so
i'm in chile in the atacama desert sitting in a hotel lobby because that's the only place that i can get a wi fi connection and i have this picture up on my screen and a woman comes up behind me
and unfortunately i can be a little too honest i said no it's it's penguin shit
and you know excuse me
sense that she thought i was speaking
just been in the falkland islands taking pictures of penguins this is a gentoo penguin and she was still skeptical so literally a few minutes before that i downloaded this scientific paper
about calculations on avian defecation which is really quite interesting because it turns out
you can model this as
at this point she stops me
what do you do
i was stuck because i didn't have any way to describe what i do
and so in some sense this talk today is my answer to that it's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that i do
it's very hard for me to make sense of it so i'm not sure that you can it's the kind of thing that i sit up late at night thinking about sometimes often at four in the morning
so some people are afraid of what i do
some people think i am the nerd tony soprano and in response i have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector
i'm not sure what these people think because i don't speak norsk
but i'm not thinking monsteret is a good thing
you know
so one of the things that i love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations and see where
they succeeded and where they failed use science to you know work backwards and say well really what were they thinking
and recently i was in easter island
an incrediblymysterious place because no matter where you go in easter island you're struck by these statues called the moai
sixty four square miles
they made so far as we can tell nine hundred of them
why on earth
and if you haven't read jared diamond 's book collapse i totallyrecommend that you do he 's a got a great chapter about it basically these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these
and
cut down the last tree and commitsuicide because we need more identical statues
that look on the face why that brow i mean it's such a powerful thing where did they get that inspiration and then i met yoyo
who is the native rapa nuian guide and if you look at yoyo 's face you kind of figure out where they got
many mysteries these statues everyone wants to know how did they made them how did they transport them
this woman in the foreground is jo anne van tilberg she's the leading archaeologistworkingeaster island today
one interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard so this used to be completely smooth
and we're going to do a very high res digitization first because it's a way of preserving them second we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically then
learn a few of the mysteries about them how long have they been standing in what positions and maybe indirectly get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are
get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet
i also have an archaeological project going on in egypt going on is perhaps a little bit strong
another thing i do is i invent stuff
in fact i design nuclear reactors
this is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle the red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors it's called the open fuel cycle
the white lines are what's called an advance fuel cycle where you
now this is the normal way it's done it's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution it has a lot of
which is a problem so our reactor eliminates these steps
which if we can actually make it work is a really cool thing
it's the kind of very high risk but potentially very high return thing that we do
a totally different field we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics particularly in an area called metamaterials
a metamaterial is an artificial material which manipulates in this case electromagnetic radiation in a way that you couldn't otherwise
so this device here is an invisibility cloak
but if you were a microwave
this is how you would view it
you could do that with mirrors from one angle the cool thing is this does it from all angles
it's you know today i'd like to say it's a zero billion dollar business but in fact it's negative
but some day some day maybe it's going to work
we do a lot of work in biomedical
diseases in developing countries
my eyes by the way
now i'm also very interested in cooking while i was at microsoft i took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in france
but barbecue 's interesting because it's one of these cult foods like chili or bouillabaisse various parts will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to
if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor that's because it is
but if you get to play with all those knobs and dials and of course really the controller over there does it all on software you can
this is a high speed centrifuge you should all have one in your kitchen beside your turbochef
oh boy does it clarify chicken stock you would not
turns out a it's useful and for a geek like me it's fun theory is red black is experiment
so i'm either really good at faking it or or this particular model seems to work
so another random thing i do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or seti
and you may be familiar with the movie contact which sort of popularized that it turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way
and jill has dedicated her life to this
but jill has what i call slow heroism
risking her professional life on something
and afterwards they came to me and they said so
you know that creepy rich guy in the movie
just a movie come on
so the seti institute with a little bit of help from me and a lot of help from paul allen and a variety of other people is building a dedicated radio telescope in hat creek california so they can do this seti work
can you imagine e t s phoning home and i'm not like
there you know horrible
so i do a lot of work on dinosaurs i'm known to tedsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs and i resemble that remark
talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs which is the finding of
now to find dinosaurs you hike around in horrible conditions
always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring you know skiers pray for
hike around
and this is after you dig them up they look like this you hike around you see something like this now this is something i found so look at it very closely here
you say well gee that's kind of interesting what are all of these pieces
closely you can recognize actually from the shape that these are skull fragments
a big serration on the edge
this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground
this is what it's like to find a tyrannosaurus rex
which i was lucky enough to do a few years ago
this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room
not the same one actually this is a cast which i had bought and then after buying the cast i found my own and i don't have room for two
so the thing that's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing because you're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago
it's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways the study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there's a problem with asteroid impact for example
the study of dinosaurs may literally one day save the planet study of the ancient climate
is very important in fact the mesozoic when dinosaurs lived had much higher co two than today was much warmer than today and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of co two on climate
but besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting
is actually what most dinosaur research looks like this is one of my papers a pygostyle from a non avian
now i'm also really big on photography i travel all over the world taking pictures
here 's a picture i took in the falkland islands
the last day the sun comes out the orcas come they're right by the boat it's fantastic and i get lots of pictures like this
a little bit later
i start getting some pictures like this
now to a human audience i need to explain that
if penthouse magazine had a marinemammal edition
this would be the centerfold
more and more activity near the boat and all of a sudden somebody
a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex
the first thing you learn
is the overwhelming importance of hands
i think paul simon is in the audience and he has he may not realize it but he wrote a song all about whale sex
that's kind of what it's like
the other interesting thing that i learned about whale sex they curl their toes too
and i've never been able to do that i just you know because yes i'll focus passion on something
that was so engrossing and the whole industry was expanding so much that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my
yeah you know i this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep
but that's really what works for me
the common or lowest common denominator is me that's it thank you
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