There is so much wrong with this crap. I can't even begin to explain.

@ForgedReality. I am not going to go knee deep into this. But I think you have misunderstood a few things. First, dispersion or the index of refraction of many materials is frequency dependent. Ironically, my graduate research focused extensively on this! In it's simplest form, the dispersion relation is (w/k)^2 = (c/n)^2. That means that the group velocity is limited by c. So in a medium where the refractive index is nonzero the speed of light is less than c. Frequency dependence further complicates the issue. It implies that the refractive index is different at different frequencies. Hence, light at one frequency has a different group velocity than light at another frequency. This has been known since Hertz. It was explained by Einstein.

Lene Hau's experiments at the Rowland Institute are a little more difficult to explain.

It is a little easier to explain something related to her experiments: Bose-Einstein condensates. Naively, you can think about light as billard balls. If you hit one ball moving at a given velocity in a given direction with an identical ball moving in exactly the opposite direction and same velocity, then by momentum transfer you can cancel the motion of both balls. When you do this with light you create a Bose-Einstein condensate.

I think there have been major social upheavals every 30 years or so in human society ever since the industrial revolution (1864 - Civil War, 1900 - Gilded Age, 1930 - Great Depression/WWII, 1960 - Civil Rights/Vietnam, 1980 - Ronald Reagan/Monetarist revolution, 2000's Iraq/Great Recession). I think we're seeing another upheaval now, I just hope it won't get quite so bad as some of the others in my list -- I hope we're going to end up comparing the 2010's more to the 1960's than the 1930's or 1860's. I suspect I'll live through one more major upheaval, assuming my lifespan ends up being somewhat average, and assuming the rate of social change isn't accelerating.

There's a part of me that thinks Kurzweil is right about a Singularity coming -- that the rate of technological advancement will speed up exponentially, and exceed our wildest expectations. I think there's a nonzero chance I'll live long enough to see the start of such a thing, but I think it could just as easily be a century or two away, and not decades.

I do think environmental issues are going to become a massive, unmistakable concern sooner rather than later. I don't think it will be the end of humanity or anything like that, but I suspect we're going to have to either rapidly retool our economy once people snap out of denial, or have a big economic crash coupled with major crop shortages and famine, and then rapidly retool our economy. I would even argue that environmental issues have played a nontrivial role in the current economic hardship, and that the time has come to really start enacting plans for moving away from fossil fuels, and start looking into more medium-to-long term issues like biodiversity and fresh water supply.

As for the freak globe-spanning natural disasters, there's no way to know about those. They could as easily happen tomorrow as they could a couple million years from now. Hopefully those will wait until post-Singularity when we'll be better equipped to deal with something like that...

Physics for Scientists and Engineers, 5th Ed. by Tipler...

...The rate with which I apply torque to individual pages is constant and nonzero!!! (It's a real page turner)
...It promotes my center of mass to be position just above the perimeter of my raised sitting platform (It's got me on the edge of my seat).

Actually it sucks and it's old...

Tags for this video have been changed from 'evolution, apocalypse, ted, lecture, society, nonzero, zero, sum' to 'evolution, apocalypse, ted, lecture, society, nonzero, zero, sum, game, theory' - edited by jwray

Tags for this video have been changed from 'evolution, apocalypse, ted, lecture, society' to 'evolution, apocalypse, ted, lecture, society, nonzero, zero, sum' - edited by jwray

Fascinating. I agree with his views on morality and empathy. Here is his website

http://nonzero.org/