For Morgan Meis. Video length: 6:09

Video length: 3:15

This talk was presented at Harvard-Epworth Church, Cambridge, MA on May 12, 2016. Video length: 1:26:30

Barack Obama spoke to Wired Editor in Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito last week. You can see all eight excellent videos here. (Is there anything BHO doesn't know a lot about? I was amazed by how he has time to keep up with things like issues surrounding recent developments in AI. I highly recommend watching all eight Wired videos.)

Here is the 6th video in the series about how AI will affect jobs. Video length: 9:12

And here are two bonus BHO videos:

From NPR:

What, exactly, made him so great? A research team in Europe wanted to answer that question, so it looked into the science behind his voice. Professor Christian Herbst was part of that team, which just released its study on Mercury; as a singing teacher and a biophysicist, Herbst says he was intrigued by Mercury's technique. According to his research, the key lies in Mercury's vibrato, which differs slightly from those of other classically trained singers.

“Usually, you can sing a straight tone, but opera singers try to modulate the fundamental frequencies,” he says. “So they make the tone, if you like, a bit more vibrant. Typically, an opera singer's vibrato has this frequency of about 5.5-6 Hz. Freddie Mercury's is higher, and it's also more irregular, and that kind of creates a very typical vocal fingerprint.”

You might be able to hear that vocal fingerprint in the vocals-only version of Queen's hit song “We Are The Champions” below.

More here.

Why is math so good at describing the world? Video length: 53:05

This is worth watching in full. Video length 28:27

Video length: 3:34

This is a very interesting look at the backgrounds of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, including their childhoods. Video length: 1:54:48

E.J. Spode in 3:AM Magazine:

One of the greatest scientists of our lifetime has embarked upon a fascinating research program. The program is exploring a property of human nature – the language faculty – and he is attempting to show how a half-century of research by thousands of linguists from around the world can be grounded in low-level mathematical and biophysical properties of our world. And whether that program is successful or not, it is a vision of remarkable beauty – the recursive patterns of our languages and their variety and complexity could be understood perhaps as well as we now understand the spiral patterns in the nautilus shell or the recursive patterns of the snowflake.

He came to us with that gift. He did not ask us to believe him, nor did he insist that we engage in that project ourselves. He simply told us what his project was and invited us to join him. And all we as a culture could do in our upscale magazines and newspapers and blogs was shit all over the man and clog the conversation with an endless stream of transparent gibberish from obvious charlatans. This is why we can’t have nice things.‘

Tom Wolfe’s most recent book – The Kingdom of Speech – is nothing if not iconoclastic. And the icons he has chosen to smash are impressive: Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky! I have no problem with smashing icons, but this effort is an embarrassment for Wolfe, for his publisher, and, because of its largely positive reception, for our broader culture. It is a literary Sharknado of error and self-satisfaction, with borderline racism and anti-Semitism mixed in. It careens between being hilariously bad and tragically bad. It is irredeemable.

Let’s start with the part of the book about Darwin. Darwin may be one of your scientific heroes and you may even consider him to be one of the great geniuses of the 19th Century. Well, wake up sheeple, because Tom Wolfe has got a story to tell you.

More here.

Video length: 3:27

Interesting cup one can only fill to a certain point before it drains. Video length: 5 minutes.