Jeff Squires

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers

Tweaking Moore’s Law and the Computers of the Post-Silicon Era: What’s beyond silicon? There have been a number of proposals: protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers, molecular computers.

Jason Silva: How Ideas are Living, Beautiful Beings of Wonder
In this video of his talk at PSFK CONFERENCE NYC, Jason Silva shares two of his ‘shots of philosophical expresso’ – an exploration of how technology can quickly manifest our ideas and desires. The filmmaker and futurist rapidly demands that we need to learn to see the world in new ways in order to experience anew the amazement that has always been there. Heady, rapid creativity.

The Very Best: Yoshua Alikuti
Shot in Nairobi and directed by Village Beat, the video for The Very Best’s new single “Yoshua Alikuti” is a play on the clip for Lil Wayne’s “A Milli”.

The Divided Brain:
Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.

Where Things Come From

Human Face Projection Mapping

Controlling 4-Story Pipe Organ with a Kinect

Turntable Rider: Cogoo has turned a BMX bike into a DJ bike with a music turntable that lets you mix tracks on the go. The Japanese bike-sharing program created the Turntable Rider, which has tweaked features. Cogoo turned the wheels of the bicycle into turntables, the handlebars into the crossfader, and the brakes into samplers. The bike can be wirelessly connected to the DJ app Traktor to let the rider perform some unique tricks while blasting out some cool mixes.

Silver & Light

America’s Dead Sea: deep in the desert of southern California sits one of the worst environmental sites in America—a former tourist destination that has turned into a toxic soup: the Salton Sea.

The sea was born by accident 100 years ago, when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal; for the next two years the entire volume of the river flowed into the Salton Sink, one of the lowest places on Earth. The new lake became a major tourist attraction, with resort towns springing up along its shores. Yet with no outflow, and with agricultural runoff serving as its only inflow, the sea’s waters grew increasingly toxic. Farm chemicals and ever-increasing salinity caused massive fish and bird die-offs. Use of the sea for recreational activities plummeted, and by the 1980s its tourist towns were all but abandoned.

The Traces of Time project presents a vision between a current and tangible printed reality that already ceases to exist and an uncertain present resembling the past. This is the perspective of travellers who steal a snapshot of life and leave behind a trace that could change the lives of those they’ve passed.

Mischievous Ismaili children, young women, and housewives, opium smokers, village chiefs and simple peasants all lent themselves to the magical ceremony of the instantaneous picture , welcoming this instant gift, which is, itself, a vestige of their time. A time which is frozen by rituals and a centuries-old way of life but also slipping away through the hardships of their daily lives.

via NYT

Le vent (ballet super slow motion)

Eat It Don’t Tweet It by American Hipster

Regina Dugan: From mach-20 glider to humming bird drone: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet — that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail. (Followed by a Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson)

Full Circle is the first fashion film for new London / Melbourne label Klezinski. Klezinski makes apparel, accessories, art and interior products utilising sustainable manufacturing processes and materials. This film is a creative collaboration between film-maker Callum Cooper, sound artist John Kassab and Klezinski.

Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence: Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.

Jonathan Haidt studies how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and open-minded.

Filmmaker, aesthetic philosopher and ecstatic futurist Jason Silva — who spoke at Singularity Summit 2011 — articulates his call for passion and artistic sensibility to inform ideation and instantiation of the Singularity.