Life in HD

Nature wastes no steps, wastes no resources. Nature adapts, improvises and finds the elegant solution. About a decade ago the BBC and Discovery Channel assembled a production team to document the hidden secrets of nature using the best of human ingenuity and the best technology available. After five years of grueling work the result was the eleven-part series Planet Earth, a must see for anyone working in a creative field.

Must see, not just for what it showed but how it was achieved. A filmmaker spent two weeks in the wilderness quietly waiting to capture this:



The same team is now back with Life, a ten-part series that explores the challenges of life on planet Earth. Life premieres (in the U.S.) on the Discovery Channel, Sunday, March 21, 8pm. Check your local listings and try to catch the series. It will surely inspire.



It is easy to think that we humans rule the animal kingdom. But take a look at these videos and see how animals survive with extraordinary imagination and “bizarre innovations.”





Click here to see the Vogelkop Bowerbird (with it’s “very appreciative eye for color”.)

Take a behind the scenes look:




From the colors of the rainbow, to the tides of the ocean, the impossibility of a hummingbird in flight, flying fish, the golden mean, fractals, and many other instances, life and nature prove to have the smartest creativity.


Related:
Life: web, wiki, twitter
Planet Earth: web, wiki

 

Photoshop's 20th Anniversary Documentary

via tv.adobe.com

In this 18 minute documentary, the founders of Adobe Photoshop - John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman - tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

It’s almost hard to believe the program is 20 years old. I remember using a very early version of it that had no layers, no history and each variation of an image had to be saved as a separate file. There are some surprising references to Macintosh, ILM, Pixar and James Cameron that relate to the birth of Photoshop.

Google Liquid Galaxy Live Demo At TED

via youtube.com

At this rate there will be a demo of the Google Holodeck at a TED in the near future.

TED 2010 Conference Makes for Strange Bedfellows

LONG BEACH, California — Bedfellows were never more strange than those assembling this week for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference launching Wednesday in Long Beach.

Avatar director James Cameron, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former covert CIA analyst Valerie Plame, 4chan founder and provocateur Christopher “Moot” Poole and potty-mouthed comedian Sarah Silverman are among the eclectic mix of speakers that will rock the small harbor town through Saturday.

The four-day, $6,000 a head, invitation-only event, dubbed “Davos for the Digerati set,” will gather industry titans, celebrities, academics and alpha geeks for its 26th year. This year’s overall theme is “What the World Needs Now,” with separate themes listed for each track of speakers.

Gates, who last year made headlines after releasing a handful of mosquitoes on stage to draw attention to malaria, will be speaking in a session dubbed “Boldness” about work being done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to eradicate malaria.

Plame and Poole will both appear in a session dubbed “Provocation.” Poole will discuss 4chan, the online forum he created that serves as a haunt for would-be hackers and members of Anonymous — a motley, loose-knit crew of online rabble-rousers who have launched crusades against the Church of Scientology, the Australian government and others while often missing their mark.

Other speakers include:

• Temple Grandin, an autism activist and designer of livestock facilities, who is the subject of an HBO biopic with actress Claire Danes;
• biologist Cheryl Hayashi will discuss the amazing properties of spider silk and its possible uses in protective armor for soldiers on the battlefield as well as biodegradable surgical sutures;
• legal activist Philip Howard will take on the provocative topic of why the world can do without lawyers;
• cell biologist Mark Roth will discuss the latest research into the possible use of hydrogen sulfide to reduce the metabolism of trauma patients and heart-attack victims to buy time until they can be treated;
• and interface designer John Underkoffler will discuss the point-and-touch interface he invented.

To provide respite from the often rich and heady presentations of TED speakers, an array of musicians and artists will provide palate-cleansing performances — former Talking Heads musician David Byrne, as well as singers Natalie Merchant and Sheryl Crow.

Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson will also be showing attendees the magazine’s new strategy for bringing its content to users of Apple’s new iPad device.

Continuing this year is the TED fellowship program that opens TED’s elite doors to more than three dozen up-and-coming thinkers and doers from developing regions who are invited to attend for free.

Founded in 1984 by architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman as a kind of dream dinner party with interesting people he wanted to meet, the conference was bought by publisher Chris Anderson in 2001 (not Wired’s Chris Anderson). Anderson’s nonprofit, Sapling Foundation, now runs the conference, along with the TED Global conference held in Oxford, England, each year, and the satellite TED Africa and TED India events.

Since taking over eight years ago, Anderson has focused the conference on philanthropy and social consciousness. The primary purpose is to cross-pollinate people from various fields to share knowledge about the latest developments in the sciences and arts and to inspire attendees to think imaginatively about their own contributions to the world.

The conference attracts a wide range of attendees, whose accomplishments and notoriety often rival the speakers -– Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, musician Peter Gabriel and comedian Robin Williams have appeared at past events. Past speakers have included former Vice President Al Gore, filmmaker J.J. Abrams, Sims creator Will Wright and physicist Stephen Hawking.

Generally, one talk stands out each year as the crowd favorite, for varying reasons. In 2008, it was neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s riveting account of a stroke she experienced years earlier. In 2006, Hans Rosling, a geeky professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, became the resident rock star for his surprisingly stunning presentation on statistics and the developing world.

Among the annual features of the conference is the TED prize, generally given to three recipients. This year it will be given only to one — celebrity chef and author Jamie Oliver. The prize is an annual award launched in 2005 to recognize individuals whose work has had and will have a powerful and positive impact on society. It provides each recipient with $100,000 and the chance to ask for help from the TED community in achieving one grand wish to change the world.

Past winners have included U2 singer Bono, former President Bill Clinton, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, and former economist and trained musician Jose Antonio Abreu.

Oliver will receive his award and reveal his wish at a ceremony Wednesday night.

Those who aren’t invited to TED can see the conference presentations as they’re posted to the web over several weeks after the conference ends. Since TED began posting videos of its talks in 2006, more than 15 million visitors have viewed them.

Earlier this year, TED launched a translation/transcription version of its talks.

The tool combines crowdsourcing with smart language markup to provide translated and transcribed videos in more than 40 languages — from Arabic to Urdu — that can be indexed and searched by keywords. Users can click on any phrase in the transcript of a talk, and jump to that point in the video.

Wired.com will publish stories from the conference all week.

via wired.com

Very much looking forward to this year’s conference. It also features LXD performing.

The New Newsstand Redux - The iPad?

This is a continuation of a post found here.

Yesterday Apple introduced the iPad. After all the build up of anticipation and the managing of expectations via leaks to the press, the product was finally introduced. And in less than 24 hours it has gone through the whole zeitgeist cycle of want-need-hate. Most of us have not even seen or touched the device, yet we have already judged it.

This is a symptom of a 21st Century cultural malady. We are quickly loosing our capacity for wonderment and surprise. If we discover something that we then love, we immediately want to know how it was made, why, how much did it cost, how long did it take to make. Be it art, or technology, or entertainment, even news. We are loosing our ability to appreciate awe-inspiring experiences and in the process rendering them ordinary.

We do this by constantly negotiating with ourselves about how we are to have the experience. If we are expecting the release of a book, a movie, a new product, anything really, we begin an internal dialogue that looks somewhat like this:

Oh, that’s cool. Let me look that up online.

Wow, that’s really cool. Can’t wait for it to come out. 

It is going to be so awesome. 

I’m sure that it is going to be exactly what I want it to be and also will surprise me with unexpected twists.

I don’t know. I heard that it may not be good. 

Here it comes, here it comes, almost there. 

Well, how can it be everything to everyone. 

Maybe they’ll surprise us and it will be better than magic. 

Here it is.

Is that it?

I don’t know. I expected more. 

We can no longer let things be what they are and appreciate them. Everything now has to be created with an aura of awesomeness. Not only are we loosing our capacity for wonderment, we are also loosing our capacity to be fair and effective critics. 

I am by no means trying to elevate the significance of the iPad - much has been said already about the name, in three years all the jokes will be forgotten, maybe less depending on how many early adopters embrace the device. Instead I want to put it in context from the point of view of someone who clearly loves technology. 

I am not an Apple cultist, some of my peers may disagree, on the other hand I’ve worked with Apple products since the late 80s and love them because at every step of my growth I was able to almost seamlessly customize them to allow me to learn more and do more. Consistently and with a minimum of irritation (compared to my experiences with other systems) I’ve been able to use Apple products as tools that adjusted to my needs and then almost got out of the way. 

So here is my take on the iPad. Like almost everyone I know, my initial reaction was decidedly “is that it?” The buzz leading up to the event so hyperbolic that it really was impossible for whatever they were introducing to illicit something more than a “there’s got to be more” response. 

Since then, I’ve watched the keynote, downloaded the SDK and given thought to how I could use this device. 

The clipboard is now obsolete. Any job that used clipboards - for medical charts, inventory, to name a few - for easy access to information can be enhanced greatly by having this device, even more with a custom made application. The idea that as a creative services producer I can do rounds in a creative department with all of my workflow assignments, budgets, timelines, emails, project history, creative notes and briefs, everything easily available, makes me think of how much more I’ll be able to do on any given day. If companies then develop custom made apps to integrate into their current systems this could be a groundbreaking device for running day-to-day operations. I will spend the next few weeks learning how to develop for the device by producing an app that addresses all my work needs. 

By embracing a few behavioral modifications the iPad could also become a productivity tool for creatives. Think of all the things that keep you from your work, your favorite distractions, twitter, facebook, rss feeds, email, all of them. Now, decide that you’ll only engage in those distractions on the iPad and you’ll only do it 3 or so times a day. In turn, your desktop or laptop then become devices used exclusively for work. By physically separating work and play into their own devices you’ll quickly notice all the ways in which the distractions encroach on your creative processes, or worse, all the ways in which we use distractions as procrastination tools. 

The iPad is a 1.0 product that, much like the iPhone, will become even better in its 2.0 incarnation. It has some flaws and some limitations, but what it does it does mostly well and fast. Really fast, thanks to Apple’s own chip.

As for my beloved magazines, it is obvious now that for them to survive they need to stop thinking of themselves as publications and start thinking of themselves as applications. Because the new newsstand is the app store.