Video – Page 13 – Chris Aldrich

📺 Food Waste: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Food Waste: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Producers, sellers, and consumers waste tons of food. John Oliver discusses the shocking amount of food we don’t eat.

This episode dispels a lot of common misconceptions about food and food donations in the United States.

Some of the potential legislation discussed here could be tremendously helpful not only to a lot of Americans, but to other countries as well. I find it difficult to believe that legislators work on a bunch of knucklehead things when “simple” things like this are left to fester away. Not only could it help out millions of people, but could create jobs, and drastically effect world efficiency as well as improve the economy.

If Jeremy Cherfas, hasn’t seen this, I highly recommend it. Perhaps a more in-dept episode of Eat This Podcast on the numbers, policy decisions and science?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY

📺 Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Federal Budget: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Donald Trump's federal budget plan proposes large funding cuts with largely negative consequences. John Oliver examines the troubling priorities of the new administration.

It’s amazing how much civics lesson one can sneak into a comedy show.

📺 Marijuana: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Marijuana: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Under federal law, even legal marijuana is illegal. John Oliver explains why conflicting drug laws pose serious problems.

Our government should spend a bit more time worrying less about flashy headlines and spend more time working on things that will help and improve the lives of the most people. Getting the hundreds of thousands of low-lying marijuana offenders out of the criminal justice system and helping them be productive members of society would certainly help. If we’re going to penalize marijuana users like this we should also do it with alcoholics too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcR_Wg42dv8

📺 Paris Agreement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Watched Paris Agreement: Last Week Tonight from HBO

Donald Trump plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. That's bad news for anyone who happens to live on this planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5scez5dqtAc

📺 A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information by Sara Walker

Watched A Universal Theory of Life: Math, Art & Information from TEDxASU

Dr. Walker introduces the concept of information, then proposes that information may be a necessity for biological complexity in this thought-provoking talk on the origins of life. Sara is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist, researching the origins and nature of life. She is particularly interested in addressing the question of whether or not “other laws of physics” might govern life, as first posed by Erwin Schrodinger in his famous book What is life?. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. She is also Fellow of the ASU -Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, Founder of the astrobiology-themed social website SAGANet.org, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Blue Marble Space. She is active in public engagement in science, with recent appearances on “Through the Wormhole” and NPR’s Science Friday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXnt79JhrbY

Admittedly, she only had a few short minutes, but it would have been nice if she’d started out with a precise definition of information. I suspect the majority of her audience didn’t know the definition with which she’s working and it would have helped focus the talk.

Her description of Speigelman’s Monster was relatively interesting and not very often seen in much of the literature that covers these areas.

I wouldn’t rate this very highly as a TED Talk as it wasn’t as condensed and simplistic as most, nor was it as hyper-focused, but then again condensing this area into 11 minutes is far from simple task. I do love that she’s excited enough about the topic that she almost sounds a little out of breath towards the end.

There’s an excellent Eddington quote I’ve mentioned before that would have been apropos to have opened up her presentation that might have brought things into higher relief given her talk title:

Suppose that we were asked to arrange the following in two categories–

distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.

I think there are the strongest grounds for placing entropy alongside beauty and melody and not with the first three.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (1882-1944), a British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician
in The Nature of the Physical World, 1927

🔖 The Algorithmic Origins of Life – Sara Walker (SETI Talks)

Bookmarked The Algorithmic Origins of Life by Sara I. Walker (SETI Institute Talks)

The origin of life is arguably one of the greatest unanswered questions in science. A primary challenge is that without a proper definition for life -- a notoriously challenging problem in its own right -- the problem of how life began is not well posed. Here we propose that the transition from non-life to life may correspond to a fundamental shift in causal structure, where information gains direct, and context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter, a transition that may be mapped to a nontrivial distinction in how living systems process information. Dr. Walker will discuss potential measures of such a transition, which may be amenable to laboratory study, and how the proposed mechanism corresponds to the onset of the unique mode of (algorithmic) information processing characteristic of living systems.

https://youtu.be/dPiI4nYD0Vg