Douglas Adams talk

[miriam_e]

I just had a wonderful breakfast listening to Douglas Adams talk about all kinds of wonderful things with that odd viewpoint he uses to illuminate things. The talk is a free download from the Biota.org site:
http://www.nobleape.com/biota/biota_adams.mp3

Do have a listen. It is well worth it. The sound quality is not great so if you are half deaf like me you might want to read the transcript at the same time:
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

Enjoy.

Comments

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

Thank you so very much for posting that!

Douglas Adams does (*sigh* did, I mean) have the knack of taking complicated things and smooshing them together with very common language and ideas and coming out with quite original but accessible ways at looking at very complicated things.

The transcript was interesting in far too many ways to enumerate but amongst all the other things, it's germinated an absolutely smashing idea for a short sci-fi story. I might using it for NaNoWriMo this year.

Serendipity indeed :)

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

In an odd way he still does because of a kind of immortality granted by files like this.

Great that it has helped you with developing a story idea. Excellent!

Teleportation

[rpeate.livejournal.com]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/04/teleportation.reut/index.html

Re: Teleportation

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Very interesting Robert. Thanks.

They seem to have only teleported the information about the object rather than the object itself, but that is still really neat. One day we may be able to do away with wires, radio waves, interference, and bandwidth problems, and send/receive data instantaneously in complete security using this technique. Very, very cool.

It occurs to me that it would be impossible to spam such communications. Yay!!!

Re: Teleportation

[rpeate.livejournal.com]

But couldn't SPAM be sent this way on its own? One might not know what one was receving until it arrived, separate and distinct. "Incoming message!" sounds good until you receive it. :)

Re: Teleportation

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Nope, it wouldn't have anything to do with the message itself; it is that such 'teleported' communications rely upon entanglement. That means each communication channel is singular and unique, and absolutely can't be confused with any other.

If we got rid of the forged "From:" headers of email, enforcing the correctness, then spam would disappear overnight. Spam only survives because of that shortcoming. Entangled communications would eliminate forged source addresses.