TED – Day 5

Session 11: The Echo of Time

Jack Hoerner – dinosaur hunter extraordinaire!  DNA from flies in amber – will yield a room full of flies!  When it hatches, the Dinochicken will be the poster child for TED.

Rajesh Rao – 4000 year-old Indus script is undeciphered but computers are making progress.

What the world needs now is more TED heroes!

Long talk with Michael Gough from Adobe. He is the on who has funded Francis Potter’s fantastic work on setiQuest Explorer.  It was nice to be able to say thank you. 

Session 8: Innovation and Consequence

Session 4: Antonio Damasio – the wonder and mystery of conscious minds.  Area at the top of the brain stem makes continuous maps of ourselves that is basic component of consciousness that is elaborated upon by tight coupling with cerebral cortex.

Damon Horowitz – teaches philosophy class in San Quentin prison.  Our enemy is thoughtlessness, this is philosophy!  Let’s do this!

Session 1: Stage revealed - and it's cosmic!!! Milky Way rises above the stage floor and all the sponsors' logos are being projected onto screens of starfields --- looks like setiQuestExplorer!

In line at 8 am, got my badge, got my bag, got my gifts, met my first ‘old friends’ from TED – I’m a TEDster again!

We are trying to move forward with our concept for engaging citizen scientists to help the SonATA team to discover signals in data collected with the ATA that we might otherwise miss.  In particular, we would like citizen scientists to find any potential ETI signals that occur in bands of the frequency spectrum that are crowded with signals that our own terrestrial communications systems produce – we refer to these as badbands and do not routinely

I gave a keynote talk at OSCON this morning to let the open source community know about setiQuest and to ask for their help to make it shine. I guess the attendees were pretty tired of slides filled with logos and lines of text surrounded by curly-brackets, because the talk was very well received and they were delighted to see images of radio telescopes and galaxies. Throughout the day people stopped me to say how much they enjoyed our exciting exploratio

(April 26, 2010) Today I am at AbSciCon 2010, a meeting on astrobiology in League City TX, and I did manage to attend the first session this morning before having to step out to reply to media enquiries.