A Mathematical Mystery Tour

Try to imagine a number bigger than infinity, or a bottle with no inside, or parallel lines that meet. Mathematical Mystery Tour looks at this world of pure mathematics, the most bizarre and most certain body knowledge that mankind has ever created. In this world, mathematicians study problems, not for the benefit of mankind, but for their own intrinsic interest.

Mathematical Mystery Tour is a science teaching resource about pure mathematics from BBC Active.

Grigori Perelman Documentary

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Ng1W2KUHI2s

Grigori Perelman proved the Poincar\'e conjecture [1] and then refused a million dollar prize. He is the only mathematician who has declined the Fields medal.

The subtitles were made by volunteers and are not part of the documentary. If you need them as a separate file: http://pastebin.com/bL1ccTQQ


[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0211159v1.pdf

Extreme Cities

Discover how these cities struggle against the toughest environmental conditions on our planet to provide their populations with an acceptable level of existence.

Part 1: Yakutsk
The coldest city on the planet. In this place known as “the cold pole”, the biggest challenge relates to the nature of the soil: the “permafrost”. With the warming of the climate, this frozen soil is melting and the buildings are threatened with collapse. [Video Link]


Part 2: La Paz
The highest capital in the world. Surrounded by 5000 meter peaks, the city has always fought against nature to develop. Living at such an altitude is a permanent challenge to the human body. [Video Link]


Part 3: Hammerfest
A city in the dark. In the northernmost city in the world, the sun disappears for 2 months every winter. This perpetual night causes extreme effects on people, known as “polar stress syndrome”. [Video Link]


Part 4: Bangkok
The drowning city. With deadly typhoons, increasing rainfall, the rising of the sea level and a land subsiding at 4 cm per year, water has become the biggest threat to the city's survival. [Video Link]

1. WATER IS LIFE

Life in deserts and life without surface water, extreme heat.

2. TAMING THE NATURE

Living under the threat of earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis ...

3. ABOVE THE CLOUDS

Living in extreme heights above sea level

4. MINUS ZERO

Living under extreme cold

5. LIFE IN A DROP

Living under extreme rainfall

6. INTO THE POLES

Living without light or without night

7. RADIOACTIVITY

Living under the influence of extreme radioactivity

8. NO LAND AHEAD

Living on stilts over the water or without solid ground

9. TOXIC LIFE

Living under the effects of extreme pollution

[Source]

Robot Revolution : Will Machines surpass humans?

Titled Robot Revolution : Will Machines surpass humans

Features Honda Asimov, Hubo, Big Dog from Boston Dynamics, Baxter from Rethink Robotics, Nextage and other Humanoids

Disclaimer : I do not own the copyright to this programme, this is a recording from NHK World and is the IP of international. I do not intend to break copyright however I feel the usefulness of the programme in inspiring innovation and improving lives is more important. Hopefully will make the content available online themselves.

Apologies for the missing 10 minutes at the end, I rushed to find an sd card for the last showing of the programme, and I already had data on it so the final 10 mintutes wasn't recorded, I remember it as being a recap of the rest of the programme.

Tijuana Los Sonidos del Nortec Completo

Lo que escuchas suena a música norteña pero, ¿desde cuándo el género norteño se acompaña de sintetizadores propios de la electrónica? La respuesta está ante tus ojos. Se materializa en un documental de 57 minutos forjado por la labor conjunta de Fandango Films, Bataclán Cine, Once TV México, los productores Carlos Sosa y Jorge Sánchez, y el cineasta Alberto Cortés. Su nombre: Tijuana, sonidos del Nortec.

La película de no ficción dirigida por Cortés muestra que Tijuana tiene ritmos limpios de pólvora; ritmos que caminan al paso de millones de personas que día con día se desplazan de México a Estados Unidos y viceversa; ritmos que suben y bajan por los instrumentos de los grupos norteños que se encuentran en las plazas; ritmos que se sumergen en las bebidas de los centros nocturnos; ritmos que juegan en el mar; ritmos que recorren las faldas de las muchachas; ritmos osados que se fusionan para crear nuevos ritmos. Es ahí donde tiene cabida Nortec Collective, el pilar central de la propuesta fílmica de Cortés.

http://www.revistamilmesetas.com/tijuana-sonidos-del-nortec


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Pepe Mogt

(Nortec Collective/Fussible)

We started using sequencers on computers about 13 years ago. We weren't even using Windows, just straight operating systems like DOS.

Ten years ago, I was working with a sampler that had only 1 megabyte of memory. Now I have one that has almost unlimited memory. That's insane. But it's good to have the old school, because sometimes, when you limit yourself, you can become more creative. Technology has a way of making people lazy.

I have different toys I like. I work with hardware instruments like drum machines that I build myself. One of my favorite software gadgets is called Live, made by Abelton of Germany. It's an audio sequencer that allows you to sample your software instruments and assign all the keys on your computer keyboard to trigger all the samples, so you can create a track on the fly. The other one, which will revolutionize music for DJs, is called Final Scratch. You can record your vinyl and MP3s on the computer, then connect the interface to your turntables. And you can put physical vinyl on the turntable: It has a digital code that triggers the MP3 on the computer. Both will be the big thing this year and in the future.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/manifestos_pr.html

How to Build a Bionic Man (2013 @ C4)

In How To Build A Bionic Man (C4), they started from scratch. The aim of the assembled team of experts [1,2] was to construct a modern Frankenstein from the latest in artificial organs and prosthetic technology, a million quid's worth of top gear. The experiment was to be "a guided tour of our future" with Dr Bertolt Meyer as our guide, investigating the latest technologies and those who benefit from them.

Dr Meyer is himself partly bionic. He's got a robot hand on one arm. After a lifetime struggling with unsatisfactory fake limbs, he has finally found something he considers both aesthetically pleasing and part of himself. "If I don't wear it, I feel as if there is something missing," he said. You could see the extent to which he'd assimilated it – he clasped it with his other hand, and enumerated points on its plastic fingers. It wasn't just a grabber, it was a tool of expression.

his didn't stop him coveting the latest in bionic hands, which come with flexing wrists and teach themselves to respond to your commands. He tried one – working it with his own arm, but from across the room – and was amazed. Meyer does a very good freaked-out face. "I had a wrist there for a moment," he said. "And then you walk out of there and it's gone again." He wants to be able drive without the knob attached to his steering wheel. "It looks like something that's made for disabled people," he said. "I hate that." He's wrong, of course. Those knobs (suicide knobs, they called them) used to be cool, but I accept that was a long time ago.

Meyer then visited Hugh Herr, an expert from MIT, who was demonstrating the latest prosthetic ankle with the help of an amputee. Meyer was duly impressed. "If he was wearing long trousers," he said to Herr, "you wouldn't realise that he was wearing an artificial leg."

"Right," said Herr, pulling up his own trousers. "Just like you don't realise I'm wearing two right now." Meyer's freaked-out face was nothing to rival mine. In addition to being MIT's director of biomechatronics, Herr is also an avid climber who lost both his legs to frostbite at the age of 17. He now has three different sets of high-tech legs just for climbing, which he changes like shoes. "I think normal bodies are boring," he said. Meyer agreed that artificial limbs no longer carry a stigma – they are just too impressive.

"It's something cool, if you make it that," he said. If that's an attitude that might allow someone to embrace his steering wheel knob, it's also not far off the kind of thinking that might lead to someone cutting off his legs to have better ones installed. Herr said he wouldn't take his old legs back, but I think we're some way off elective bionic surgery, if only because of the cost. Herr's ankle joints are £45k apiece.

But back to the bionic man. By now he'd been fitted with robot arms, a state-of-the-art retina chip, a skull, an artificial heart pumping synthetic blood, and a voice synthesiser attached to a chatbot programme that made him seem at least as intelligent as the average Deal or No Deal contestant. All he needed was a face. His designers decided to give him Meyer's. Not his actual one – they made a mould.

Seeing his own head perched atop a collection of fake limbs and chugging tubes produced a reaction in Meyer that went some way beyond freaked out. He was horrified. "It has this Frankenstein creepiness to it," he said, looking queasy. The designers sniggered. "I think I need a break," said Meyer. "And will you STOP laughing!" When the bionic man lurched round the corner, electronic innards hanging out, I understood how he felt. He'd seen a monster created in his own image.

While occasionally gut-churning – I don't need to watch another heart being cut out of someone for a while – this was a tremendously intriguing exercise, raising all sorts of tricky questions – about the nature of humanity, our future relationship with machines and its eventual cost (presently much of the prosthetic technology that could transform amputees into superhumans is funded by the US military), and the best way to spend quality time with one's mechanical doppelganger. Dr Meyer took his to Harrods to get him some shirts [3].



[1] http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/richard-walker-shadow-robotics.html
[2] http://cyberneticzoo.com/?tag=richard-walker
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/08/build-a-bionic-man-tv-review

Hackers_Wanted

Hackers_Wanted is an unreleased American documentary film.

Directed and written by Sam Bozzo, the film explores the origins and nature of hackers and hacking by following the adventures of Adrian Lamo, and contrasting his story with that of controversial figures throughout history. The film is narrated by Kevin Spacey.

Originally named "Can You Hack It?" The film failed to get a conventional release, according to Lamo, because of conflicts between its producer and others on the team. The more commonly cited reason is a problem with the quality of the finished product. On May 20, 2010, a version of the film was leaked to BitTorrent. Lamo has stated that he had no involvement in the leak.[

"It's ironic that a film about overcoming barriers, about new technologies, about thinking differently, had to come to the public eye by being hacked out of the hands of people who, after making a film about the free flow of information, tried to lock away that information forever. The truth tends to itself." --Adrian Lamo

On June 12, 2010, a director's cut version of the film was also leaked onto torrent sites. This version of the film contains additional footage and is significantly different from the one previously leaked.

Hello World! Processing

Hello World! Processing is a documentary on creative coding that explores the role that ideas such as process, experimentation and algorithm play in this creative field featuring artists, designers and code enthusiasts. Based on a series of interviews to some of the leading figures of the Processing open programming platform community, the documentary is built itself as a continuous stream of archived references, projects and concepts shared by this community.

It is the first chapter of a documentary series on three programming languages -Processing, Open Frameworks y Pure data- that have increased the role of coding in the practice of artists, designers and creators around the world.

The series explores the creative possibilities expanded by these open source tools and the importance of their growing online communities.

See more information at http://www.hello-world.cc/

archipelago.ch

archipelago.ch depicts a tour of newly discovered “islands” which are actually a series of robotic research labs at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich.

achipelago.ch iterates the discovery, analysis and interpretation of their terrain and indigenous creatures. The “creatures” inhabiting each island are the idiosyncratic robots evolved by each researcher from their choice of morphologies occurring in nature, i.e., a insect eye, mouse whiskers discerning textures by touch, etc.

Robotic systems at the AILAB are evolved for research and experimentation on the interrelationship between morphology, cognitive capabilities, and environment in generating behavior. Each robot constitutes a creature for a section of the video and is named after the corresponding researcher: a “mouse” (St. Simir Island) - capable of perceiving its environment through rat whiskers as a sensory modality; quadrupeds (Fumiya Island). And aquatic creatures moving through water via stimulated oscillation (Marcus Cove).

The video voiceover consists of verbatim text from Darwin’s Voyage lf the Beagle, Chapter 17: The Galapagos, with some contributions from researchers’ papers. The lab terrains are strewn with the tools and detritus of each researcher’s endeavors and treated as flora. Depiction of isolated robotic parts, particularly those from trial and error experimentation, emphasizes a robot’s evolution as a specimen striving for fitness and survival. Coincidentally, the video is narrated by Andrew Berry, Alfred Wallace historian and an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology lecturer at Harvard University, who attended Shrewesberry School of which Charles Darwin was an alumni.

Director of AILAB: Dr. Rolf Pfeifer

Mentes Brillantes Los Secretos del Cosmos Galileo , Newton, Einstein y Stephen Hawking

Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein y Stephen Hawking: cada hombre era un rebelde a su manera y cada uno con una visión radicalmente nueva del Cosmos. Todos ellos cambiaron el mundo descifrando una parte del Universo, partiendo del lenguaje de las matemáticas, desde lo cotidiano hasta lo que parecía inalcanzable.