technology entertainment and design (ted) is a conference, they gather world greatest thinkers and doers let them talk and make it available for us to watch.
all at ted.com

I’ve watched many many of them, and i really deeply moved virtually by all of them. their motto is “ideas that worth spreading” and it is very true.
some of them really moved me and changed the way i see the world and my place in it.



go to ted.com, you can watch all their videos (usually speakers given 18 minutes),
conference is happening once a year, in march in california, and 2008 one is just over and i realized that i should have written about it a long time ago.

i think you should explore things there your self, but here’s some of my favorite talks

youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM - about choices
youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY - about education
youtube.com/watch?v=r1RsfRHU0uU - about new life
ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39 - about avoiding aging
blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php - about brain
ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 - about images

just explore it

science is advancing, sadly most of the people do not really pay attention to the fundamental science. and that is in the period of really big discoveries. so big that would change the way we understand everything. big changes happening in mathematics, with e8. but even bigger things happening in physics - one of the key areas of our understanding of the world.

So, there is modern physics - that is what we study in schools (perhaps) and that is what written in books, and scientific community is supporting it. and there is a lot of research is being done, but mostly it falls within the current system, just refining detail. but science is science and it is full of people who are trying to understand missing pieces. and there are tons of missing or inconsistent or assumed topics all over the place. one of the really big ones is lack of link between quantum theory (that has to do with tiny things) and general relativity (that deals with mostly huge things, speed of light etc). Plus there is gravity, time, dimensions, origin of big bang, dark matter and all sorts of things that are not really well explained. thus there are lots of efforts to explain and combine all that - those called unified theories. Usually they are very complex and constantly found wrong.

but, there is one new unified theory that i strongly believe is drastically better. and not just better - it is one giant step forward in our understanding of things.
one of the differences is that it can be explained in a simple, easy to understand terms to an average educated person.
they call it “the resonance project”. and they have a video presentation on 4 dvds, where Nassim Haramein explains it all.
naturally it sound really long, but it is not because it is so sophisticated, but because it is presented an a very basic level and it covers huge part of physics and it is called Crossing the Event Horizon.



obviously you are not gonna run and buy those dvds after reading this, let’s be realistic. what i am suggesting is just watch a shorter presentation by nassim haramein, he is an amazing speaker. and if you get interested you might what to dig dipper. i actually think that this is revolutionary and it is huge. unfortunately there is very little information about it on the web.
so here’s what i found for you:
theresonanceproject.org - this is the their official site. it has tons of info and a couple of video clips.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4907540922643918266 - this is short presentation at google video

this is truly fascinating

a guy (who goes by name Peter Joseph, but I am not really sure that it is his real name) made a movie - zeitgeist, it is a 2007 non-profit web documentary film hosted at google video, it is 116 minutes long and it is free.
he is not a professional movie maker, not a professional historian, as far as i understand he is just a guy, who decided to do something about things that he cares.

I first heard about it in july, and it was a lot of discussions at the time, but I never got to write about it then, yet recently I was talking about it a lot and thus I decided to make an entry.
according google’s statistics it was watched more that 6 million times, but you can watch it in parts and on youtube as well, yet there is very little talk about it in the mainstream media.



the film has 3 parts, and for me they look really related, yet many people claim that those are three separate subjects. maybe.
nevertheless, it has lots of facts, and even if you do not believe in their accuracy, it still has a lot to make you think and reevaluate your believes. not that many films can claim that.

i do not want to force you to watch the entire 116 minutes, but if you care to talk about it you should, and if not, i can suggest you to watch just the first part
the greatest story ever told

part 1

the entire movie can be watched at the official website zeitgeistmovie.com
or at google video video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5547481422995115331&hl=en

( continue )

there are lots of things happening in the world of computers and electronics,
but I will briefly summarize on a simple level what really caught my attention.
( if you are curious )

happy to know that there are some reasonable people with good common sense on this planet
and jacque fresco is one of them. he develops very beautiful futuristic architectural and technological projects, but i really salute his philosophy and the way he talks about world and its future. as the main point he suggests to use scientific methods for social issues.

i strongly recommend to listen to what he got to say

he even has myspace, and also there is a recent movie about him future by design, wikipedia article, venus project and following youtubes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc7x79kJ1S0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt8HkCWW2Yk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTQXgVb8V9M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVOPkGAtt48

recent interview with forbes

via centralasian

flickr is relatively new (a bit more than 3 years),
and was bought by yahoo and it is mostly a good thing,
and it is growing and tons of very interesting talented creative people are there.
of course there are crowds of folks who just uploads hundreds of ever boring party and vacation photos, but if you sniff around you can find a gold mine with artists, illustrators and creative photographers!

for those who mostly enjoy looking at images in their friends livejournal entries it will be pure fun.

i could not bypath such phenomena and little by little got my stuff uploaded and now it's virtually all there.

www.flickr.com/photos/thedimka or simply flickr.com/thedimka

i still consider that lj is way better as a site (comparatively, especially in usability and features, and i tried many, blogspot, and facebook and virb and devianart and myspace and high5 and mail.ru and li.ru and wordpress and moveabletype and twitter to name a few) and more useful and it is very important, but never the less, the people and community is essential and flickr got them (those who i like finding), plenty of them.



(closer, if you want to see this collage closer)

bill maher is so damn good.
he is the guy with common sense and humor, and he is not indifferent.
i pretty much on the same boat about politics, religion, health, legalization, diets etc.

he is a comedian and even though he is bashing republicans more, he is not really a partisan and for me (being liberal libertarian) is pure pleasure

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=bill+maher&search=Search
youtube has tons of flics with him

last night in my dream i saw road, lots and lots of roads. symbolic.
it rains today, and i like it. self inflicted sleep deprivation again.
i like listening the lyrics in songs, and music makes me happy.

finally i know what i want to see in a movie-theater. but i don’t have anyone to go with me.

for breakfast (i actually almost never eat breakfast) i made myself egg “venetian style”. ah, heavenly yammy.

at the boat renting place, clerk looking at the boat in the lake and says in loud speaker
- boat number 99, you are getting too far, please come back, boat number 99, you are getting too far, boat number 99, you are getting too far
the other clerk says
- but we only have 70 boats
- boat number 66, you are okay over there?

excellent visual comparison of german and chinese culture
http://www.adinochang.com/archives/chinese-culture-versus-german-culture.html

also, subject of screen font rendering on macs comes up in conversations a lot
in june joel had a good blurb about it
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
read it and you’d get the basic idea

many russian bloggers talk about starbucks coming in moscow. common, what’s the fuss? i can get why mcdonalds was such an attention grabber in 90s or pepsi in 80s, that was still soviet times, but now it moscow there are so many outstanding cool coffee place. what gives?

youtube phenomenon is wonderful, perhaps like mp3 one.
and of course there other ones that better, but it does not matter, because now, as the result tons and tons of amazing things are accessible to people.

here list my most favorite 12 (used to be 20, but they got removed from youtube, that’s why i recommend you to download and save you favorite ones too)


( dig it and enjoy )

in the late 70s italian architect, illustrator and industrial designer luigi serafini made a book, an encyclopedia of unknown, parallel world. it’s about 360-380 pages. it is written in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet. it took him 30 month to complete that masterpiece that many might call “the strangest book on earth”. codex seraphinianus is divided to 11 chapters and two parts - first one is about nature and the second one is about people.
btw five hundred years ago there was another book somewhat like that - voynich manuscript.

take a look at some pages (click on image to see a bigger version)




amazon sells those for 500 bucks or more

you can read about it in wikipedia.
i can’t even tell you how much i like stuff like that


( follow this link [under cut] to see few dozen pages and to find links )


( update with bunch of links )