most part do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff i was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the unions of america and canada in washington and i did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings etc
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the metalworkers for the most part do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff i was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the unions of america and canada in washington and i did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings etc etc and it's working very well to have these people these craftsmen interested in it i just tell the stories it's a way of connecting at least with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture the metal continued into a building herman miller in sacramento and it's just a complex of factory buildings and herman miller has this philosophy of having a place a people place
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and it's just a complex of factory buildings and herman miller has this philosophy of having a place a people place i mean it's kind of a trite thing to say but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be where the people would come and where the people working would interact so it's out in the middle of nowhere and you approach it it's copper and galvanize i used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge so it would buckle i spent a lot of time undoing richard meier's aesthetic everybody's trying to get the panels perfect and i always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy and they end up looking like stone
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everybody's trying to get the panels perfect and i always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy and they end up looking like stone this is the central area there's a ramp and that little dome in there is a building by stanley stanley was instrumental in my getting this job and when i was awarded the contract i at the very beginning asked the client if they would let stanley do a cameo piece with me because these were ideas that we were talking about building things next to each other making it's all about a metaphor for a city maybe and so stanley did the little dome thing
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because these were ideas that we were talking about building things next to each other making it's all about a metaphor for a city maybe and so stanley did the little dome thing and we did it over the phone and by fax he would send me a fax and show me something he'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower i told him no no that's too i don't want the tower so he came back with a simpler building but he put some funny details on it and he moved it closer to my building and so i decided to put him in a depression
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so he came back with a simpler building but he put some funny details on it and he moved it closer to my building and so i decided to put him in a depression i put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in and so then he put two bridges this all happened on the fax going back and forth over a couple of weeks' period and he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it and so then i put this big billboard behind it and i call it david and goliath and that's my cafeteria in boston we had that old building on the left
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in boston we had that old building on the left it was a very prominent building off the freeway and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of i thought the language of the neighborhood which had these projecting mine got a little exuberant but i used lead copper which is a beautiful material and it turns green in years instead of like copper in or we redid the side of the building and re proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space and it surprised both boston and myself that we got it approved because they have very strict kind of design guideline and they wouldn't normally think i would fit them the detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building in barcelona on las for some film festival i did the hollywood sign going and coming made a building out of it and they built it
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