#106; Videos

A selection of clips for today:

Watch this video (if you're not a fan of spiders, I'd skip past this one). For the first minute it's an oddly absorbing and eerie clip of a spider immobilising an ant, but make sure you keep watching till the end. It's worth it:


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Complicated physicsy stuff is generally too much for my biology-orientated brain, so this animated comic on dark matter is great. They highlight how little we actually know about the fundamentals of our universe

"We have no idea! we're only now, by looking at the details, realising what the questions we should be asking are. There's a huge amount of exploration left to do."

Exciting times:

Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.


Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics - a man ahead of his time. I want to feature the second part of this interview, but can't find it on Youtube. Go watch it HERE (it's only a minute long!)

"It seems to me that as robots become continually more advanced that people will not try to keep it entirely a matter of metal and electrons, that there will be cases in which attempts will be made to make use of the very great flexibility and minituarisibility of organic living tissue. At the same time we will have human beings who will make more and more use of artificial organs of metal and plastic. We may have a society in which robots will drift away from total metal toward the organic. And human beings will drift away from the total organic toward the metal and plastic. And that somewhere in the middle, they may eventually meet."

That's from 1965 - I love predictions of the future from the past. When you look at BrainGate & the TED talk I posted in the last entry on this blog, you can see that maybe we are going in that direction. Interesting stuff:


And finally in a science-heavy post, this TED talk is well worth a watch. It's concerning the direction of evolution in contemporary humans. Are we now entering a stage of human-driving evolution? Great stuff here, and also notice how elegant, simple and beautiful his visual aids are. A great talk with the perfect slides to accompany it: