Get Shouty

Ok- confession time. I’m a physics nerd. I love it. I had the most amazing, passionate teachers who romanced my classes with stories of Issac Newton and Einstein and Galileo. Only when we knew about their lives and the context of their discoveries were we introduced to the mechanics. It brought what might have been remote and dusty into sharp relief and fostered a life long interest in how things work.

I can introduce you to a similar teacher, Professor Lewin the iconic brilliant scientist who  is at once larger than life and totally accessible. Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall. He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he created.

The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.

The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”

So my Christmas gift to you all:

The MIT Physics 1: Classical Mechanics course- lecture notes, problem sets with solutions, exams with solutions, links to related resources, and a complete set of videotaped lectures. The 35 video lectures by Professor Lewin, were recorded on the MIT campus during the Fall of 1999.

» Download the complete contents of this course.

Marrakesh is one of the darkest cities that I’ve ever flown into- 10 o’clock and almost nothing to see. Once you get out of the airport it’s an entirely different story, a hive of activity that you can spend hours trying to decipher.

I’m staying in a riad right in the medina, deep in the Souks about a 15 minute walk away from the main square- the Jemaa El Fna. And right now I’m tapping away on a non qwerty keyboard and across the little alley way from the internet cafe is a chicken butcher with live chickens, a beef butcher with body parts hanging from hooks. Morocco is no place for vegetarians. The alleyway itself is filled with crazy two stroke motor cycles, donkey carts, veiled women, a million cats and the call to prayer.

Must dash- more soon.

 The cathedral in Seville is the largest medieval Gothic building in the world and the view from the belltower, once a minaret, brings to life the differences between the Spain of Al-Andalus and the Spain of the Inquisition.

The courtyard, the Patio de los Naranjos was once where Muslims cleansed themselves before entering the Mosque when it was built in the 12th century. Central fountains feed an ingenious reticulation system. It is a celebration of symmetry, balance and harmony, light and order. The cathedral which now covers the site is decorated in gargoyles and inside is very dark and full of glorified images of misery and pain.

I was very glad indeed to get out in the the winter sun and see it from this distance and get this perspective- the place chilled my bones.
 

It´s a very strange beast, travelling from the third world to the first world.

I´m sitting in the VIP lounge at the Madrid train station waiting to catch the AVE train (Alta Velocidad Española,literally, “Spanish High Speed,” but also a play on the word ave, meaning “bird”)  to Seville . It can achieve speeds of up to 300 km/h (186 mph) on dedicated track. But I´m w.a.i.t.i.n.g. to get on it.

I remember that some of the first words I learned in South America was ‘form a line’ and this tradition of patiently waiting to be served holds in Spain too. Everywhere I walked today people were lined up to buy lottery tickets.

In Thailand, if you´re Hiso, you neither walk nor wait. At the end of any street you will find a phalanx of motorcycles waiting to take you any distance  more than 20 meters and it is a super fun way of cooling down in the Bangkok heat. My colleague, Ceri, tells me that this is the way she dries her hair in the morning. You can also  get to your destination much faster by these mad cutting through traffic antics as  it usually doesn´t moove much more than 7km an hour .

Today is the first day I´ve eaten in ages. I got a noxious bout of something or other in Bangkok and the 20 hours of travelling to get to Madrid didn´t help. Neither did the fact that, while I arrived, my bags didn´t. By the time I arrived at my hotel all I wanted to do was sleep, horizontally, in clean sheets, alone and not in the company of 400 people. Which I did- for about 18 hours. I guess I needed that. Thank you Hotel Urban- you were a very soft place to land.

But back to the eating. In Thailand while I love to eat like a native, it might have been the source of my troubles. In Spain I´m going there too- and I’m sure that’s why I feel so fabulous right now. Hot chocolate that really just chocolate liquidy goodness for breakfast. Lunch at a place called ‘Mueso de Jamon’ which is, you guessed it Ham Museum evidenced by hundreds of different kinds of Jamon Iberico. In Australia this stuff sells for over $350 a kilo. Here they stuff it into crunchy rolls by the handful and chuck in a cafe con laite and a freshly squeezed oj for 3 euros. I could get used to this. 

Well Interesting South is finally here. A team have put together a conference, not about brands, advertising, blogging or twitter but a wide variety of interesting, unexpected, original things. We’ve found 19 fascinating people and asked them speak for 3 or 10 minutes about something they care about. We want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, music, jokes and whatever. The idea is to be informal and fast paced.

I´m in Madrid right now and have had to put together my presentation remotely- a strange scenario of very late nights in a Bangkok hotel, food poisoning, Skype phone calls and the very kind help of my friend Tim.

It´s completely sold out which is great and we´ve also just got an email from the guy who runs TED and they may want to post some of the videos to their site which is pretty cool too.

I won´t be able to be there and see it live, but I will be able to see the night through the eyes of all of my friends, which just might mean that I get a more accurate 360 degree view of proceedings . Running events means that you´re ‘on duty’ all night and that, in combination with having a speaker slot would colour my own perceptions considerably. Now I get to see the night through a friend’s eyes, a colleague’s eyes, a speaker’s eyes, a sponsor’s eyes and through fantastic Emily’s eyes.

We will be giving you all an opportunity to check out the interestingness in the very near future as we´ve arranged a sponsor for hosting. I´ll let you know when it’s live.

UPDATE ME PLEASE! Gavin? Emily? Matt? Tim? I need the goss!

 It is well known that I have a major crush on TED.

Two weeks ago, TED.com hit a milestone: posting their 150th TEDTalk. To help you keep track of all the TEDTalks you’ve watched and want to watch, here’s a simple, low-tech tool: a list of all the TEDTalks posted to TED.com so far, in the order they were posted.

My favourites:

• Majora Carter’s tale of urban renewal
• Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen
• Ze Frank’s nerdcore comedy (seen above)
• and well…Al Gore on averting climate crisis

Wow- my blog’s life in 30 seconds. Watch it. Make your own!

Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out.

Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.

 A number of people have expressed their amazement at how much Australians love to text.

Coming from the insight that Australians have a text message stored on mobile phones that they can’t bring themselves to delete, a book has just been launched to celebrate this love.

Nearly 2 years in the making, 200 Characters is (perhaps) Australia’s first book devoted to the refined art of SMS. Collected from real peoples in boxes, this book covers the full spectrum of emotions (and emoticons) expressed through the Short Message Service

Sneak peak here

Office beats from Musa Tariq on Vimeo which WordPress does not like but I do!

So I’m here in the Hunter Valley for the iMedia Connection Summit. We’re two and a half hours north of Sydney deep, deep in the wine region of NSW. It’s green, green in a way that we haven’t seen in years. That’s what a flood will do for you.

I’ve been in the Australian digital industry for a while now. It’s awesome to see a whole bunch of people coming of age- people I’ve worked with, people I respect, and of course, people who I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.

The opening address concentrated on the potential of the internet- wot a wonnerful medium, it is. Yawn. The speaker was addressing the top 80 digital thinkers in the country. People who eat the internet for breakfast. People who create tomorrow today. People who understand that the internet is no longer a wonderful idea- but a place where wonderful ideas can happen. Disappointing.

 Had some fantastic conversations with the crowd. The ever brilliant Jen from Tribal had some very insightful thinking on mobile ad serving and the resposibilities of educating clients and the ever charming Peter, from Clear Blue Day was a gracious host.

More tomorrow. This is dial up. Ouch.

Come on boys, we need to dance, we have got a good chance.
Lay your problems on the floor, clap your hands and sing once more:

Everybody, lets go to the king,
We can dance there, dance and eat an ice-cream.
Everybody dancing all night long,
Try to do it, sing a happy song.

Music, dancing in the night, we can get so high,
For no reason no long stop, nows the time to go to the top.

Its a sweeter happy song, well sing all night long.
Lay your problems on the floor, clap your hands and sing once more:
Everybody, lets go to the king,…

I’ll be eating ice cream  and doing a happy clappy dance with King Marcus (or the Kaiser as we all know him) in the smack down challenge between Boney M and The Smiths championing the side of disco and mirror balls over the shoe gazing dis chordal down beat wailings of Morrisey.

Charles, Gavin and Sean are already in-will you join the challenge? Get in contact if you’d like to be involved- there’s a secret clubhouse and everything!

Antony Gormley: Bubble matrix, arms and legs bent and apart 2007

When I worked in the music industry I used to have to present each week’s product to the sales team. They would be unusually attentive. At the pub I asked one of the guys what was going on, and learned that I have a bit of an unusual talent. I could predict a top ten song.

I have strong, immediate and visible reactions to things that I think are brilliant, that I think will work. I get  goosebumps.

It’s really useful in brainstorming and allows me to filter and process information really quickly.

The better the stimulus the more intense the reaction I have. If it is very beautiful and true then I have a tendency to burst into tears.

Here are some things that have recently made me well:

• Paul Potts singing Nessun Dorma
• Antony Gormley’s bubble matrix work- these huge sculptures are a balance of delicacy and strength that continue to reveal insight on human shape and form
• And this:
  • Be grateful to those who have hurt or harmed you,
     for they have reinforced your determination.
    Be grateful to those who have deceived you ,
    for they have deepened your insight.
    Be grateful to those who have hit you,
    for they have reduced your karmic obstacles.
    Be grateful to those who have abandoned you,
    for they have taught you to be independent.
    Be grateful to those who have made you stumble,
    for they have strengthened your ability.
    Be grateful to those who have denounced you,
    for they have increased your wisdom and concentration

Last night Australia hosted a full eclipse of the moon.

It’s lovely when an event of nature gets people on the street talking to each other.

There once was a thinker called Plato
Who said “this world’s second rate-oh,
It’s just a poor copy
Of something less sloppy
Where all is precise and first rate-oh”

And then there’s a nod to Descartes:
“I hope that you’ve taken to heart
That without a safe line
To something divine,
Each is stuck at his self engrossed start.”

But cheer yourselves up my good friends
Though it’s true that the search never ends
We may each in our day
Have our personal say
And feel free to explore current trends.

The poem above mostly stolen and re purposed  from here.