Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman

About this talk

What's it like to be pals with a genius? Onstage at TEDxCaltech, physicist Leonard Susskind spins a few stories about his friendship with the legendary Richard Feynman, discussing his unconventional approach to problems both serious and ... less so.


I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I'm going to tell you the Richard Feynman that I knew. I'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman was a very complex man. He was a man of many, many parts. He was, of course, foremost a very, very, very great scientist. He was an actor. You saw him act. I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. They were fantastic. He was a philosopher; he was a drum player; he was a teacher par excellence. Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. He was brash, irreverent -- he was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upsmanship. He loved intellectual battle. He had a gargantuan ego. But the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom. And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case -- I can't speak for anybody else -- but in my case, a lot of room for another big ego. Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. I always felt good with Dick Feynman.

It was always fun to be with him. He always made me feel smart. How can somebody like that make you feel smart? Somehow he did. He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun. He loved to win. With these little macho games we would sometimes play -- and he didn't only play them with me, he played them with all sorts of people -- he would almost always win. But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won.

I remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him. They took him -- I think it was for his birthday -- they took him for lunch. They took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and they arranged that they would all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich." And without skipping a beat at all, he said, "Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham," ham, as in bad actor. (Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "Yeah, but a lot less baloney."

(Laughter)

The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense -- phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. I remember sometime during the 80s, the mid-80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman, we met a couple of times up in San Francisco at some very rich guy's house -- up in San Francisco for dinner. And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. These guys were philosophers of mind. Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. And they were full of all kinds of jargon. I'm trying to remember the words -- "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place. I didn't know what those things meant, neither did Dick -- neither did Sydney for that matter.

And what did we talk about? Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? One thing, this one obvious thing to talk about -- can a machine become a mind? Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being, that is conscious? We sat around and we talked about this -- we of course never resolved it. But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-iphizing. It's a scientific question after all. And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman. Feynman let them have it -- both barrels, right between the eyes. It was brutal, it was funny -- ooh, it was funny. But it was really brutal. He really popped their balloon.

But the amazing thing was -- Feynman had to leave a little early. He wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. They were so happy. They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud; and it was something special. I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.

Dick, he was my friend. I did call him Dick. Dick and I did have a little bit of a rapport. I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. I also liked the kind of intellectual macho games. Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. I don't think he was right. I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. But he was convinced of this. And he was curious. The man was incredibly curious. And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection.

And one day we were walking. We were in France. We were in La Zouche. We were up in the mountains, 1976. We were up in the mountains, and Feynman said to me, he said, "Leonardo." The reason he called me Leonardo is because we were in Europe and he was practicing his French. And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or to you father when you were a kid?" And I said, "Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance." And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a light bulb. And he said he had had basically the exact same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that, to be a good physicist, that it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened.

He said that he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary -- the necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment. So, well he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?" And to a man -- they were all men -- to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." (Laughter) There went that theory down the trashcan of history. But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced that this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?

But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. Feynman's style -- no, style is not the right word. Style makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn or the suit he was wearing. There's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. But no doubt part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply you didn't understand it. In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.

There was a theory. It was due to a Russian mathematical physicist, and it was a complicated theory. I'll tell you what that theory was soon enough. It was a terribly complicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. The helium atoms had to be very far apart. And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.

Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. He had an idea, a very clear idea. He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. The first one was that, when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. The other fact is that the ground state, the lowest energy state of a quantum system, the wave function is always very smooth -- has the minimum number of wiggles.

So he sat down -- and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil -- and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. He wrote down a simple thing. It was so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high school student, who didn't even have calculus, could understand what he wrote down. The thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some.

I've always wondered whether the professionals, the real professional helium physicists, were just a little bit embarrassed by this. They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. It was the technique of Feynman diagrams.

(Laughter)

He did it again in 1968. In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- but in 1968, they were exploring the structure of the proton. The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles. This was more or less known. And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for -- to understand particles. The experiments that were going on were very simple. You simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for. The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. They're difficult integrals. If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory. But you couldn't; they were just too complicated. People were trying to do them. You could do a one loop diagram. Don't worry about one loop. One loop, two loops -- maybe you could do a three loop diagram, but beyond that you couldn't do anything.

Feynman said, "Forget all of that. Just think of the proton as an assemblage of little particles -- a swarm of little particles." He called them partons. He called them partons. He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast." Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. The electron hits it suddenly. It's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. What do you see? You see a frozen bunch of partons. They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. You don't have to worry about the forces between them. You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons. This was the key to analyzing these experiments. Extremely effective, it really did -- somebody said the word revolution is a bad word. I suppose it is, so I won't say revolution -- but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that.

Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. So I think I'll just finish up by saying I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. I think he would have said, "I don't need this." But how should we honor Feynman? How should we really honor Feynman? I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can.

Thank you.

(Applause)

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I got to speak to Dr. Ge Wang, the co-founder, CTO and CCO at Smule yesterday about the development process for Magic Piano, the differences in developing for the iPad versus the iPhone and what the iPad might mean for the future.

Wang, an Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, really wanted to build an application specifically for the iPad and one that would show off the devices best features.

Working around the clock for just over two months, the team at Smule built Magic Piano to be both an experiment and working proof of concept, as well as an app that could be fun and creative.

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Wang sees the iPad as having tremendous potential for the creation of music. Looking at Magic Piano, I have to agree. If this is what you can create in two months as a proof of concept and experiment, who knows what could be built in the next six!

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Yesterday, representatives from both companies were called before a senatorial subcommittee to answer questions from the likes of Senators Al Franken (Minn.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.) on whether or not our mobile devices are becoming Big Brother 2.0.

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“I am also concerned about reports that this sensitive location information may be maintained in an unencrypted format, making the information vulnerable to cyber thieves and other criminals”, the Senator said.

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Be that as it may, Senator Franken noted that consumers remain confused, so he posed the question directly to Apple’s VP of Software Technology Bud Tribble: “does this data indicate anything about the user’s location, or doesn’t it?”

Tribble’s response was to reiterate the main message to the average consumer: that the data is a record of the location of cell towers and WiFi hotspots, it does not contain any customer information. It is anonymous. However, that comes with a nuance. When a portion of that database is downloaded onto your phone, your phone knows which hotspots and towers it can transmit through, so the combination of the location of those towers and your phone knowing which towers it can transmit through, allows the phone to give you a basic location without GPS.

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Franken also asked the representatives from the two companies about the fact that they run the biggest app stores in the world, yet require no privacy policy for their apps, and so asked them if they would consider adding a privacy policy.

Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy, said that Google has relied on a permission-based model which requires users to give permission before any sharing takes place, but that the next step is important for Google to consider and is “a very good suggestion”. He said that he would “take that issue back to leadership”. And for Apple, Tribble said that Apple contractually requires third-party developers to disclose if they’re going to do anything with user information, but does not integrate an over-arching privacy policy. He then continued on to say that a general privacy policy would not be enough, that true transparency goes beyond what’s in the privacy policy and needs to be integrated into the user interface of an app, designing feedback to the user about what’s happening to the information into the actual app.

Franken then asked Tribble about why Apple only asks users if they want to share location with an app, while Google asks the user if they want to share location, address book information, contacts, and so on. Tribble responded by saying that a long checkmark box of opt-in sharing options would only confuse the user and be unwieldy both to present and read on a mobile device.

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The legislative process is just beginning here, and may well be glacial in its progress. Though there is certainly some questionable thinking to be found coming from these two companies in how they’re thinking about privacy, it’s great to see evidence of their willingness to work with the government to find the best solution for enterprise — and more importantly, the consumer — going forward.

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Ignite is back to top off your brain after a packed day. This year we will learn about the Brain API, the similar...

Discovery Channel: Megaquake, hour that shook Japan documentary Part 1 of 3

Discovery Channel's new one-hour special MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN will tell, through the eyes of those who lived it, the story of the moment the 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck northeast Japan on March 11, 2011 and the tsunami that followed, resulting in more than 12,000 deaths. Poignant testimonies and remarkable footage captured that day will reveal what happened in those crucial moments following the quake as a tsunami barreled toward land at 500 miles per hour. The special will also examine scientifically what happened that day and attempt to piece together when Mother Nature may strike again. MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN, featuring exclusive interviews and never before seen footage, premieres on Discovery Channel on Sunday, April 24 at 10PM e/p and will subsequently roll out on Discovery networks around the world.

Discovery Channel and its production partner, Darlow Smithson Productions, includes in its movie an exclusive sound recording captured at the Wake Island hydro-acoustic station 2,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean. The station belongs to the global monitoring network of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The recording, made by ultra sensitive hydrophones at a depth of 1,300 meters, was subsequently sped up by 32 times so it could be audible to human ears - enabling people to hear the actual sound of a 600km long section of the fault line in the earth's crust rupturing and grinding against rock with the power of 600 million Hiroshima bombs.

Viewers will also hear the very personal stories of those who experienced events of March 11th. Firefighter Takayama Yukio was inside the nuclear plant when the earthquake struck. He will recall the sense of fear and desperation among those inside. The special also includes footage of Yukio and his fellow firefighters inside the reactor.

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, Japan's Sendai Airport was a nightmare - cars were strewn about the runway, debris littered the terminal and there was no power. Hear about the chain of events in an exclusive interview with the air traffic controller, Kibuna Yoshihiko, who was on duty that day.

The special also features interviews with Americans who were in Japan on March 11th, including Paula Lutze who was teaching school in Sendai. Exclusive footage shows Lutsy in school that day. She was instrumental in rescuing children caught up in the chaos of the tsunami.

Additionally, the new Discovery special will examine the Pacific Ring of Fire - a name given to the region devastated by natural disasters in recent years - to assess whether the earth's tectonic plates are in a phase of increased activity, which could result in further seismic events. Through exclusive interviews with top seismologists and oceanographers, the documentary will piece together where Mother Nature might strike next.

MEGAQUAKE: HOUR THAT SHOOK JAPAN is produced for Discovery Channel by Darlow Smithson Productions, where Tom Brisley and Guy Davies are executive producers and Simon Young is producer. For Discovery Channel, Stephen Reverand is executive producer.

核電變色龍郝龍斌

日本首相菅直人敢停掉濱岡核電, 除了自己的勇氣之外, 一些地方首長的支持也是功不可沒. 靜岡縣知事川勝平太、大阪府知事橋下徹、名古屋市長河村隆之、愛知縣知事大村秀章等等, 都在背後力挺菅直人. 所以, 核電問題雖是中央政府的層次, 地方首長的態度也很重要.

那麼台北市長郝龍斌的態度究竟是什麼呢? 當年陳水扁停建核四時, 郝龍斌曾連署提案倒閣. 光憑這一點, 你會以為他是擁核人士. 但我翻閱一下舊紀錄, 赫然發現他曾在立法院就"立即停建核電廠"一案投下贊成票. 民進黨執政時代, 他當環保署長, 主導通過「環境基本法」，其中第23條明定：「政府應訂定計畫，逐步達成非核家園目標」. 所以蔡英文現在講的非核家園, 郝龍斌也有貢獻.

看來郝龍斌似乎是個反核人士. 但他的立場總是隨著官位而改變. 看我質詢他時的支吾其詞, 就知道他其實是沒有態度的......

Underwater search robot

Touchpanel that don't rely fingertip movement

Pioneer Prototypes Android-based Cyclocomputer (Video)

If you thought Android can be used just to power phones, tablets, TVs or similar devices, think again: Pioneer is now using the Google OS (version unknown) in the development of a “next-generation” cyclometer. It helps users track four main parameters: speed, cadence, heart rate, and power.

The prototype, which sports a 2.2-inch color LCD (non-touch) screen and a trackball, also features a pedaling motor that measure the force on the crank.

Current features include ANT+ support, GPS, a microSD slot, a microUSB port, a thermometer, and 12 hours of battery life. The device weighs 100g.

This video (shot by our friends over at Diginfonews in Tokyo) provides more insight:

A talking dog

Flipboard's Mike McCue at SXSW

Flipboard's Mike McCue at SXSW

Kara Swisher interviews Mike McCue, CEO and Co-founder of Flipboard, the social and news reading app, at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.

Start-up Allows Flash Games, Video on iPad

蕭青陽 - Story Island

3 times Grammy's Award nominated designer talked about the creative process of his latest album in TEDx Guangzhou event.








李欣芸《故事島》風潮音樂11/15正式發行。

影片為精裝版內頁製作過程，費時費工！是蕭青陽與《故事島》相遇後，碰撞出充滿台灣味的設計作品！值得您我一起來品味&收藏！

(請注意：影片備註過程皆為12倍速快轉)

Milestones in AppJudgment's 300 Episode History! - AppJudgment

Poor Wayfaring Stranger - Peter Hollens - Feat. Swingle Singers - A cappella Cover - Beatbox

PressPausePlay Sneak Peek #2 - Dystopia

3d Printing

For The High-Tech Naturalist: LeafSnap Identifies Leaves Using Your iPhone’s Camera

This is just plain fantastic. The LeafSnap app for iPhone identifies any leaf you take a picture of, as long as it’s in their library. Right now it’s limited to trees native to the Northeastern US, but they’re working on expanding that. The best part is it’s free! Hopefully this will get me to finally learn the names of the trees around here. All I know is “pine” if it has pine cones and “not pine” if it doesn’t.

The app is a collaboration between Columbia, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institute. Thanks, guys.

Man, this is the best reason I’ve heard of yet to get an iPhone. Luckily it’s coming out for Android and iPad this summer. Check it out at the App Store. It’s free!

Cool Ring prototype shows new way to use Tablets

Silk: a great new database powers new Next Web site

Here's a sneak peak at a new database that Silk is helping build for The Next Web. Here the founder shows me what makes it special.

Capitalism, Chinese Style

Orville Schell on China's view of American debt


Bio

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are, Virtual Tibet, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders. He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books.



Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. We're in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the birthplace of the International Monetary Fund, at the INET conference--hundreds of economists brought together to find a solution or debate solutions to the economic crisis. There's barely a panel or a sentence in this conference that doesn't mention the word China. Now joining us is one of America's foremost China experts, Orville Schell. Orville's the Arthur Ross director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He's a former professor and dean at the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism. Thanks for joining us. So at the opening panel, George Soros starts by saying: I'm baffled. And he specifically says he's baffled that more corrective action hasn't been taken dealing with the causes of the financial meltdown, more or less the regulation of Wall Street. He says that his framework of looking at the world would have suggested after such a meltdown there would have been a push to take real action. So when China looks at the United States and sees it seem so little has been done to deal with some of the underlying issues, and given how many American T-bills China owns, how do they look at all this?

ORVILLE SCHELL, DIRECTOR, CENTER ON US-CHINA RELATIONS: Well, China has traditionally, I think, looked up to the United States, particularly as it's begun to marketize and to allow its economy to open up. And they've viewed America as sort of the titan of the world, as most countries have also done. So I think it's with some surprise that they saw this titanic country and the world's largest economy just kind of go into implosion. And it's taken a lot of adjustment for them, as it has for us, to kind of adjust to the fact that this country, which for so many years they were against and that they admired, that they loved, they hated, but that was always hugely important and seemingly implacable to them, that it could have been so fallible.
JAY: Now, China kept its cool, and in fact kept buying T-bills and kept sending signals that, well, we have faith in the US economy and it will all work out. They really had no choice but to say those things. But do you get a sense--what do they really think about it? There must have been some shaking of their confidence in where all this is leading.
SCHELL: Well, I think the Chinese leadership was very rattled to find this sort of pillar of the whole financial architecture of the global economic system so unstable. And it's true that they've invested many hundreds of billions of dollars in Treasury bills and other forms of American securities. And they will continue to do so not because they aren't bothered by what they see, by the fragility of our own system, but because there's no other place for them to put it.
JAY: Where else do they put all the capital?
SCHELL: [incompr.] they're collecting huge amounts of foreign exchange, and they've got to park it someplace. And in a certain sense there is a kind of a symbiotic relationship that's almost like some drunk and their spouse, which is they lend to us, we borrow, we spend in a profligate manner, but we buy their stuff, they make the money, get the foreign currency, and give it back to us so that we can go deeper in debt to buy from them. That's what's been going on until the financial crisis. Now that's got to change. China recognizes it, and I think we do, too. They can't just be an export economy. They have to start generating a greater level of consumption within China. But there the Chinese run into a structural problem of their own, that they have a very high savings rate, which means people don't consume as much as they could. Why? Because they don't have a welfare system and a health care system that provides for people in their old age, so people lock up their money. So it's only to say--and one of the reasons why China comes up every other sentence here in Bretton Woods and everyplace else is because the US and China are insolubly locked together now with one set of sort of economic internal organs.
JAY: Now, Soros's point about being baffled was that he was baffled that there wasn't more serious regulatory action taken to control Wall Street. Given how much at stake China has in all this, they must be more than baffled. Are they not concerned that the underlying reasons have not been addressed, this could all happen again, and they own so much American debt that--or do they just think this economy's just too big, that this is an American economy too big to fail?
SCHELL: Well, here I think the Chinese leadership and George Soros are in accordance, strangely. They both believe the United States has been very reckless in escaping and refusing to sort of regulate itself in a way that would make the system safer for everybody. And, after all, it isn't just the Americans that suffer when the American financial system is shaken; it's the whole world, China included. So China looks at the United States with a good deal of trepidation. But it isn't like there are an awful lot of alternatives for them to go to. First of all, to buy T-bills, which are safe, I mean, unless the US defaults, which I think it--very small likelihood of that. Second of all, we're in this whole new world now where China's piling up capital that wants to go someplace, and it doesn't want just these low-yield Treasury bills or other kinds of securities. It wants mergers and acquisitions. It wants high-yield investments. And what better place to invest than the US? But, of course, here we run into a certain ambivalence.
JAY: 'Cause what you're talking about is starting to buy stuff rather than to buy T-bills. In other words, you buy mines and you buy factories, and perhaps you buy banks.
SCHELL: They want brand name, big league companies. They want to run with the big guys. And China's had a very difficult time getting any company to be sort of brand-known on a global scale. I mean, if I ask you how many Chinese companies do you know the names of, you might think of Lenovo [incompr.] IBM, or you might think of parts of IBM, or /haIr/, the, you know, whiteware, white goods company.
JAY: Why would they--why don't they buy Wal-Mart, given that Wal-Mart is essentially--.
SCHELL: I don't think Wal-Mart is for sale, but they might like to. But can you imagine the reaction in America? That would be like, you know, buying the Queen of England. These are very symbolic things that--. And America's not adjusted well at all at this point to the idea that someone else might start owning us, just the way we--.
JAY: But there's no legal way to stop it, really, is there?
SCHELL: No. Legally, one would have to say America is an open market. We believe in allowing foreign direct investment from around the world. It's a great virtue of this country, and also a great strength. However, we have certain neuralgia against certain kinds of countries, like sometimes Arabs, and China, because it's run by the Chinese Communist Party. So what happens is they'll want to buy a company, and there is a review process, but just for national security purposes. It's seldom used. But people just start talking. Congressmen start writing letters, investment bank gets scared, the Chinese investments don't want to have their name dragged through the mud, and poof, the deal evaporates. That's been the pattern--not a healthy one, I should say, for the United States or for China.
JAY: We go back to this issue we were talking about previously, which is, when China looks at the debate in American politics right now, this stimulus versus austerity, all the austerity hawks seem to be winning this debate. The Obama administration seems to have bought into this idea that the idea is pay down the debt. They're debating how much. In China, the issue, they understood there should be stimulus. And the austerity regime there was never their way out of the crisis. So if they look at this American debate, one would think if there's austerity and [incompr.] layoffs coming at the state municipal levels and the likelihood of employment not going down further--many people are saying it's going to go back up again once the real hit hits at the state level--what do they make of this? They didn't follow these policies in China, and they have so much American debt at stake.
SCHELL: I think the Chinese, like many other countries, have a lot of catching up to do to figure out what's going on in America with these Tea Party people. Where did they come from? You know, what's this all about? How in the name--in their view of heaven has the United States of America, land of reason, freedom, scientific thinking, rationality, how has it been seized by people who believe in none of these things? And the Chinese really don't understand this well. They scratch their heads and they look at us, and they need a lot of help, as many Americans do, to understand what is happening to this great country.
JAY: But clearly it's a section of the American elite that's behind the famous--the ones out front are the Koch brothers, but they can't be doing this all on their own. And there's this--you know, Karl Roves and others were all involved in the last November election campaign. There's a whole section of the American elite that sees the necessity, they think, of austerity. They make paying down the debt the big issue, and they're absolutely against paying any kind of taxes. So the Chinese, are they going to weigh in on this in any way? Or is it just too difficult for them to say anything?
SCHELL: They don't believe in interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, because they don't want anyone to interfere in their internal affairs. So they're not likely to give us, you know, a lot of gratuitous advice about how to run our affairs. However, they are worried--as everybody must be worried--about America, because America sits at the center of everything. So as we go, in certain respects, so goes the world. So it's very important, I think, that America figure itself out better. In the meanwhile, it leaves a lot of other people around the world scratching their head. And that's why it's so important that our financial system remain open, as we always have been--that's been our great strength--and receptive to other countries investing in it, because if we begin to get into trade wars, you know, protectionism, tit-for-tat kind of deals--and we're particularly inclined to do that with China--it could be very deleterious not only to our health, but the health of the global financial system.
JAY: Does China have a plan B? If they think the American politics is going to push American economics really into some downward spiral, have they got a plan B not to be drawn into it?
SCHELL: Well, you know, there really is no plan B for anybody. America is too large on the sort of international economic scene. China is, of course, investing very vigorously in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, around the world, particularly in natural resources. But that still doesn't sort of take up the slack. They're doing that for energy security and resource security. But they've piled up, you know, an awful lot of foreign exchange reserves and they've got to do something with it. So the question is: what? The euro is a bit wobbly, and all these crazy countries, and Athens in, you know, Greece, and Portugal on the abyss, and Japan's no great shakes, the yen, where else do you put your money? There are a very limited set of options. So the US is still a good option. So one hopes that that partnership between the US and China can work its way out in a constructive manner, because in actuality the US now could use Chinese investment for job creation and infrastructure building. That's why it's so important. And that's why the US-China relationship simply cannot be ignored, because without it--well, there is no without it. There's only with it. So you've got to get it right.
JAY: Thanks for joining us.
SCHELL: Pleasure.
JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
End of Transcript

Keen On… Ze Frank: Why We All Need to Go Back to Kindergarten (TCTV)

Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze’s soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an attempt to reinvent the kindergarten’s star system of rewards.

As Ze told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, “stars are good.” They make us human, they allow us to display our emotions and become children again. But the funny thing about Ze is that, in building his new online kindergarten, he’s had to become an adult – fancying an idea, raising capital, developing a business model, leading a team. And, as he confessed to me, becoming the CEO of a funded startup hasn’t always been as easy as he first imagined when he founded Star.me.

This is the first part of my conversation with Ze. On Monday, he tells me why the future of play is a “hot thing.”

(Green B.A.C.O.N, in the video above, wants to use natural sunlight to reduce lighting costs.)

(Green B.A.C.O.N, in the video above, wants to use natural sunlight to reduce lighting costs.)


Around eighty entrepreneur hopefuls gathered at NASA AMES last week to pitch their ideas for breakthrough technological products, with the hopes of gaining the funding to make their dreams a reality. But this wasn’t part of the application process for a new fangled startup accelerator program, and the teams weren’t comprised of Valley visionairies in their 20s and 30s but rather high school kids between the ages of 14-18.

To compete in the Conrad Foundation’s Spirit of Innovation Awards, each team of high schoolers had to create a business plan, technical report, graphical representation and elevator pitch for their product, presenting their invention to a panel of judges for 10 minutes. All in all 27 finalists competed in the Aerospace, Clean Energy and Cyber security categories to win $5,000 and the community support and mentorship to develop their product commercially.



While their peers were pitching on stage, I interviewed ten of the most promising teams about their product vision, what it was like to be so ambitious at young age and their thoughts about young entrepreneurship. Three of our interviewed teams went on to win the competition (Unisecurity, Ouroboros and West Philly EVX Team) but every participant won in the long run as they got to spend four days at NASA surrounded by other nerdy kids excited about changing the world.

From Ouroboros (a team focused on a “perpetual nutrition system” or a mechanism that would turn organic human waste into compost that can be used to grow crops) to S.A.R.A. (safe word activated mobile app designed to stop sexual assault by notifying the police) the level of professionalism and passion exhibited by these students was impressive.

And more importantly, none of their ideas was on this list of startup ideas destined to fail. Hooray for the future.





(Green B.A.C.O.N, in the video above, wants to use natural sunlight to reduce lighting costs.)



Ouroboros is a composting system for human waste.




UniSecurity wants to create a smartphone app that acts as a heart rate monitor for the elderly or others with cardiac issues, reacting to heart rate irregularities by alerting emergency contacts if there’s an issue.






Air-Ease built a solar powered fan, because many on their Montezuma Creek Indian reservation




West Philly EVX Team actually built a light weight, market ready electric car.





S.T.A.R. wants to make glasses for augmented reality.





SARA is an iPhone app designed to respond in the case of sexual assault.





R Squared is building a mobile app that lets users easily notify their friends when they need a safe ride.





Lennox Aerospace wants to build a space scaffolding structure designed to provide astronauts with privacy.





Kinergy is a mobile phone charger that runs off of the kinetic energy created from human movement.

Skydeck Quietly Becomes Mr. Number, Hits 2 Million Users, Brings Status Alerts And More To Mobile

You can shine

Ben Brown: Wainui River

Vikram Pamdit

http://buttonwood.economist.com/

The World Cyber Games Special

The World Cyber Games Special from Emergent Order, LLC on Vimeo.

This one hour special, which I produced and co-edited together with Bobs Your Uncle takes a look at the world of international professional video gaming.

Pulp Culture

Pulp Culture from Emergent Order, LLC on Vimeo.

Keynes vs Hayek Rap (VIDEO)

http://econstories.tv/



Hayek and Keynes Battle at The Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering

On October 25th, an audience of financial managers and CEOs, politicians, central bankers and Nobel Prize-winning economists at The Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering were treated to an unusual experience: a live rap battle between John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek.






Part I: Keynesianism

It’s All About Spending

Is our prosperity derived from a continual circular flow of spending? Is it impossible for a society to increase it’s total savings? Can deficit spending by a government step in to replace private activity in order to maintain full employment and restore lasting economic growth? What is a liquidity trap and what does it mean for the economy? What did Keynes really mean by “in the long run, we’re all dead”?

Facebook's new energy efficient data center

Cloud technologies power some of Internet's most well-known sites—Picasa, Gmail, Facebook and Zynga, just to name a few—and cloud companies are striving to make the computer processing behind these sites as energy efficient as possible. With that in mind, Facebook, Dell, HP, Rackspace, Skype, Zynga and others have teamed together to form the Open Compute Project to share best practices for making more energy efficient and economical data centers.

To kick-start the project, Facebook unveiled its innovative new data center and contributed the specifications and designs to Open Compute. "Cloud companies are working hard to become more and more energy efficient...[and] this is a big step forward today in having computing be more and more green," explains Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace.

A small team of Facebook engineers has been working on the project for two years. They custom designed the software, servers and data center from the ground up.

One of the most significant features of the facility was that Facebook eliminated the centralized UPS system found in most data centers. "In a typical data center, you're taking utility voltage, you're transforming it, you're bringing it into the data center and you're distributing it to your servers," explains Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations at Facebook. "There are some intermediary steps there with a UPS system and with energy transformations that occur that cost you money and energy—between about 11% and 17%. In our case, you do the same thing from the utility, but you distribute it straight to the rack, and you do not have that energy transformation at a UPS or at a PDU level. You get very efficient energy to the actual server. The server itself is then taking that energy and making useful work out of it."

To regulate temperature in the facility, Facebook utilizes an evaporative cooling system. Outside air comes into the facility through a set of dampers and proceeds into a succession of stages where the air is mixed, filtered and cooled before being sent down into the data center itself.

"The system is always looking at [the conditions] coming in", says Furlong, "and then it's trying to decide, 'what is it that I want to present to the servers? Do I need to add moisture to [the air]? How much of the warm air do I add back into it?'" The upper temperature threshold for the center is set for 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but it will likely be raised to 85 degrees, as the servers have proven capable of tolerating higher temperatures than had originally been thought.

The servers used in the data center are unique as well. They are "vanity free"—no extra plastic and significantly fewer parts than traditional servers. And, by thoughtful placing of the memory, CPU and other parts, they are engineered to be easier to cool.

Now that these plans and specifications have been released as part of the Open Compute Project, the goal is for other companies to benefit from and contribute to them. "Open source, crowd sourcing, Wikipedia—these are all capitalizing on, or enabled by, the same force," explains Weston, "which is that when things are open, there's more innovation around them."

More info:

Facebook announcement: http://tinyurl.com/4x67au9
Open Compute Project web site: http://opencompute.org/

NAVTEQ True(TM) Platform at Where 2.0

Jeff Raimo, Product Manager at NAVTEQ, describes NAVTEQ True, the next generation vehicle for collecting raw data as well as the customized tools for automating the extraction of this data. Jeff points out the 3 primary categories for collecting data, including LIDAR, imagery and positioning.

VUFind lets people play and share around their visually-recognized interests

t's a real life game. http://www.vufind.com/ You play this game on a real-life map, but it's a mix of virtual and reality. Sort of like Risk and Stratego board games. Here I talk with the founder, Moataz Rashad, about it.