reflections on the technium

Greetings!

For this installment of Brown Bag at the Movies we will be viewing (abstract below):

• Engineering of the 10,000 Year Clock 32:50
• The Future of Fabrication 30:53
• Lamps 001/1 3:02

07-26-2011 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

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IN OTHER NEWS: Wired Magazine has an interesting update on the doings at the Khan Academy here <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/all/1>. The Khan Academy is now flipping the educational paradigm in select California public classrooms. As homework teachers are assigning viewing his instructional videos, then during class time the traditional homework questions are worked with both the assistance of the teacher and her classmates. Its all self-paced, so the students can advance as far and as fast as they are capable.

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CEP COMMENT: Ten thousand year concrete, robotic rock saws… was it engineering like this that was used to build the Great Pyramids?

Alexander Rose: Engineering of the 10,000 Year Clock
<http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Alexander_Rose_Engineering_of_the_10000_Year_Clock>
32:50
ABSTRACT
First employee and Director of The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose, will discuss the design challenges while building a monument scale 10,000 Year all mechanical Clock. The reasoning behind the project will be covered as well as details of engineering and construction. The presentation will include new images and video of Clock construction underway in the high desert. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation>

BIO

Alexander Rose. As the director of the Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Rose shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.

Hired as the first employee of the foundation in February of 1997, Rose has been an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., a project manager for Shamrock Communications, and a founding partner of Inertia Labs. Rose attended the Art Center College of Design and graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 1995.

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CEP COMMENT: What is manufacturing going to look like in 10 years? 20 years? Will we have our own personal replicators? Probably YES! Also see <http://bit.ly/nIQLVb> 46:53

Neil Gershenfeld: The Future of Fabrication
<http://bit.ly/oDfcon>
30:53
ABSTRACT
Analog phone calls degraded with distance; we now have the Internet. Analog computations degraded with time; we now have PCs. But today’s most advanced manufacturing processes, whether additive or subtractive, remain analog because the materials themselves don’t contain information. Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, will present research on digital materials, and discuss its implications for the future of making things.

BIO

Neil Gershenfeld <http://ng.cba.mit.edu/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gershenfeld>
Beyond his many publications and patents, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld is the author of the books Fab and When Things Start To Think, and the technical texts The Nature of Mathematical Modeling and The Physics of Information Technology. His work has been featured by the White House and Smithsonian Institution in their Millennium celebrations, he has been the subject of print, radio, and TV programs in media including the New York Times, The Economist, CNN, and PBS, and has been selected as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.
Book: When Things Start To Think
Book: Fab

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