Monthly Archives: March 2012

Why Nothing Really Matters (My Trip Inside An Isolation Tank)

by

Have you ever done absolutely noth­ing for an entire hour?

I mean noth­ing.

On March 25th, 2012, I did noth­ing for the first time in my life.

altered states 1 Why Nothing Really Matters (My Trip Inside An Isolation Tank)

States Were Altered.

I was invited to the pri­vate res­i­dence of Edward Arroyo in the hills near Pasadena to expe­ri­ence some­thing called an Iso­la­tion Tank.  I had known  Edward since the Tran­scen­dent Man screen­ing party, but I never had a chance to check it out until now.  I recently saw him at BIL Con­fer­ence, and I real­ized that, Holy Shit, I still need to do this.

It was a cold, rainy Los Ange­les day — which set the per­fect mood for intro­spec­tion.  Four of us arrived at his res­i­dence, where we were greeted by sand­wiches and refresh­ments.  He showed us many arti­facts he has col­lected from around the world, most notably, some­thing called Noah’s Ark — a black, obsid­ian, boat shaped rock.  It only spins clock­wise — that is, if you try to spin it the other direc­tion, it vibrates, stops, and cor­rects itself.

The final stop on the tour was in the back build­ing, where the iso­la­tion tank resides.  It is basi­cally a large metal cham­ber, with the inte­rior com­pletely blacked out.  There is about ten inches of extremely salty water, which is warmed to the exact same tem­per­a­ture as the human body.  The air is also warm, giv­ing the illu­sion that you are com­pletely sub­merged in something.

Edward led us back inside the house, where we made final prepa­ra­tions.  I was first, so I took a shower, dawned a bathrobe and slip­pers, and took out my con­tact lenses (an act that in itself would be enough to ren­der me deprived of all vision).  Edward was to play sounds of the ocean and some kind of shamanic-sounding hum in the begin­ning and at the end, to let me know that one hour had elapsed.  One hour is a good ini­tial base­line for time, appar­ently.  I fol­lowed Edward out through the rain to the Iso­la­tion Tank, and he handed me earplugs, and a cou­ple tow­els.  I think Drew, my drum­mer, was film­ing up to this point, but as I was about to get com­pletely naked, they left me alone to take the plunge.  I put in my earplugs, threw my robe on a chair, and climbed into the black abyss, clos­ing the door behind me…

50583 512x288 generated X0aOvMCsMk2+mugzuRNkDQ Why Nothing Really Matters (My Trip Inside An Isolation Tank)

At first I was like this

At first, it felt like you would expect — float­ing in the dark.  But then I real­ized how buoy­ant the water was — it was like what I imag­ine zero grav­ity would feel like.  If I didn’t know I was in a con­trolled, com­pletely safe envi­ron­ment, that sen­sa­tion would have been utterly ter­ri­fy­ing.  I mean, it was utterly ter­ri­fy­ing for a few moments, but I knew what I was get­ting myself into.  I am a sound guy, so I started to focus on the waves/hum noise, and real­ized how loud my breath­ing was as it started to fade away.  Once it was com­pletely silent, I kind of had a “now what?” feel­ing, but tried to focus on my breath­ing.  At this point, my body had adjusted to the sen­sa­tion, but I still felt tense in my neck and in my legs.  That’s when I real­ized I was still actu­ally hold­ing myself up — to some capac­ity.  I released every mus­cle in my body in one of the single-most refresh­ing instances I’ve ever had, and just really let go.  Bingo. Now it’s time to fuckin’ FLOAT.

2001 monolith Why Nothing Really Matters (My Trip Inside An Isolation Tank)

Then I was like this

(From here on, it’s really hard to describe, but I will try.)

I first started think­ing about all of human activ­i­ties — like bills, my job, my band’s next direc­tion, and things like that.  This was prob­a­bly about ten min­utes in, from my esti­mate.  When your brain doesn’t have any­thing else to do, you do a really good job think­ing about things.  Really fast, and with laser-sharp focus.  It felt that in about five min­utes, I had worked-through and addressed my now seemingly-mundane human ‘prob­lems’ in my life.  Well, now what do I think about, I thought to myself.  I don’t know, why don’t you think about what you’re doing here? What do you want to do? What is all that stuff out­side? Who are all those peo­ple? Do they mat­ter? It feels like it. What are they? And what are you?

It felt like my eyes were mov­ing deep into my body, like my vision was start­ing to come from my chest instead of my eyes.  And right when I noticed myself slip­ping into that, I would jolt back awake.  It was kind of like being on sleep depri­va­tion at this point, but still remain­ing incred­i­bly ener­getic.  I started to hear for­eign music and loud, thun­der­ing sounds — big bass notes and some­thing like a trum­pet in the dis­tance.  I decided to think about mem­o­ries and friends from my past, and it was like walk­ing through a party where I knew every­one.  Every room was a dif­fer­ent mem­ory, and I could walk in and inter­act with it — bring it back to life.  Then I really lost control.

It now felt like a DJ had showed up to the party and started remix­ing my brain.  Mem­o­ries, ideas, peo­ple, music, visual images…all started to get the mashup treat­ment, and I actu­ally felt my brain using itself as its own sen­sory input. Like some­one plugged a power strip into itself.  I heard a voice say “He hasn’t started using his lungs yet”, which was pretty creepy (per­haps some kind of con­nec­tion to being in the womb?).  It felt like a bunch of peo­ple were above me, look­ing down, but there was no down, just out.  I started to feel really guilty about things, but kind of ‘as every­one’.  That as humans, we aren’t using all the tools we’ve been given prop­erly, and that we are let­ting some­one down.  That there is some big thing we are sup­posed to do.

nin closer missing scene600px Why Nothing Really Matters (My Trip Inside An Isolation Tank)

Then I was like this

The ocean sound started to creep up and I started to sink back into myself.  I was expect­ing to get that hor­ri­ble sleep-paralysis feel­ing when I came back, but I had never actu­ally gone to sleep…so I tried mov­ing a fin­ger.  Mov­ing one sin­gle fin­ger a quar­ter of an inch after not hav­ing a body feels inde­scrib­able.  I clenched my fist, one at first, then the other, and wig­gled my toes.  Yep, I’m in this body again.  I slowly sat up in the tank,  both exhausted and com­pletely reju­ve­nated at the same time.  I pushed open the door, and as my pupils shrank back into tiny black dots, I looked around for some­one.  Still alone.  I blindly reached for a towel, and stum­bled out into the real world again.  Catch­ing a glimpse of my reflec­tion in the mir­ror on the way out had a cer­tain completing-the-journey qual­ity to it.  After tak­ing a shower to get the salt off, I sat around the out­door firepit where every­one was.  I tried my best not to talk about the expe­ri­ence as not to influ­ence theirs, but I think that lasted about ten seconds.

After all four of us had gone in the iso­la­tion tank for one hour each, we all had com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences and expla­na­tions — but we all agreed it was one of-if-not-the-single-most life-changing feel­ings we’d ever felt.  And seri­ously, the way you phys­i­cally feel after­wards is like get­ting a mas­sage, doing a full work­out, and get­ting 8 hours of sleep all at once.

Edward showed us the con­cept video for Float­space, his next endeavor.  He wants to set up iso­la­tion tanks for pub­lic and com­mer­cial use, and we talked about all the new pos­si­bil­i­ties that would arise.  What if you could skype with other peo­ple while inside the cham­ber? What about vir­tual or aug­mented real­ity sys­tems? If I could have, I would have invested a cool mil­lion right then and there.

With our jour­ney com­plete, we thanked Edward I think about a hun­dred times before we climbed back into the car.  The qual­ity of sleep I had that night was unri­valed, and I was able to par­tially slip back into that float­ing feel­ing.  This morn­ing I woke up an hour before my alarm clock.

To sum it all up, go do this.  I feel embar­rassed that I haven’t done this before.  Until you try it, you won’t under­stand what I’m talk­ing about.

 

Why noth­ing really matters.

The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

by

BY  ON MARCH 22, 2012

IH jungle yacht 700x433 The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

The Jun­gle Yacht by Inter­na­tional Har­vester was cre­ated for and used by Ital­ian explorer Com­man­der Attilio Gatti and his wife, who both trav­eled exten­sively to the African Congo. Accord­ing to Hem­mings Blog, he used the Jun­gle Yacht as a deluxe apart­ment “for his 1937–1940 (his 10th) and 1947 (his 11th) expe­di­tions” and “equipped them quite lavishly.”

1106769228 f89cd6d506 o The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

jungleyachtadv 530x700 The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

cocktails in the Congo The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

0305002727 l The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

The bed­room

0305002725 l The Lavish Jungle Yacht by International Harvester

The liv­in­groom

via Tel­star Logis­tics and Hooni­verse

Thalience — The Mind-Blowing Theory You’ve Never Heard Of

by

Karl Schroeder wrote a lit­tle book in 2001 called Ven­tus - a hard-sci-fi story that will undoubt­edly be most remem­bered for its rad­i­cal new the­ory about life on Earth…that gives us an insight into what life might be like after sci­ence.

Mind Blown Thalience The Mind Blowing Theory Youve Never Heard Of

Those of you who’ve read my novel Ven­tus may rec­og­nize “The Suc­ces­sor to Sci­ence” as the title of a fic­tional paper referred to in that book. The paper intro­duces the reader to the con­cept of thalience.  As orig­i­nally intended, thalience was an attempt to look past sci­ence to see what dis­ci­pline would come after it–hence the title “A Suc­ces­sor to Science.”

You’re for­given if you’re bewil­dered–after sci­ence? How does that make sense? Am I say­ing that sci­ence is just a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non, a fash­ion? No. But it is some­thing that exists in a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal con­text, and the ques­tion I was ask­ing with thalience was whether sci­ence might pro­duce some new kind of activ­ity that, while not replac­ing it, could be viewed as an off­spring of equal value to us.

Let’s back up a bit. In Ven­tus I invented a new word, and gave sev­eral def­i­n­i­tions for it–quite delib­er­ately, because I believe that ambi­gu­ity is the life-force of words. The word is acu­tally defined now on Wikipedia, but the two def­i­n­i­tions given there are only half-right. Vinge asked me whether the word has to do with dis­trib­uted sen­sor nets–because the Winds of Ven­tus are a sys­tem of mas­sively par­al­lel nan­otech AIs–and I said yes at the time, but didn’t expand on what that implied. If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet, bear with me; you may find what fol­lows interesting.

What if you could sep­a­rate the activ­ity of sci­ence from the human researchers who con­duct it?Auto­mate it, in fact? Imag­ine cre­at­ing a bot that does physics exper­i­ments and builds an inter­nal model of the world based on those exper­i­ments. It could start out as some­thing sim­ple that stacked blocks and knocked them over again. Later mod­els could get quite sophis­ti­cated; and let’s say we com­bine this abil­ity with the tech­nol­ogy of self-reproducing machines (von Neu­mann machines). Seed the moon with our pocket-protector-brandishing AIs and let them go nuts. Let them share their find­ings and refine their models.

So far so good. Here’s the ques­tion that leads to the notion of thalience: if they were allowed to freely invent their own seman­tics, would their phys­i­cal model of the uni­verse end up resem­bling ours? –I don’t mean would it pro­duce the same results given the same inputs, because it would. But would it be a humanly-accessible theory?

This is a bet­ter ques­tion than it might at first appear, because even we can pro­duce mutu­ally irrec­on­cil­able the­o­ries that suc­cess­fully describe the same things: quan­tum mechan­ics and rel­a­tiv­ity, for instance. Their world­views are incom­pat­i­ble, despite the fact that together they appear to accu­rately describe the real world. So it’s at least pos­si­ble that non-human intel­li­gences would come to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about what the uni­verse was like, even if their the­ory pro­duced results com­pat­i­ble with our models.

This lit­tle thought-experiment asks whether we can turn meta­physics into a hard sci­ence; and this becomes the first inter­est­ing mean­ing of the world thalience: it is an attempt to give the phys­i­cal world itself a voice so that rather than us ask­ing what real­ity is, real­ity itself can tell us. It is pos­si­ble that thalient sys­tems will always con­verge on a model of the uni­verse that is com­pre­hen­si­ble to humans; if so, then we will actu­ally have a means of solv­ing what were once con­sid­ered philo­soph­i­cally impon­der­able questions–such as, what is the world really made of? How much of our under­stand­ing of the uni­verse is sub­jec­tive, and is tru­ely objec­tive knowl­edge even pos­si­ble? A thalient sys­tem could tell us.

1453557787 f5bbea242b b Thalience The Mind Blowing Theory Youve Never Heard Of

When Biol­ogy And Tech­nol­ogy Merge

In Ven­tus, of course, the thalient sys­tem has lost the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with humans; but the end of the novel holds out the hope that some sort of bridge can be con­structed. Strangely, this bridge appears in the form of pol­i­tics, rather than as a meet­ing of minds through Rea­son or Mathematics.

But there’s a fur­ther mean­ing to the term. If you were to auto­mate sci­ence, and reap the rewards, what would you be left doing? Twid­dling your thumbs while the AIs solve all the big prob­lems? Well, not nec­es­sar­ily. The last def­i­n­i­tion of thalience involves the excit­ing pos­si­bil­ity that, yes, mul­ti­ple equally valid phys­i­cal mod­els of the uni­verse are pos­si­ble. Not one true “the­ory of every­thing” but many, per­haps an end­less num­ber of them. In this case, the con­clu­sions we reach about our place in the uni­verse when we under­stand quan­tum mechan­ics and relativity–or, for that mat­ter, New­ton­ian physics–are acci­den­tal, by-products of the sub­jec­tive side of objec­tive research. So here is the grand­est def­i­n­i­tion of thalience: it is the dis­ci­pline that chooses among mul­ti­ple suc­cess­ful sci­en­tific mod­els based on which ones best sat­isfy our human, aesthetic/moral/personal needs. In other words, given two or more equally valid mod­els of the uni­verse, thalience is the art of choos­ing the one with the most human face. It is the recov­ery of the nat­ural in our under­stand­ing of the Natural.

The abil­ity to cre­ate non-human intel­li­gences that can ask the same ques­tions we ask leads to the pos­si­bil­ity not just of answer­ing ancient ques­tions, but of turn­ing sci­ence into the pre­cur­sor of a new human activ­ity. If thalient enti­ties can cre­ate accu­rate mod­els of the world that are dif­fer­ent from our own, you may no longer be faced with the dilemma of tak­ing either a reli­gious, com­fort­ing view of the uni­verse, or an objec­tive and scientific–but not humanly satisfying–view. Thalience would con­sist in tak­ing science’s results as raw mate­r­ial for build­ing new mythologies–and pos­si­bly religions–which would dif­fer from all pre­vi­ous ones in that they would all be sci­en­tif­i­cally, objec­tively true.

Now maybe you can see how sci­ence could have a suc­ces­sor: thalience would use objec­tive truth as an artis­tic medium and merge sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity in a cre­ative activ­ity whose pur­pose is the re-sanctification of the nat­ural world. To believe in an uplift­ing and sat­is­fy­ing vision of your place in the uni­verse, and to know that this vision is true (or as true as any­thing can be) would be sub­lime. Thalience would be an activ­ity wor­thy of post-scientific human­ity, or our own bio­log­i­cal or post-biological successors.

Whoa.

12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online

by

self educate yourself 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online

Writ­ten by Marc and Angel Hack Life

All edu­ca­tion is self-education. Period. It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re sit­ting in a col­lege class­room or a cof­fee shop. We don’t learn any­thing we don’t want to learn.

Those peo­ple who take the time and ini­tia­tive to pur­sue knowl­edge on their own are the only ones who earn a real edu­ca­tion in this world. Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entre­pre­neur or his­tor­i­cal fig­ure you can think of. For­mal edu­ca­tion or not, you’ll find that he or she is a prod­uct of con­tin­u­ous self-education.

If you’re inter­ested in learn­ing some­thing new, this arti­cle is for you. Bro­ken down by sub­ject and/or cat­e­gory, here are sev­eral top-notch self-education resources I have book­marked online over the past few years.

Note that some of the sources over­lap between var­i­ous sub­jects of edu­ca­tion. There­fore, each has been placed under a spe­cific sub­ject based on the major­ity focus of the source’s content.

Sci­ence and Health

  • MIT Open­Course­Ware – MIT Open­Course­Ware is a free web-based pub­li­ca­tion of MIT course mate­ri­als that reflects almost all the under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate sub­jects taught at MIT.
  • Tufts Open­Course­Ware – Tufts Open­Course­Ware is part of a new edu­ca­tional move­ment ini­ti­ated by MIT that pro­vides free access to course con­tent for every­one online. Tufts’ course offer­ings demon­strate the University’s strength in the life sci­ences in addi­tion to its mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary approach, inter­na­tional per­spec­tive and under­ly­ing ethic of ser­vice to its local, national and inter­na­tional communities.
  • How­Stuff­Works Sci­ence – More sci­en­tific lessons and expla­na­tions than you could sort through in an entire year.
  • Har­vard Med­ical School Open Course­ware – The mis­sion of the Har­vard Med­ical School Open Course­ware Ini­tia­tive is to exchange knowl­edge from the Har­vard com­mu­nity of schol­ars to other aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, prospec­tive stu­dents, and the gen­eral public.
  • Khan Acad­emy – Over 1200 videos lessons cov­er­ing every­thing from basic arith­metic and alge­bra to dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, physics, chem­istry, and biology.
  • Open Yale Courses – Open Yale Courses pro­vides lec­tures and other mate­ri­als from selected Yale Col­lege courses to the pub­lic free of charge via the inter­net. The courses span the full range of lib­eral arts dis­ci­plines, includ­ing human­i­ties, social sci­ences, and phys­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal sciences.
  • webcast.berkeley – Every semes­ter, UC Berke­ley web­casts select courses and events for on-demand view­ing via the Inter­net. webcast.berkeley course lec­tures are pro­vided as a study resource for both stu­dents and the public.
  • UC San Deigo Pod­cast Lec­tures – UCSD’s pod­cast­ing ser­vice was estab­lished for instruc­tional use to ben­e­fit our stu­dents. Pod­casts are taken down at the end of every quar­ter (10 weeks Fall-Spring and 5 weeks in the sum­mer). If you’re enjoy­ing a pod­cast, be sure to sub­scribe and down­load the lec­tures. Once the pod­cast has been taken offline, fac­ulty rarely approve their reposting.
  • Johns Hop­kins Open­Course­Ware – The Johns Hop­kins Bloomberg School of Pub­lic Health’s Open­Course­Ware project pro­vides access to con­tent of the School’s most pop­u­lar courses. As chal­lenges to the world’s health esca­late daily, the School feels a moral imper­a­tive to pro­vide equal and open access to infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge about the obsta­cles to the public’s health and their poten­tial solutions.
  • Carnegie Mel­lon Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive – No instruc­tors, no cred­its, no charge. Use these self-guiding Carnegie Mel­lon mate­ri­als and activ­i­ties to learn at your own pace.
  • Utah State Open­Course­Ware – Utah State Open­Course­Ware is a col­lec­tion of edu­ca­tional mate­r­ial used in our for­mal cam­pus courses, and seeks to pro­vide peo­ple around the world with an oppor­tu­nity to access high qual­ity learn­ing opportunities.
  • AMSER – AMSER (the Applied Math and Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion Repos­i­tory) is a por­tal of edu­ca­tional resources and ser­vices built specif­i­cally for use by those in Com­mu­nity and Tech­ni­cal Col­leges but free for any­one to use.
  • Wol­fram Demon­stra­tions Project – Wol­fram brings com­pu­ta­tional explo­ration to the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence, open-code resource that uses dynamic com­pu­ta­tion to illu­mi­nate con­cepts. Free player runs all demos and videos.
  • The Sci­ence Forum – A very active sci­en­tific dis­cus­sion and debate forum.
  • Free Sci­ence and Video Lec­tures Online! – A nice col­lec­tion of video lec­tures and lessons on sci­ence and philosophy.
  • Science.gov – Science.gov searches over 42 data­bases and over 2000 selected web­sites from 14 fed­eral agen­cies, offer­ing 200 mil­lion pages of author­i­ta­tive U.S. gov­ern­ment sci­ence infor­ma­tion includ­ing research and devel­op­ment results.
  • The National Sci­ence Dig­i­tal Library – NSDL is the Nation’s online library for edu­ca­tion and research in Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing, Mathematics.
  • Envi­roLink Net­work– A non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, grass­roots online com­mu­nity unit­ing orga­ni­za­tions and vol­un­teers around the world. Up-to-date envi­ron­men­tal infor­ma­tion and news.
  • Geology.com – Infor­ma­tion about geol­ogy and earth sci­ence to vis­i­tors with­out charge: Arti­cles, News, Maps, Satel­lite Images, Dic­tio­nary, etc.
  • Scitable – A free sci­ence library and per­sonal learn­ing tool that cur­rently con­cen­trates on genet­ics, the study of evo­lu­tion, vari­a­tion, and the rich com­plex­ity of liv­ing organ­isms. The site also expects to expand into other top­ics of learn­ing and education.
  • LearningScience.org – A free open learn­ing com­mu­nity for shar­ing newer and emerg­ing tools to teach science.

Busi­ness and Money

  • MIT Sloan School of Man­age­ment – MIT Sloan is a world-class busi­ness school long renowned for thought lead­er­ship and the abil­ity to suc­cess­fully part­ner the­ory and prac­tice. This is a sub­sec­tion of the larger MIT Open­Course­Ware site.
  • Investo­pe­dia Finan­cial Invest­ing Tuto­ri­als – A plethora of detailed lessons on money man­age­ment and investing.
  • U.S. Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion Train­ing Net­work – The Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion has one of the best selec­tions of busi­ness courses on the web. Top­ics include every­thing from start­ing a busi­ness and busi­ness man­age­ment to gov­ern­ment con­tract­ing and inter­na­tional trade. Most courses take only 30 min­utes to complete.
  • VideoLectures.NET (Busi­ness) – A free and open access edu­ca­tional video lec­tures repos­i­tory. The lec­tures are given by dis­tin­guished schol­ars and sci­en­tists at the most impor­tant and promi­nent events like con­fer­ences, sum­mer schools, work­shops and sci­ence pro­mo­tional events from many fields of Science.
  • My Own Busi­ness, Inc. – Offers a free online busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion course that would be ben­e­fi­cial to new man­agers and to any­one who is inter­ested in start­ing a busi­ness. This com­pre­hen­sive course is split up into 16 ses­sions cov­er­ing top­ics like busi­ness plans, account­ing, mar­ket­ing, insur­ance, e-commerce and inter­na­tional trade.
  • UC Irvine Open­Course­Ware (Busi­ness) – Rapidly with the addi­tion of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offer­ings are directed at work­ing adults seek­ing con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.
  • Kutz­town Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia – The Kutz­town Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania’s Small Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Cen­ter offers more than 80 free busi­ness courses online. Kutztown’s courses are indi­vid­u­al­ized and self-paced. Many of the courses fea­ture high-end graph­ics, inter­ac­tive case stud­ies and audio streams.
  • Boston Col­lege Front Row (Busi­ness) – Boston Col­lege Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through stream­ing media to tapes of cul­tural and schol­arly events at Boston College.
  • Finan­cial Man­age­ment Train­ing Cen­ter – The Finan­cial Man­age­ment Train­ing Cen­ter pro­vides sev­eral free down­load­able busi­ness courses for peo­ple who need to learn the finer points of finan­cial man­age­ment. All courses offered can be taken online; courses include full exams as well as eval­u­a­tion forms for peo­ple seek­ing Con­tin­u­ing Pro­fes­sional Edu­ca­tion (CPE) credits.
  • The Free Non­profit Micro-eMBA – Free Man­age­ment Library’s Free Non­profit Micro-eMBA Pro­gram is an espe­cially great resource for stu­dents wish­ing to learn more about non­profit man­age­ment, but most of the lessons also apply to gen­eral busi­ness man­age­ment. Com­ple­tion of this pro­gram will not result in an MBA degree, but enroll­ment is free and the mate­r­ial is well structured.
  • Book­boon Free Busi­ness e-books – Hun­dreds of free busi­ness books online in PDF format.
  • TheStreet Uni­ver­sity – If you’re just start­ing out as a stock and bond investor or need a refresher’s course, this is the place to learn what you need to know.

His­tory and World Culture

  • Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s OpenUW – Explore a vari­ety of learn­ing in sev­eral free history-centric online courses from the Uni­ver­sity of Washington.
  • Notre Dame Open­Course­Ware – Notre Dame OCW is a free and open edu­ca­tional resource for fac­ulty, stu­dents, and self-learners through­out the world.
  • Bio’s Best – Biography.com’s most pop­u­lar biogra­phies on notable his­tor­i­cal figures.
  • UC Irvine Open­Course­Ware (Social Sci­ence) – Rapidly with the addi­tion of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offer­ings are directed at work­ing adults seek­ing con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.
  • Boston Col­lege Front Row (His­tory) – Boston Col­lege Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through stream­ing media to tapes of cul­tural and schol­arly events at Boston College.
  • MIT Open­Course­Ware (His­tory) – The MIT His­tory Fac­ulty offers about 70 sub­jects in the areas of Ancient, North Amer­i­can, Euro­pean, East Asian, and Mid­dle East­ern history.
  • Wikiver­sity School of Social Sci­ences – Wikiver­sity is a Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion project devoted to learn­ing resources, learn­ing projects, and research for use in all lev­els, types, and styles of edu­ca­tion from pre-school to uni­ver­sity, includ­ing pro­fes­sional train­ing and infor­mal learning.
  • Open­Learn (Arts and Human­i­ties) – The Open­Learn web­site gives free access to Open Uni­ver­sity course materials.
  • A Biog­ra­phy of Amer­ica – A Biog­ra­phy of Amer­ica presents his­tory not sim­ply as a series of irrefutable facts to be mem­o­rized, but as a liv­ing nar­ra­tive of America’s story.
  • Have Fun with His­tory – A resource for stu­dents, edu­ca­tors and all lovers of Amer­i­can History.
  • The USGen­Web Project – Free geneal­ogy and fam­ily his­tory resources online.
  • Macro­His­tory and World Report – Tell with­out illu­sions or ide­o­log­i­cal restraints the story of our ances­tors, our par­ents and us.
  • World His­tory Hyper­His­tory – Nav­i­gates through 3000 years of World His­tory with links to impor­tant per­sons and events of world his­tor­i­cal importance.
  • Amer­i­can Dig­i­tal His­tory – Online Amer­i­can his­tory text­book. An inter­ac­tive, mul­ti­me­dia his­tory of the United States from the Rev­o­lu­tion to the present.

Law

  • Duke Law Cen­ter for the Pub­lic Domain – Duke Uni­ver­sity is counted amongst the best schools in the South. If you’re inter­ested in law, Duke’s open course­ware in that sub­ject area can go a long way towards help­ing you learn more about the jus­tice system.
  • Intute Law – Pro­vides free access to high qual­ity resources on the Inter­net. Each resource has been eval­u­ated and cat­e­gorised by sub­ject spe­cial­ists based at UK universities.
  • Boston Col­lege Front Row (Law) – Boston Col­lege Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through stream­ing media to tapes of cul­tural and schol­arly events at Boston College.
  • Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity – Offers a selec­tion of pod­casts on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent law-related sub­jects. There is even a very inter­est­ing pod­cast on debt relief and the law.
  • Lewis & Clark Law School – Pro­vides a num­ber of pod­cast from the law school. Sub­jects include tax law, busi­ness law, envi­ron­men­tal law and other areas of law. Inter­est­ing and insight­ful lec­tures on the law.
  • Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­sity School of Law – Offers a num­ber of inter­est­ing lec­tures on dif­fer­ent law sub­jects. These lec­tures are both pod­casts and Web casts. You can look ahead to the com­ing school year, which already has a num­ber of inter­est­ing sub­jects lined up.
  • Har­vard Law School – Pro­vides a num­ber of Web casts of law lec­tures, sym­posia, pan­els and con­fer­ences. A great col­lec­tion of rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and insights on how the law inter­acts with cur­rent events.
  • Stan­ford Law – Pro­vides open course­ware via iTunes on a vari­ety of law sub­jects, includ­ing the the­ory of jus­tice, mobile con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion, gay mar­riage, judi­cial review and pri­vacy pro­tec­tion. The tracks are avail­able for free, but you’ll need iTunes. Put the lec­tures on your iPod or iPhone and lis­ten them anywhere.
  • Mon­eyIn­struc­tor Busi­ness Law – From MoneyInstructor.com pro­vides a look at a num­ber of basics in busi­ness law. Learn how to define crimes under busi­ness law. Work­sheets and cur­ricu­lums are avail­able for teach­ers. Ordi­nary folks will find them use­ful as well.
  • Wes­leyan Col­lege Con­sti­tu­tional Law – From North Car­olina Wes­leyan Col­lege offers an overview of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and the laws spring­ing from it. Online lec­tures and class notes are included, which can help you develop a strong under­stand­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion and how it forms the basis of our laws.

Com­puter Sci­ence and Engineering

  • VideoLectures.NET (Com­puter Sci­ence) – A free and open access edu­ca­tional video lec­tures repos­i­tory. The lec­tures are given by dis­tin­guished schol­ars and sci­en­tists at the most impor­tant and promi­nent events like con­fer­ences, sum­mer schools, work­shops and sci­ence pro­mo­tional events from many fields of Science.
  • Wikiver­sity School of Com­puter Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy – Wikiver­sity is a Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion project devoted to learn­ing resources, learn­ing projects, and research for use in all lev­els, types, and styles of edu­ca­tion from pre-school to uni­ver­sity, includ­ing pro­fes­sional train­ing and infor­mal learning.
  • New York State Uni­ver­sity (US), Com­puter Sci­ence – Hun­dreds of lec­tures, tuto­ri­als and links to edu­ca­tional material.
  • Dream.In.Code Tuto­ri­als – Lots of com­puter pro­gram­ming tutorials.
  • MIT Open­Course­Ware (Engi­neer­ing and Com­puter Sci­ence) – MIT Open­Course­Ware is a free web-based pub­li­ca­tion of MIT course mate­ri­als that reflects almost all the under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate sub­jects taught at MIT.
  • Maine Uni­ver­sity (US), Fogler Guide to Com­puter Sci­ence – An insanely detailed list of com­puter sci­ence resources.
  • FreeComputerBooks.com – Free com­puter, math­e­mat­ics, tech­ni­cal books and lec­ture notes.
  • Col­lec­tion of Com­puter Sci­ence Bib­li­ogra­phies – A mas­sive col­lec­tion of bib­li­ogra­phies of sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture in com­puter sci­ence, updated weekly from orig­i­nal loca­tions, more than 3 mil­lions of ref­er­ences (mostly to jour­nal arti­cles, con­fer­ence papers and tech­ni­cal reports), clus­tered in about 2000 bibliographies.
  • W3Schools – Web-building tuto­ri­als, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Data­base, Mul­ti­me­dia and WAP.
  • FreeTechBooks.com – This site lists free online com­puter sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and pro­gram­ming books, text­books and lec­ture notes, all of which are legally and freely avail­able over the Internet.
  • Free com­puter Tuto­ri­als – Free com­puter courses and tuto­ri­als site. All the courses are aimed at com­plete begin­ners, so you don’t need expe­ri­ence to get started.
  • Pro­gram­mer 101: Teach Your­self How to Code – Sev­eral help­ful resources for com­puter pro­gram­ming beginners.
  • Google Code Uni­ver­sity – Pro­vides sam­ple course con­tent and tuto­ri­als for Com­puter Sci­ence (CS) stu­dents and edu­ca­tors on cur­rent com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies and paradigms.

Math­e­mat­ics

  • Oxford Uni­ver­sity Math­e­mat­ics Open­Course­Ware – Var­i­ous online math­e­mat­ics classes pro­vided free by Oxford University.
  • UMass Boston Math­e­mat­ics – Var­i­ous online math­e­mat­ics classes pro­vided free by UMass Boston.
  • What­com Online Math Cen­ter – Var­i­ous math lessons pro­vided free by What­com Com­mu­nity College.
  • VideoLectures.NET (Math­e­mat­ics) – A free and open access edu­ca­tional video lec­tures repos­i­tory. The lec­tures are given by dis­tin­guished schol­ars and sci­en­tists at the most impor­tant and promi­nent events like con­fer­ences, sum­mer schools, work­shops and sci­ence pro­mo­tional events from many fields of Science.
  • Wikiver­sity School of Math­e­mat­ics – Wikiver­sity is a Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion project devoted to learn­ing resources, learn­ing projects, and research for use in all lev­els, types, and styles of edu­ca­tion from pre-school to uni­ver­sity, includ­ing pro­fes­sional train­ing and infor­mal learning.
  • AMSER Math­e­mat­ics – AMSER (the Applied Math and Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion Repos­i­tory) is a por­tal of edu­ca­tional resources and ser­vices built specif­i­cally for use by those in Com­mu­nity and Tech­ni­cal Col­leges but free for any­one to use.
  • Math.com – Math.com is ded­i­cated to pro­vid­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary ways for stu­dents, par­ents, teach­ers, and every­one to learn math.
  • Intute Math­e­mat­ics – Pro­vides free access to high qual­ity resources on the Inter­net. Each resource has been eval­u­ated and cat­e­go­rized by sub­ject spe­cial­ists based at UK universities.
  • Free-Ed Col­lege Math­e­mat­ics – Offers a wide range of free online math courses and study programs.

Eng­lish and Communications

  • Open Yale Courses (Eng­lish) – Open Yale Courses pro­vides lec­tures and other mate­ri­als from selected Yale Col­lege courses to the pub­lic free of charge via the internet.
  • Writ­ing Guide­lines for Engi­neer­ing and Sci­ence Stu­dents – These guide­lines for engi­neer­ing writ­ing and sci­en­tific writ­ing are designed to help stu­dents com­mu­ni­cate their tech­ni­cal work.
  • MIT Writ­ing and Human­is­tic Stud­ies – The MIT Pro­gram in Writ­ing and Human­is­tic Stud­ies gives stu­dents the oppor­tu­nity to learn the tech­niques, forms, and tra­di­tions of sev­eral kinds of writ­ing, from basic expos­i­tory prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fic­tion and poetry, sci­ence writ­ing, sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media.
  • Merriam-Webster Online – In this dig­i­tal age, your abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with writ­ten Eng­lish is para­mount skill. And M-W.com is the per­fect resource to improve your Eng­lish now.
  • National Novel Writ­ing Month – Valu­ing enthu­si­asm and per­se­ver­ance over painstak­ing craft, NaNoW­riMo is a novel-writing pro­gram for every­one who has thought fleet­ingly about writ­ing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
  • Lifewrit­ing – A com­plete text of the 9-week writ­ing class a pro­fes­sor taught for years at UCLA.
  • Guide to Gram­mar and Writ­ing – Gram­mar and writ­ing tech­niques, lessons and quizzes.
  • Pur­due Online Writ­ing Lab – Over 200 free resources includ­ing lessons on: writ­ing, research, gram­mar, and style guides.

For­eign and Sign Languages

  • BBC Lan­guages – Teach your­self a new spo­ken lan­guage online.
  • Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage Browser – Teach your­self sign lan­guage online.
  • Live­mocha – Start learn­ing a new lan­guage online for free.
  • Learn10 – Gives you a lan­guage learn­ing habit that’s hard to kick. 10 new words; every­where, every day.
  • One Minute Lan­guages – Learn a new lan­guage via pod­casts that are updated regularly.
  • Mango Lan­guages – Over 100 lessons, shown to you in Pow­er­Point style with inter­sti­tial quizzes, to move you through any lan­guage with­out crack­ing a book.

Mul­ti­ple Sub­jects and Miscellaneous

  • Open­Learn – The Open­Learn web­site gives free access to Open Uni­ver­sity course mate­ri­als. Mul­ti­ple sub­jects are covered.
  • Capi­lano Uni­ver­sity Open­Course­Ware – The Capi­lano Uni­ver­sity Open­Course­Ware site is a free and open edu­ca­tional resource for fac­ulty, stu­dents, and self-learners through­out the world.
  • Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Queensland’s Open­Course­Ware – Pro­vides access to free and open edu­ca­tional resources for fac­ulty mem­bers, stu­dents, and self-learners through­out the world.
  • YouTube EDU – Edu­ca­tional videos on YouTube orga­nized by sub­ject matter.
  • Learn­Hub Test Prep – Raise your test scores with free prac­tice tests & coun­sel­ing on var­i­ous subjects.
  • iTunes U – Hun­dreds of uni­ver­si­ties — includ­ing Stan­ford, Yale and MIT — dis­trib­ute lec­tures, slide shows, PDFs, films, exhibit tours and audio books through iTunes U. The Sci­ence sec­tion alone con­tains con­tent on top­ics includ­ing agri­cul­ture, astron­omy, biol­ogy, chem­istry, physics, ecol­ogy and geography.
  • United Nations Uni­ver­sity Open­Course­Ware – Show­cases the train­ing and edu­ca­tional pro­grams imple­mented by the Uni­ver­sity in a wide range of areas rel­e­vant to the work of the United Nations.
  • Brigham Young Inde­pen­dent Study – BYU Inde­pen­dent Study now offers free courses in dif­fer­ent areas of study. These areas include Fam­ily His­tory, Fam­ily Life, and Reli­gious Scrip­ture Study, Per­sonal Dev elope­ment, etc. Use these courses as a start­ing point for your per­sonal stud­ies or just to add insight to an area of interest.
  • Uni­ver­sity of Utah Open­Course­Ware – Pro­vides access to free and open edu­ca­tional resources for fac­ulty mem­bers, stu­dents, and self-learners through­out the world.
  • United States Nation Archives – The National Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. Valu­able records are pre­served and are avail­able to you, whether you want to see if they con­tain clues about your family’s his­tory, need to prove a veteran’s mil­i­tary ser­vice, or are research­ing an his­tor­i­cal topic that inter­ests you.
  • Wikiver­sity – Wikiver­sity is a Wiki­me­dia Foun­da­tion project devoted to learn­ing resources, learn­ing projects, and research for use in all lev­els, types, and styles of edu­ca­tion from pre-school to uni­ver­sity, includ­ing pro­fes­sional train­ing and infor­mal learning.
  • UMass Boston Open­Course­Ware – Var­i­ous online classes pro­vided free by UMass Boston.
  • About U – A col­lec­tion of free online edu­ca­tional courses from About.com.
  • Aca­d­e­mic Earth – Online degrees and video courses from lead­ing universities.
  • Free-Ed – Clus­ters of courses that sup­port your prepa­ra­tion for today’s fastest-growing careers and crit­i­cal aca­d­e­mic disciplines.
  • Con­nex­ions – A place to view and share edu­ca­tional mate­r­ial made of small knowl­edge chunks called mod­ules that can be orga­nized as courses, books, reports, etc. Any­one may view or contribute.
  • TED – Moti­va­tional and edu­ca­tional lec­tures from note­wor­thy pro­fes­sion­als around the world.
  • Intute – Pro­vides free access to high qual­ity resources on the Inter­net. Each resource has been eval­u­ated and cat­e­gorised by sub­ject spe­cial­ists based at UK universities.
  • Boston Col­lege Front Row – Boston Col­lege Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through stream­ing media to tapes of cul­tural and schol­arly events at Boston College.

Free Books and Read­ing Recommendations

  • Library­Thing – Library­Thing con­nects you to other peo­ple who are read­ing what you’re read­ing and allows you to see which books are pop­u­lar in var­i­ous cat­e­gories of reading.
  • Text­book Rev­o­lu­tion – Links to free online text­books and other edu­ca­tional materials.
  • Book TV – This is the com­pan­ion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some cur­rent inter­views with authors, many past inter­views, opin­ions, reviews, and fea­tured pro­grams through online video.
  • Book­boon – Book­boon pro­vides online text­books for stu­dents in PDF for­mat. The free ebooks can be down­loaded with­out reg­is­tra­tion. Our books are legal and writ­ten exclu­sively for Book­boon. They are financed by a few in-book ads.
  • Scribd – Scribd, the online doc­u­ment shar­ing site which sup­ports Word, Excel, Pow­er­Point, PDF and other pop­u­lar for­mats. You can down­load a doc­u­ment or embed it in your blog or web page.
  • Book­Yards – Book­Yards is a web por­tal in which books, edu­ca­tion mate­ri­als, infor­ma­tion, and con­tent will be freely to any­one who has an inter­net connection.
  • Planet eBook – Free clas­sic lit­er­a­ture to down­load and share.
  • E-Books Direc­tory – Thou­sands of ebooks on var­i­ous sub­jects to down­load and share.
  • Read Print Library – Free online books library for stu­dents, teach­ers, and the clas­sic enthusiast.
  • GoodReads – Get great book rec­om­men­da­tions and keep track of what you want to read.
  • The Online Books Page – Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia data­base with over 30,000 books.
  • Pub­lic Lit­er­a­ture – Thou­sands of famil­iar clas­sics, children’s books, plays and poems, as well as books by new authors.
  • Full Books – Thou­sands of full-text non­fic­tion and fic­tion books.
  • Many Books – Free fic­tion and non­fic­tion ebooks for your PDA, iPod or ebook reader.
  • Get Free Books – Thou­sands of free ebooks to download.
  • Project Guten­berg – More than 20,000 free books from the first pro­ducer of free e-books.
  • Bib­lio­ma­nia – Thou­sands of clas­sic books, poems, short sto­ries and plays.
  • Clas­sic Reader – Large col­lec­tion of free clas­sic books, plays, and short sto­ries from more than 300 authors.
  • Bartleby Fic­tion – Clas­sic antholo­gies and volumes.
  • The Per­sonal MBA Rec­om­mended Read­ing List – MBA pro­grams don’t have a monop­oly on advanced busi­ness knowl­edge: you can teach your­self every­thing you need to know to suc­ceed in life and at work. The Per­sonal MBA fea­tures the very best busi­ness books avail­able, based on thou­sands of hours of research.
  • Books Should Be Free – Free audio books from the pub­lic domain.

Edu­ca­tional Main­stream Broad­cast Media

  • BBC Learn­ing – Online learn­ing, sup­port, and advice. This site offers inter­nal and off­site links to a vast amount of materials.
  • Biog­ra­phy – The site holds videos to past inter­views and biogra­phies on peo­ple in top­ics that range from Black his­tory to women’s history.
  • Book TV – This is the com­pan­ion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some cur­rent inter­views with authors, many past inter­views, opin­ions, reviews, and fea­tured pro­grams through online video.
  • CBC Archives — Relive Cana­dian his­tory through thou­sands of avail­able radio and tele­vi­sion clips.
  • Dis­cov­ery — This chan­nel is home to sev­eral dif­fer­ent net­works that focus on the mil­i­tary, ani­mals, travel, etc. The Dis­cov­ery site offers a “Video of the Day” from its home page, a sep­a­rate online video sec­tion, and a Dis­cover Edu­ca­tion cen­ter where teach­ers can accu­mu­late mate­ri­als for K-12 teach­ing. It’s impos­si­ble to list all their offer­ings here, so go discover!
  • His­tory Chan­nel – Visit the Video Gallery for a selec­tion on his­tor­i­cal top­ics. Like the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, this net­work pro­vides many oppor­tu­ni­ties for you to gain access to infor­ma­tion and ref­er­ence materials.
  • NOVA — Watch cur­rent sci­ence shows or browse by cat­e­gory. PBS spon­sors this channel.
  • Research Chan­nel — Speak­ers, researchers and pro­fes­sors present rev­o­lu­tion­ary thoughts and dis­cov­er­ies. Use their Web­streams and an exten­sive video-on-demand library for research.
  • Weather Chan­nel – You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Chan­nel also offers dynamic con­tent based upon sea­sons and spe­cial con­di­tions and a spe­cial mul­ti­me­dia and edu­ca­tion section.

Online Archives

  • Amer­i­can Mem­ory – The Library of Con­gress pro­vides exten­sive mul­ti­me­dia offer­ings on var­i­ous top­ics through their Amer­i­can Mem­ory Col­lec­tion, includ­ing their out­stand­ing Built in Amer­ica project that show­cases his­tor­i­cal build­ings through photographs.
  • Fathom – This archive, pro­vided by Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, offers access to the com­plete range of free con­tent devel­oped for Fathom by its mem­ber insti­tu­tions. The archives include online learn­ing resources includ­ing lec­tures, arti­cles, inter­views, exhibits and seminars.
  • Inter­net Archive Open Edu­ca­tional Resources – A dig­i­tal library of Inter­net sites and other cul­tural arti­facts in dig­i­tal form.
  • National Archives – Pro­vides pri­mary source mate­ri­als from NARA along with les­son plans for teach­ing with those sources.
  • National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter – The NCDC, a divi­sion of NOAA, main­tains cli­matic archives, includ­ing lists of storms in given coun­ties, and records about global extremes, etc.
  • The Rosetta Project – A global col­lab­o­ra­tion of lan­guage spe­cial­ists and native speak­ers build­ing a pub­licly acces­si­ble online archive of all doc­u­mented human languages.
  • Sep­tem­ber 11 Dig­i­tal Archive – This site uses elec­tronic media to col­lect, pre­serve, and present the his­tory of the 9/11 attacks.
  • U.S. Cen­sus Bureau – If you think the Cen­sus Bureau is all about num­bers, you might be sur­prised to learn about their archived pho­tographs, daily radio fea­tures, and more avail­able through theirNews­room.

Direc­to­ries of Open Education

  • Google Scholar – Pro­vides a sim­ple way to broadly search for schol­arly lit­er­a­ture. From one place, you can search across many dis­ci­plines and sources: arti­cles, the­ses, books, abstracts and court opin­ions, from aca­d­e­mic pub­lish­ers, pro­fes­sional soci­eties, online repos­i­to­ries, uni­ver­si­ties and other web sites.
  • Open­Course­Ware Con­sor­tium – This site pro­vides a por­tal to search through hun­dreds of free courses or to add new courses you know about to the database.
  • iBerry – Check out this site for a huge direc­tory of open course­ware orga­nized by school and sub­ject mat­ter that can point you in the right direc­tion for any type of learning.
  • Self Made Scholar Direc­tory – Free online direc­tory of web-based classes and courses.

Please add to the resource list via the com­ments sec­tion if you know of a valu­able site we left off the list.

How the Universe Works

by

6999851583 6affb6a99f o How the Universe Works

From award-winning sci­ence fic­tion author Larry Niven comes a list that describes, in his own words, “how the Uni­verse works” — also known as “Niven’s Laws.” Said list has evolved over the years and as a result vari­a­tions exist. The ver­sion below is quoted from the book, Take My Advice, pub­lished in 2007.(Source: Take My Advice; Image: Larry Niven, via Wikipedia.)

To the best I’ve been able to tell in fifty years of obser­va­tion, this is how the Uni­verse works. I hope I didn’t leave any­thing out.

1a. Never throw shit at an armed man.

1b. Never stand next to some­one who is throw­ing shit at an armed man. You wouldn’t think any­one would need to be told this. Does any­one remem­ber the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion of 1968?

2. Never fire a laser at a mirror.

3. Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re hav­ing fun. (Please note: You will not be stopped! There are things you can’t do because your metab­o­lism uses oxi­da­tion of sugar, or you’re made of meat, or you’re a mam­mal, or human. Funny chem­i­cals will kill you slow or quick, or ruin your brain…or pro­long your life, if you’re care­ful. You can’t fly like an eagle, nor yet like Daedalus, but you can fly with a hang glider, or ride through the sky in some­thing like a cramped liv­ing room. There are even answers to jet lag. You can cheat. Nature doesn’t care, but don’t get caught.)

4. F × S = k. The prod­uct of Free­dom and Secu­rity is a con­stant. To gain more free­dom of thought and/or action, you must give up some secu­rity, and vice versa. These remarks apply to indi­vid­u­als, nations, and civ­i­liza­tions. Notice that the con­stant k is dif­fer­ent for every civ­i­liza­tion and dif­fer­ent for every individual.

5. Psi and/or mag­i­cal pow­ers, if real, are nearly use­less. Over the life­time of the human species we would oth­er­wise have done some­thing with them.

6. It is eas­ier to destroy than cre­ate. If human beings didn’t have a strong pref­er­ence for cre­ation, noth­ing would get built.

7. Any damn fool can pre­dict the past. Gen­er­als are famous for this, and cer­tain writ­ers too.

8. His­tory never repeats itself.

9. Ethics changes with technology.

10. Anar­chy is the least sta­ble of social struc­tures. It falls apart at a touch.

11. There is a time and a place for tact. (And there are times when tact is entirely misplaced.)

12. The ways of being human are bound but infinite.

13. The world’s dullest sub­jects, in order:

a. Some­body else’s diet.
b. How to make money for a wor­thy cause.
c. Special-Interest Liberation.

14. The only uni­ver­sal mes­sage in sci­ence fic­tion: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but dif­fer­ently. Niven’s corol­lary:The gene-tampered turkey you’re talk­ing to need not be one of them.

15. Niven’s Law for Musi­cians: If the applause wasn’t louder than the music, something’s wrong. Play bet­ter or softer.

16. Fuzzy Pink Niven’s Law: Never waste calo­ries. Potato chips, candy, or hot fudge sun­dae con­sump­tion may involve you, your doc­tor, your wardrobe, and other fac­tors. But Fuzzy Pink’s Law implies:

Don’t eat soggy potato chips.
Or cheap candy.
Or an infe­rior hot fudge sun­dae. 
Or a cold soggy pizza. 

17. There is no cause so right that one can­not find a fool fol­low­ing it. This one’s worth notic­ing. At the first High Fron­tier Con­ven­tion, the minds assem­bled were among the best in the world, and I couldn’t find a con­ver­sa­tion that didn’t teach me some­thing. But the only newsper­sons I ran across were inter­view­ing the only hand­i­capped per­son among us. To prove a point, one may seek out a fool­ish com­mu­nist, thirteenth-century lib­eral, Sci­en­tol­o­gist, High Fron­tier advo­cate, Mensa mem­ber, sci­ence fic­tion fan, gamer, Chris­t­ian, or fanat­i­cal devo­tee of Special-Interest Lib–but that doesn’t really reflect on the cause itself. Ad hominem argu­ments save time, but it’s still a fallacy.

18. No tech­nique works if it isn’t used. If that sounds sim­plis­tic, look at some specifics: Telling friends about your diet won’t make you thin. Buy­ing a diet cook­book won’t either. Even read­ing the recipes won’t do it. Know­ing about Alco­holics Anony­mous, look­ing up the phone num­ber, even jot­ting it on real paper, won’t make you sober. Buy­ing weights doesn’t give you mus­cles. Sign­ing a piece of paper won’t make mis­siles dis­ap­pear, even if you make lots of copies and tell every anchor­per­son on earth. End­lessly study­ing designs for space­craft won’t put any­thing into orbit. And so forth. But you surely know some­one who tried it that way, and maybe you’re one yourself.

19. Not respon­si­ble for advice not taken.

The Invention Of God — An Interview With Bill Lauritzen

by

41 P6XC2n L. SL500 AA300 The Invention Of God An Interview With Bill Lauritzen

The Inven­tion Of God, by Bill Lauritzen

Arthur C Clarke called him “some kind of genius.” I recently got the chance to inter­view Bill Lau­ritzen, the author of The Inven­tion Of God — which is a fas­ci­nat­ing book that looks at how reli­gion began — and how our ances­tors inter­preted the nat­ural world as some­thing supernatural.

 

What was the ori­gin of your beliefs and how were you raised as a child? Did that affect how you feel about reli­gion and science?

I was lucky because I never went to church as a child and my par­ents were agnos­tic, so that helped me to have an open-minded belief sys­tem.  It made me very curi­ous about reli­gion — because I wasnt exposed to it.  My father was a busi­ness man and my mother was a jour­nal­ist, both fairly well edu­cated.  Niether one went to col­lege how­ever, my mother was self — edu­cated, and that had a big influ­ence on me.  She was a very curi­ous person.

What led you down this path as your got more curi­ous? Any sin­gu­lar event?

One impor­tant event of great sig­nif­i­cance was in 1992. I went to a total eclipse in Hawaii, and I was more impressed by the vol­canic struc­ture of the island and see­ing the lava turn into solid ground before my eyes — that had a big influ­ence on me.  It even­tu­ally led me to explore other vol­ca­noes around the world and I real­ized how impor­tant they are in reli­gion and mythol­ogy.   In Hawaii, you can walk right up to the lava flow — there were no park rangers hold­ing you back.  Hawai­ian vol­ca­noes are called shield vol­ca­noes, and later on I vis­ited cone vol­ca­noes — which are more explo­sive — in South­east asia and Indone­sia.  One vol­cano in par­tic­u­lar was Kraka­toa, which exploded vio­lently in 1883.  The Child of Krakatao is now grow­ing and will even­tu­ally explode.  These are things the ancient peo­ple saw, and this affected their mythol­ogy and their worldview.

So your line of think­ing is that we didn’t have the tools to explain nat­ural phenomena?

We didnt have the elab­o­rate, sophis­ti­cated sci­ence. Ancient peo­ple were proto-scientists.  They didnt even have a word for reli­gion.  Their proto-science…It was a model of the world around them, and that devel­oped later into alchemy…And finally into chem­istry and physics.

Before elec­tric­ity, vol­ca­noes were one of the few sources of light in the world.  You had light­ning, the sun and moon, fire, and vol­ca­noes.  Prim­i­tive man tried to fit all this together into some whole cohe­sive the­ory, and basi­cally came up with fire, air, earth, and water as a prim­i­tive sci­ence — which then led to the peri­odic table that we have today.

297706 2410847404022 1636373671 2311745 1894784231 n The Invention Of God An Interview With Bill Lauritzen

What are your the­o­ries about prophets — the peo­ple that claimed they spoke to God?

Well, it’s pos­si­ble they thought the vol­cano was a God of the under­world, because they saw lava turn­ing into land, and the land becom­ing fer­tile and grow­ing things — they saw this hap­pen, so they might have assumed it was a creator.

Have you thought that were might be an impend­ing war between sci­ence and religion?

Nobody knows the future, but cer­tainly there is con­flict going on between the reli­gious right and the rest of us, and I dont know that it will result in vio­lence, but I do see social upheaval — pri­mar­ily due to the great wealth inequal­i­ties, and as a result of the poli­cies of the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tions.  Again, nobody can pre­dict it, but it will be inter­est­ing.  Peo­ple need to demistify these myths and defeat the fundamentalists.

Whats the best way to edu­cate peo­ple in a way that doesn’t offend them, and still allows them to be spir­i­tual, but to not be ostra­cized by their fam­i­lies and community?

My orig­i­nal intent with the book was not to offend peo­ple, but I don’t know how well it does that because I’m not read­ing it from a reli­gious view­point.   I don’t know that reli­gion will ever be replaced with some­thing else — I’m begin­ning to think that some form of reli­gion is inevitable, and it is pos­si­ble we could replace it with some­thing more ratio­nal. That’s some­thing im explor­ing right now.  There are a lot of seri­ous sci­en­tists try­ing to fig­ure out why reli­gion exists in the first place and why it evolved.

Do you see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence becom­ing some­thing like a God?

That is pos­si­ble, of course peo­ple who know what AI is, I don’t think they are going to wor­ship them.  Per­haps com­mon peo­ple would, and it is pos­si­ble AI could declare itself a form of reli­gious leader.  Our con­cept of God keeps evolv­ing, and you can always trump some­body elses con­cept of God by cre­at­ing a big­ger con­cept of God.  Some­one says Big Bang, then some­one says “Well who cre­ated that?”  We are here to do the best we can and develop mod­els for the world around us…and to pre­dict the best we can what will happen.

Have you done any research about ancient con­tact with extraterrestrials?

Of course, I’ve done research in that area, and the peo­ple who pro­pose those ideas usu­ally get all the pub­lic­ity, but the books debunk­ing their claims, they don’t get any pub­lic­ity at all.  Peo­ple are always look­ing for an easy way out — that some moth­er­ship will come down and take us away.  Its eas­ier to believe in some­thing like that than to study sci­ence and physics and make a break­through your­self.  And then, who knows, actu­ally build a star­ship.  That would be the way to go — instead of wait­ing for some­body to res­cue you from your situation.

Why is reli­gion more pop­u­lar than science?

Think about how many Chris­t­ian bands and Chris­t­ian radio sta­tions there are.  How come there are no athe­ist or sci­ence radio sta­tions?  Reli­gion pays no taxes, which is ridicu­lous.  It is also a lot eas­ier to under­stand — its pretty sim­ple. There’s one book to read instead of a thou­sand.  It takes hard work to learn sci­ence.  Church, you know,  you just show up every Sun­day, sing some songs, and go out to lunch afterwards

Do you think that sci­en­tists are too busy actu­ally work­ing on sci­ence to care about mar­ket­ing? Or are there too many dis­parate branches of sci­ence to cre­ate a cen­tral­ized message?

Sci­ence is more com­plex to under­stand, so I dont know that sci­ence will ever have that level of pop­u­lar­ity.  Every once in a while, they make a break­through and sim­plify things like New­ton did, but it still takes a lot of work to under­stand it.

When you think about reli­gion, it’s actu­ally a very intel­li­gent idea as a con­cept in his­tory — have you ever thought that reli­gious lead­ers are actu­ally very intel­li­gent and are good at the sci­ence of mak­ing peo­ple believe things?  

I don’t con­sider them true sci­en­tists — because they dont have high eth­i­cal stan­dards in report­ing facts and results.  They are more like really good busi­ness­men.  It’s never the une­d­u­cated peo­ple at the top.

What is your opin­ion on the future of education?

Good ques­tion. I see our country’s true sal­va­tion is edu­ca­tion, not reli­gion.  We need to start using the inter­net more, and make it avaible to every­one in the inner cities.  That may be my next book. It is a key thing that will keep our coun­try strong and I dont think we are doing nearly enough in that realm.

me 2006 750x1024 The Invention Of God An Interview With Bill Lauritzen

Bill Lau­ritzen

William Lau­ritzen is a dis­tin­guished grad­u­ate of the Air Force Acad­emy in Col­orado Springs.  He received a B.S. in psy­chol­ogy and grad­u­ated near the top 1% of his class.  He was named “The Out­stand­ing Grad­u­ate” in both psy­chol­ogy and philosophy. The Air Force sent him to an accel­er­ated pro­gram to get a master’s degree in indus­trial and orga­ni­za­tional psy­chol­ogy at Pur­due. At the age of 22, he received a master’s degree in Indus­trial Psy­chol­ogy from Pur­due, spe­cial­iz­ing in Human Engi­neer­ing Design. He was assigned to design and eval­u­ate cock­pits for jet air­craft, which he did for two years.

He wrote a paper on the Buck­min­ster­fuller­ence mol­e­cule in 1994, and has cre­ated sev­eral inno­v­a­tive designs and insight­ful arti­cles which com­bine cog­ni­tive sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, geom­e­try, geo­desic domes, arche­ol­ogy, anthro­pol­ogy, geol­ogy, oceanography,education, ancient Egypt, eco­nom­ics, and other subjects.

His designs include a new way of pre­sent­ing and teach­ing the Eng­lish alpha­bet (still under devel­op­ment), a new num­ber sys­tem (a base-12 color-coded num­ber sys­tem with new sym­bols), an edu­ca­tional word game (still under devel­op­ment), and Spacehenge.

Lau­ritzen teaches sum­mers for the Cen­ter for Tal­ented Youth of Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity. He lives in Los Ange­les and New Mexico.

 

We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In…“The Singularity”

by

We are liv­ing dur­ing a very impor­tant time. It is a time in which time itself seems to be speed­ing up. It is also a time in which the prospect of being able to pre­vent our own death is becom­ing fea­si­ble. Intrigued? You should be — some­thing called The Sin­gu­lar­ity may ren­der you immortal.

Internet map plain 1024 We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In...The Singularity

The Map Of The Internet


3053933851 776b2207d5 150x150 We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In...The Singularity

Early Multi-Cellular Life

At the dawn of life on this planet, evo­lu­tion­ary changes hap­pened slow. Bil­lions of years slow. One microbe took bil­lions of years to evolve the DNA nec­es­sary to repli­cate itself from sim­ple amino acids. But that first copy­ing mech­a­nism, DNA, allowed infor­ma­tion to be trans­mit­ted that much faster. Then, evo­lu­tion only took mil­lions of years to cre­ate multi-cellular crea­tures. Good infor­ma­tion was kept, and bad infor­ma­tion was dis­carded. The wheel of time con­tin­ued until evo­lu­tion pre­sented the planet Earth with a new species — human beings. Except this species was dif­fer­ent — this was the first intel­li­gence on the planet.

This is where the evo­lu­tion­ary process of life really began to accel­er­ate. Instead of mil­lions of years to the next par­a­digm shift, it was only 50,000 years until Man began to talk. And then, only 10,000 to develop agri­cul­ture, writ­ten lan­guage, soci­ety, and gov­ern­ment. Another 5,000 elapsed, and we had con­structed Pyra­mids, devel­oped the­o­log­i­cal and mon­e­tary sys­tems, and had begun col­o­niz­ing the planet. This led to the devel­op­ment of Sci­ence a few thou­sand years later. Sci­ence, after a few mere cen­turies, gave rise to the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, which after only 50 years gave us the Com­puter Rev­o­lu­tion. Notice the trend? Evo­lu­tion is a feed­back loop.

ExponentialGrowthofComputing 1024x861 We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In...The Singularity

“Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the his­tory of com­put­ing hard­ware, in which the num­ber of tran­sis­tors that can be placed inex­pen­sively on an inte­grated cir­cuit has dou­bled approx­i­mately every two years.”

When Moore made this pre­dic­tion at Cal­Tech in the 1970’s, com­put­ers were the size of build­ings. Now one fits in your pocket, and a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor in CERN is capa­ble of achiev­ing the cold­est tem­per­a­ture in the uni­verse and a mag­netic field thou­sands of times more pow­er­ful than the Earth’s– all to find the God Par­ti­cle that allowed the uni­verse to be cre­ated. Forty years ago a machine that sized could barely run Pong.

This is only the begin­ning, how­ever — imag­ine the things we will achieve with com­put­ers the size of red-blood cells float­ing inside the body. Nanobots will soon be inte­grat­ing them­selves into our bio­log­i­cal struc­ture, repair­ing bro­ken synapses in the brain, clean­ing out arter­ies and cre­at­ing a virtual-reality inter­face within your visual cor­tex. Don’t believe me? Ask Ray Kurzweil, who this year co-founded the Sin­gu­lar­ity Uni­ver­sity in Palo Alto with Google and NASA. Their sole mis­sion is to cre­ate a human-computer hybrid that will allow us to live forever.

Why a hybrid? Why not sim­ply cre­ate a smarter-than-human com­puter and have it solve all our prob­lems? Because that com­puter might decide that keep­ing us humans on Planet Earth would hin­der its own progress in evo­lu­tion — that we pose a threat to its sur­vival. Or, the com­puter might even con­vert the entire solar sys­tem into a big­ger ver­sion of itself to solve the prob­lem. In Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Ques­tion”, sci­en­tists keep build­ing big­ger and big­ger com­put­ers; while con­stantly ask­ing the mean­ing of life. It is not until the very end, when, after the entire uni­verse has been con­verted into a com­puter that the final answer is given.

The UN even recently passed a law ban­ning “self-replicating nanobots” to pre­vent the planet from being cov­ered in a “gray goo” of robotic microbes. This only sup­ports how real this is all becom­ing. Six years ago, Face­book was being invented. Now, 500 mil­lion peo­ple have moved parts of their lives “online”, and could not imag­ine life with­out it. Ten years ago, cell phones and lap­tops were only just becom­ing com­mon­place within the soci­etal lex­i­con. Now, hav­ing a desk­top or even lap­top com­puter is viewed as being a nui­sance and has­sle. In the next ten years, how­ever, the change will be faster. We know this because it’s been speed­ing up this entire time.

ascore simple.2008 big 1024x790 We Will Either Live Forever or Be Killed By Robots In...The Singularity

Every day, more things hap­pen than the day before– because today we have bet­ter tools for com­mu­ni­cat­ing, work­ing, liv­ing, and repli­cat­ing infor­ma­tion than we did yes­ter­day. The move from ana­log to dig­i­tal will be almost too grad­ual to notice, but one thing is cer­tain: Human­ity is upload­ing itself onto the inter­net, which now appears to have turned Planet Earth into a col­lec­tive brain; every human being a neu­ron in the sys­tem. This col­lec­tive brain will soon aban­don the mor­tal prob­lems we face today, but it will face prob­lems on a uni­ver­sal scale. Like how to pre­vent its col­laps­ing, par­ent star from dying, how to exist in mul­ti­ple dimen­sions, or even how to bet­ter allo­cate intel­li­gence through­out the universe.

Maybe then it will even send out tiny seeds to land on dis­tant planets…just like the amino acids that landed on Earth.

BIL Conference 2012 — In Retrospect

by

I recently wrote about my expe­ri­ence at BIL 2011 in this arti­cle, but I absolutely have to update and tell you about BIL Con­fer­ence 2012 — mainly because of how much it exceeded my expectations.

6954653539 345290c0de b BIL Conference 2012 In Retrospect

Simone and Alexis Not Pictured!

First off, there were more peo­ple in atten­dance.  I believe we clocked in at over 800(!) peo­ple.  It seems our mes­sage is truly begin­ning to spread and pick up speed, which is no sur­prise — alot has hap­pened since March of 2011.

We are finally see­ing the rise of the “Inter­net voice”, as made evi­dent by the huge amount of activism by Twit­ter, Anony­mous, Occupy Wall Street, and many more connectivity-based move­ments.  Peo­ple are start­ing to step away from the com­puter (with iPhone or Droid still firmly in hand) and take to the streets.  Infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies are mak­ing peo­ple real­ize how much work there is to do to fix the prob­lems our soci­ety still faces.  Yet, many peo­ple that want and can do some­thing to help don’t know where to turn.  I didn’t.  Before con­nect­ing with the peo­ple at BIL, I had moti­va­tion and knew what I wanted to do, but didn’t know there were thou­sands of other peo­ple that had the same ideas.

BIL, by nature, is a very geeky event.  As a counter-culture shadow con­fer­ence that not-so-coincidentally occurs right around TED, you would expect this.  And by nature, these peo­ple don’t have alot of free time for social inter­ac­tion — and most find the usual “club and bar scene” to be trite and super­fi­cial (myself included).  The beauty in BIL is that it gives the nerdy, quirky, sub­ver­sive, think–way-the-fuck-outside-the-box types a sin­gu­lar event to come and talk about all the insanely cool projects they’ve been work­ing on in the past year.

New addi­tions this year included:

  • Space Stage, where SpaceX and XCOR showed off some very cool, pri­vately funded space vehi­cles. A
  • Burning-Man-esque.…dodecahedron? (It’s a geo­met­ric shape I can’t describe in human lan­guage).  Peo­ple were relax­ing and singing karaoke when they needed a mind-rest from talks.
  • Massage/Cupping sta­tion.
  • Speed Dat­ing and Rela­tion­ship Dis­cus­sions in the Red Room.
  • Col­lege Of Lockpicking
  • Crash­space 3D Print­ing Demonstration
  • Hal­cyon Mol­e­c­u­lar DNA microscope
  • BIL2012 Anthem!
  • Per­for­mances by Max Luga­vere and Ancient Lasers

At the clos­ing cer­e­mony, Reichart auc­tioned off a chance to sit in on a live read­ing of Futu­rama, with the full cast (as well as him­self and Simone for dates).  Their com­bined sex­i­ness helped put a deposit for BIL2013! Maria Entraigues and myself also per­formed the first ever “BIL Anthem” — and we got Aubrey de Grey to jump on stage and bust out a smooth 16 bar rap verse about “biol­ogy, nan­otech­nol­ogy, quan­tum com­put­ing, more biol­ogy…”  That was def­i­nitely a fit­ting way to end the con­fer­ence.  Spe­cial thanks to Reichart, Maria, Aubrey and Simone for mak­ing that hap­pen with 4 days notice!

In con­clu­sion, BIL expanded my mind and now I have a thirst for knowl­edge — and meet­ing the peo­ple who pos­sess it. I know I’m leav­ing out tons of amaz­ing peo­ple I met, and I apol­o­gize in advance.  More posts com­ing!  I have a big list of sim­i­lar con­fer­ences, con­certs, and events like BIL in my Google Docs, and I hope to check a few dozen off the list by the time 2012 is over.

The Art Of Lock Picking — BIL2012

by

At BIL 2012, I inter­viewed Eric Michel of the Col­lege of Lock­pick­ing, who showed me that most locks in the United States have an exploitable fault that is vul­ner­a­ble to lock picking.

You see, locks are rel­a­tively sim­ple devices. In the United States, we have what are called “pin-and-tumbler locks”.  They come in many dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes — key and lock, pad­lock, mor­tise cylin­der, dead­bolts, etc.  All locks dis­played have the same inter­nal mech­a­nism.  You have the body, which is the metal cylin­der hous­ing, and the plug — which is the rotat­ing inside piece. Inside the plug are drill holes, and on the front is the key­way.  The metal “juts” are sim­ply there to make sure the key fits the lock — con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, the shape of these juts doesn’t actu­ally turn the lock.  Here’s where it gets interesting:

If you turn a lock on its side, you will see stacks of pins.  Above the “key” pins are “dri­ver” pins, that sit between the plug and the body of the lock.  The dri­ver pins pre­vent the plug from rotat­ing.  The springs at the top are what keep the pins pushed into the plug, so that no mat­ter the ori­en­ta­tion, it will still oper­ate correctly.

For the man­u­fac­turer, it is very expen­sive to drill precision-machined holes.  Also, if any amount of dirt col­lects in one or more of the holes, they won’t fit the pins and the entire lock will not func­tion.  Man­u­fac­tur­ers under­stand this, so they pur­posely allow for a lit­tle bit of “slop” — that is, a mar­gin of error in the size and depth of the holes.  Because of this pro­duc­tion tech­nique, not all of the pins need to be push­ing to the side at all times — in real­ity, locks only have one or two pins that move — which cre­ates an exploitable position.

skyrim lock picking The Art Of Lock Picking BIL2012

It’s kind of like Skyrim

Here are the tools you will need.

  • Torque tool, which is basi­cally just a bent piece of metal in an L-shape.
  • A short hook — again, a small, bent piece of straight metal with a tiny hook or tooth on the end to push up the pins.

To take advan­tage of the “exploitable con­di­tion”,  put the torque tool into the bot­tom of the lock.  Place your index fin­ger on torque tool to add pres­sure.  If your fin­ger is turn­ing white, you are press­ing too hard.  Hold the short hook like a pen­cil, and place it into lock as low as pos­si­ble by rid­ing it down on the torque tool.  Do not pre­ma­turely lift any pins that you dont want to lift, but feel if any pins are springy.  If the pin gives, that means you don’t have to worry about it because it isn’t block­ing the lock from rotat­ing.  In sequence, use your hook to find the pins that are bind­ing, and push it up. Presto.

Feel­ing ter­ri­fied at how sim­ple the entire process was, I asked a glar­ing ques­tion: Why are you guys teach­ing peo­ple how to pick locks?! 

Eric explained that there is noth­ing ille­gal about pick­ing locks, and that in the long run, it is actu­ally a good thing to edu­cate peo­ple about exploitable faults in any­thing so that man­u­fac­tur­ers can cor­rect the issues for greater secu­rity across the board.

Sim­i­lar to a hacker that finds holes in a website’s secu­rity, the Col­lege of Lock­pick­ing is not only spread­ing aware­ness, but a mes­sage: Lock­ing that door at night may put your mind at ease — but in this day and age, our minds are the keys.