Speaking of Freedom - Great speeches of our time

Energy Literacy (Saul Griffith)

2008-09-10T12:25:00.002+09:30

A really excellent talk explaining in detail the breakdown of planetary energy usage, what that means per person, and what we need to do in concrete terms to deal with planetary warming. An engineer's approach, you'll like this if you're sick of the intellectual vacuum in the global warming "debate", and want some cold hard facts.

If we are to make a big change in the way energy is produced and consumed we need an “Energy Literacy” that gives people a tangible sense of their energy consumption, and of what it takes to meet that. This talk aims to inspire people that the problem is solvable with rational, data-driven development of the appropriate technologies, both in clean energy generation and in energy conservation. It aims to inject a rational perspective on the energy debate by showing the real numbers and potential of various energy sources to contribute to a balanced future energy supply."

Taking the next giant leap in space (Peter Diamandis)

2008-09-09T10:31:00.001+09:30

Let's go to space, and get all the gold, yeehaw! It's a cool talk. A bit too gung-ho-isn't-the-rich-poor-gap-awesome, but hey.

All the Government's Information (Carl Malamud)

2008-09-04T13:08:00.009+09:30

Video Link

Totally back on topic. A talk by Carl Malamud.

"If you happen to be lucky (or unlucky) enough to live in Washington, D.C., and are appropriately credentialed or won the right lottery, you can choose from a couple of dozen places to go watch the workings of government in action. Congressional hearings and the White House briefing rooms are the best known of these official hotspots, but most agencies have their own hearing rooms for official actions, press conferences, and other public proceedings. Sometimes these official proceedings make themselves visible to the rest of us, usually through low-resolution streaming video using a proprietary format. A few hearings get archived, though the archives are rarely accessible. A new project aims to change that by streaming official proceedings out to the Internet as high resolution video and creating a permanent archive. It is our belief that the respective agencies have an obligation to create these feeds, since you can't really can't call a proceeding public if it isn't on the Internet. It is also our belief that permanent archives of these official records should be widely replicated throughout the Internet. Consequently, the aim of this project is to create the service and then put it self out of business in a few years by encouraging/cajoling the government to do the right thing. Technically, the project consists of gatewaying an existing video-over-fiber facility which transports 280 mbps uncompressed video into a series of 50-mbps MPEG-2 streams transported over an OC48 which backhauls the data into public peering facilities, where the streams are transcoded and made available without charge to service providers, such as Google Video and the Internet 2 backbone. Additional services envisioned include an "anybody can annotate" service which couples XMPP-based sessions (such as Google Talk services) to stored archives."

Fascination with the Dodo Bird (Adam Savage)

2008-09-03T17:25:00.009+09:30

Adam Savage of Mythbusters talks about his obsessions. He's a model maker, and oh my god, the stuff he does. What an incredible actualizer!

The Q&A gets a bit dull, but at around 46:00 he talks about why they wont ever be able to do a show about RFID, check it out.

Lessig on McCain on Technology

2008-08-28T19:29:00.002+09:30

This one is absolutely on-topic. From Lawrence Lessig's blog, it's "Me on McCain on Technology".

More quality from Lawrence Lessig. You keep shootin' 'em Larry, and I'll keep showin' 'em.

Parrots the Universe and Everything (Douglas Adams)

2008-08-27T17:09:00.002+09:30

Look, I'm wandering further off topic. This is indeed a talk (about an hour and a half long), but it's not really about freedom or free culture. It's partly about endangered species and mostly about being damned funny.

My excuse is that it's Douglas Adams, of Hitchhikers Guide fame, and a very tenuous thread is that he was apparently good friends with Richard Dawkins. The world became a measurable poorer place on the day he died.

I'll be posting more by Adams in the near future (on topic this time), although I can't find a video, so I might have to read it myself, which should be jarring, I mean excellent.

The God Delusion #2 (Richard Dawkins)

2008-08-27T11:42:00.003+09:30

Part 2 of Richard Dawkins talking about his book The God Delusion in Lynchburg, Virginia (in the U.S.A.).

70 minutes, so grab a coffee and kick back for this one.

Hang in there for the creationist pwnage as students from Liberty University try to catch Professor Dawkins out. Some nice discussion of that is here.

The God Delusion #1 (Richard Dawkins)

2008-08-27T11:23:00.004+09:30

Slightly deviating from topic, here's Richard Dawkins talking about his book The God Delusion in Lynchburg, Virginia (in the U.S.A.).

Professor Dawkins isn't talking about freedom / free culture, but he is talking about truth and evidence based rational enquiry, the impulse to which stems from the same root as the free culture movement; that it is right to know all we can about the universe we live in, and it is not right to fence that knowledge away, be it through the use of goons (legal measures) or memes (religion).

Also, it's just a great talk. Worth your time to watch. Which is 37 minutes for this first part, and 70 minutes for the second part.

Lawrence Lessig at iCommons Summit 2007

2008-08-25T09:39:00.003+09:30

Lawrence Lessig speaks at iCommons 2007 about CC (CreativeCommons.org).

Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus - Clay Shirky

2008-08-23T17:58:00.003+09:30

"I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."

Life in the Information Economy - Cory Doctorow

2008-08-23T17:01:00.011+09:30

Cory Doctorow writes on BoingBoing:
I gave a talk a couple weeks ago in Cambridge, UK, as part of the Cambridge Business Lectures, entitled, "Life in the Information Economy." Lots of folks asked about video for the talk -- and here it is! The (free) lecture series goes on -- the next speaker is John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, on Sept 12. Life in the Information Economy"

Transcript here.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

2008-08-23T16:39:00.004+09:30

"presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008. This was tons of fun to present. I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result."

by Professor Michael Wesch