Andrew Carol built a “Babbage Difference Engine” using Legos which can solve polynomials. Read more and watch video of it on acarol.woz.org.
He also built an eclipse predictor known as an Antikythera Mechanism. It is has over 100 gears and 7 differential gearboxes. See pictures and videos here.
The YouTube video is titled “Guy Walks Across America”. But he didn’t actually walked across America. The movie was a stop-motion video created by Peter Cote and his crew as they took 2700 individual shots of various points across America from New York to San Francisco.
You can also watch the behind-the-scenes process in this video.
Most people have the traditional view that people deposit money into banks and then bank lend those money out to other people. Banks make money because it charges higher interest on lending money out than it gives back in depositor’s interest. This is true to a certain extent. But it is not a complete big picture of how the monetary system works in modern times (such as in the United States).
Think about all the big mortgages and large car loans that many people have taken out currently. The banks have lend them all these money. Do you think depositors have deposited that same amount of money into the banks? Considering that the savings rate is around 1% and 2% in the United States around the years 2006, it doesn’t seem likely.
Perhaps the banks have all this money to lend out because the wealthy has deposited a lot of money into banks. With saving interests rates often below inflation rate, do you think the wealthy really save all their money in a bank savings account? More likely, their money is in investments such as stocks, bonds, and assets.
So where do banks get all this money to lend out to people?
The truth is that banks are lending out money that they don’t have. They are lending out more money than what people are depositing into the banks. If banks are lending out more money than deposits are putting in, where is that money coming from? Banks are creating money. Money just appears whenever someone sign their signature for a loan. In essence, money is debt.
You can learn more in the 2006 video “Money As Debt” by Paul Grignon
And this is legal?
Yes, in the United States it is legal. It is known as the partial reserve system.
In 2009, Paul Grignon created its sequel “Money As Debt II”. The movie is appear to be in part a response to the economic financial crisis that the United States is in at the time.
You can learn more on their website at moneyasdebt.net which have a references to quotations and transcripts.
Economist Andrew Lo speaks at MIT about economics and physics. He talked about ideas that he and physicist Mark T. Mueller came up with as to why financial crisis happens.
It is a timely talk presented in June 2010 after the 2007 to 2009 recession.
He explains the Ellsberg Paradox by introducing to the audience a hypothetical game.
One of the main points of the talk is that financial crisis happens when tools developed are not appropriate for the level of uncertainty and risk involved.
Some links to what I call nail-biting videos. Just watch and you will know what I mean.
Linked here is a video of a lecture by Professor Frank Wilczek given at MIT about the unification theory of the elemental forces.
Just because the lecture is in MIT doesn’t mean that you have to be a physicist to understand it. In fact, the lecture is geared toward the general audience and he explained things in a way that’s easy to understand. He also sprinkled in a few jokes into the lecture.
As Wilczek mentioned, you do not have to be a physicist in order to appreciate the beauty of the laws of nature. But he does say it is an exciting time to be a physicist, due to the fact that all these exciting ideas that are coming out. And that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be able to show whether the ideas are correct or not. This lecture was given in 2008 and the LHC was due to come online in a year from that time.
Wilczek has a book called, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces: Anticipating a New Golden Age — and this is also title of the lecture.
In the lecture, Wilczek showed us some pictures of the LHC from the inside as well as from a birds-eye-view. Although you cannot really see much from the bird’s-eye-view since the collider is underground. What is important is that Wilczek explains what the LHC does, and a little on how it works, and how it is important to physicists. He even played a clip of the LHC rap video song. He stopped the video halfway, since although the first part of the video is scientifically correct, the second part gets it wrong.
Another video that he showed was what apparent empty space looks like at a microscopic level with its quantum fluctuations.
At the end of the lecture, there was time for Q&A. He answered a question about the Higgs particle and also explained briefly about dark matter and dark energy. He explained that matter as we normally think of it comprised only 5% of the mass of the universe. That dark energy comprises around 70%. Dark energy is uniform across all space so it’s kind of a medium of space. Here is an article explaining what the universe is made out of.
Frank Wilczek did win the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004 along with David Gross and David Politzer for discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.
References:
The short film “My Name Is Lisa” is such as powerful film about Alzheimer’s. It was made by Shelton Films (started by two brothers) and is on YouTube. In fact, it won 2007 YouTube Awards for “Best Short Film of the Year”.
YouTube linked here has a hilarious video by Mark Gungor telling us the difference between men and women’s brain. Funny and perceptive too. More of his humor in his DVDs, Tale of Two Brains and Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage
Mark Gungor does marriage seminars and his website is LaughYourWay.com
For more funny videos, visit his YouTube channel.
This is a funny video about procrastination. It was drawn and made by Lev Yilmaz of ingredientx.com, where you can watch more of his comics and videos.
He also has a book out as well called “Sunny Side Down: A Collection of Tales of Mere Existence”.
You may also like to watch Ellen DeGeneres funny video about procrastination.
Watch an excerpt from the documentary “Ants! Natures Sceret Power” as scientists excavate an ant colony. This was done by pouring concrete into an abandoned ant colony and then excavating away the earth. This reveals an incredible an efficient structure that has highways and sideroads. The ants had to remove 40 tons of dirt in order to build this structure.
In another different ant colony that was not abandoned, scientists measure the air coming into and out of the ant tunnels and determined that it is analogous to an air-conditioned system where there are different shafts for incoming fresh air and outgoing carbon dioxide air.