Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster

Summary: As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

IMHO: Its a long video but has some great information about how cities and corporation grow and die.

Will We Ever Understand the Brain?

Summary: "As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these question and more as we look into the neurology of the brain."

African Bull Frog Plays Ant Crusher

The video is of an African Bull Frog playing the Ant Crusher game on a smart phone.

"Firewall" (Don't Let Our Government Ruin The Internets)

Leah Kauffman wrote this song taking aim at the Stop Online Piracy Act (aka SOPA). She is also the singer/songwriter behind the 2007 song "I Got a Crush on Obama".

Kindness Boomerang - "One Day"

Watch as the camera tracks an act of kindness as its passed from one individual to the next and manages to boomerang back to the person who set it into motion.

End of the World Parody (CollegeHumor)

Funniest News Report of all Times

What do you get when you have a 48 Ton Dead Whale, and a half ton of dynamite? Watch the video to find out what happens. Not amazingly, there is a web site dediciated to this event (theexplodingwhale.com)

Yoav Medan: Ultrasound surgery -- healing without cuts

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, surgeon Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

Awesome Projects on KickStarter

Below is a list of my favorite projects that I am watching on KickStarter. If you're not familiar with the KickStarter site, its dedicated to crowd funding small projects that could be the next awesome thing by pooling together money contributed by lots of different people.  If a project gets fully funded the project creator gets the money, if the full funding is not reached then the contributors get their money back.

Printrbot: Your First 3D Printer
Excerpt from the project Kickstarter page: "I designed the Printrbot to be the simplest 3D printer yet. There are some great kits out there - the Makerbot, the Ultimaker, the Prusa Mendel, and others - but none as small and simple as the Printrbot. This all-in-one 3D printer kit can be assembled and printing in a couple of hours. Other kits will not only take you many more hours to build, they will also have hundreds more parts, and they will cost more. My design also does away with the finicky calibration and adjustment from which most 3D printers suffer. This is the printer a kid could put together. We assemble the electronics, we assemble the hotend, and we put the connectors on all the motors and components... no soldering required!" (more information)




Multi-Touch Keyboard and Mouse
Excerpt from the project Kickstarter page: "Multi-Touch keyboards and mice are the next generation in computer peripherals. These elegant well made devices are composed of quality tempered glass, a solid metal base, and the finest components. They are designed using simple existing technology and have no moving parts. They have rechargeable Lithium Polymer batteries and are completely wireless. The tactile sounds and lighting can be turned on or off per the users' preference plus they are coffee and doughnut resistant!" (more information)



Teagueduino: Learn to Make
Excerpt from the project Kickstarter page: "Teagueduino is an open source electronic board and interface that allows you to realize creative ideas without soldering or knowing how to code, while teaching you the ropes of programming and embedded development (like arduino). Teagueduino is designed to help you discover your inner techno-geek and embrace the awesomeness of making things in realtime — even if you’ve only ever programmed your VCR." (more information)



Twine : Listen to your world, talk to the Internet
Excerpt from the project Kickstarter page: "Want to hook up things to the Web? Maybe you want to get a tweet when your laundry's done, or get an email when the basement floods while you're on vacation. Even if you're good with electronics and programming, these are involved projects. Instead of worrying about wiring or networking code, you can focus on your idea." (more information)



BoardX: The Open Source Miniature Motherboard
Excerpt from the project Kickstarter page: "BoardX is a collection of electronic circuit boards that stack on top of one another to share resources, communicate, and extend the functionality of one another. This system is built on the motherboard that acts as both an electrical and structural foundation." (more information)

Google’s Graphing Calculator (new feature)

Google introduced a new feature recently in the search result page which is the ability to plot mathematical functions and display using an interactive graphing calculator functionality. For example, if you type in a function like sin(x) and you’ll see an interactive graph on the top of the search results page.

Cheryl Hayashi: The magnificence of spider silk

Cheryl Hayashi studies spider silk, one of nature's most high-performance materials. Each species of spider can make up to 7 very different kinds of silk. How do they do it? Hayashi explains at the DNA level -- then shows us how this super-strong, super-flexible material can inspire.

Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration

After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately -- all for free.

Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon's new map for war and peace

In this bracingly honest and funny talk, international security strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett outlines a post-Cold War solution for the foundering US military: Break it in two. He suggests the military re-form into two groups: a Leviathan force, a small group of young and fierce soldiers capable of swift and immediate victories; and an internationally supported network of System Administrators, an older, wiser, more diverse organization that actually has the diplomacy and power it takes to build and maintain peace.

Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science

Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.

William Shatner's Steps to Unfriending Recovery

...LIKE THERE IS NO TOMORROW! (Awesome Video Compilation))

Here is the list of videos used to make this compilation.

Justin Hall-Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid

What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes? In this moving talk, entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible, and how questioning our notion of 'normal' can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs.

Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that hint of longer lives

What controls aging? Biochemist Cynthia Kenyon has found a simple genetic mutation that can double the lifespan of a simple worm, C. Elegans. The lessons from that discovery, and others, are pointing to how we might one day significantly extend youthful human life.

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment (Window Farms)

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. For more information, check out RNDIY.ORG