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  • BRADY FORREST: Hi.

  • I'm Brady Forrest.

  • Welcome to Ignite.

  • We're going to have a fun hour for you to cap off

  • your day here at Google IO.

  • It's going to be unlike any other session that you were

  • in, in that is not heavily scripted.

  • It is a bunch of people coming together that share their

  • ideas and passions.

  • As mentioned, I'm Brady Forrest.

  • I am with O'Reilly, and many, many years ago, I start now

  • many years ago, I started Ignite.

  • I also run Radar and do a bunch of other conferences.

  • About 3 years ago, my friend, Bre Pettis and I wanted

  • a geek event for our friends in Seattle.

  • And we wanted a place where they could share their thoughts

  • and passions, but very quickly.

  • Because not everybody is that interesting!

  • And so, to do that, we set some constraints around it.

  • But we wanted to make it a safe place for them to do that.

  • We wanted to make it fun for the audience and so all along

  • those lines, we invented a torturous format.

  • And, we would ply the speakers with beer.

  • We would ply the audience with beer.

  • I apologize in advance.

  • We were unable to procure any for this session.

  • But each speaker gets just 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide,

  • for a total of 5 minutes.

  • The speakers are not in control of their slides entire time.

  • So, once they're up here, as you've seen me do, they

  • kind of tap dance as their slides change, and, in this

  • case, we have 10 talks.

  • We're going to be beginning with Clay Johnson, learning

  • about the ins and outs of DC, and we are going to be ending

  • with, "Where the Hell is Matt?" And "A Great

  • Dance Around the World".

  • If you want to Tweet about it, share your your thoughts on it,

  • look up information about this later, use the hash

  • tag, Ignite IO.

  • I won't be checking Twitter during this; I'll be too busy

  • hoping that Powerpoint doesn't crash just so you know.

  • If you've never heard of Ignite, Ignite's in over a

  • 100 cities around the world.

  • It's spread far.

  • It's spread wide.

  • And if you want to throw your own, just let me know.

  • There are thousands of Ignite videos on line

  • at IgniteShow.com.

  • And it is super easy and fun to start.

  • You really just need to borrow a microphone and about 20

  • geeks, which I'm sure anyone here could round up.

  • Now, I'd like to welcome up our first speaker.

  • He is based in DC.

  • He's one of the people charged with basically trying to

  • make our government more transparent.

  • He does this through Sunlight Labs.

  • Please welcome up their CTO, Clay Johnson.

  • CLAY JOHNSON: How are you guys doing?

  • No, no, no no!

  • Come on!

  • This is Ignite!

  • This is Ignite!

  • That's what I'm talking about!

  • I'm Clay Johnson.

  • I direct Sunlight Lab at the Sunlight Foundation.

  • My primary job is fighting Zombies.

  • I fight Zombies in Washington DC, where a lot of

  • them get created.

  • And we work with government data.

  • And I need your help to fight these Zombies too.

  • Zombies, for the most part, are being generated by bad

  • information and bad access to information, generally

  • by people like this.

  • This is Glenn Beck and he is a Zombie producer.

  • Also Keith Olbermann, in the interest of partisanship,

  • is also a Zombie producer.

  • And other people who produce really commercial information.

  • It's like commercially process food.

  • This is Tyson's Any'Tizers.

  • They're Dippin' Twists.

  • Good for any time.

  • And I don't know what the fuck they're made out of, man!

  • And it's the same thing with information.

  • If you think about it information and food

  • are pretty similar.

  • They have these food chains, right?

  • So food goes from organic matter to vegetables, meats, to

  • people, and facts go data, to wire services, to bloggers

  • and distributors, people.

  • At the top of both of these food chains are Zombies!

  • And that's what we have to fix.

  • So what I do is, I fight Zombies.

  • What we do, is we get data out of government

  • to empower people.

  • Now here's a good example of some Zombies; Don't Steal

  • from Medicare to Support Socialized Medicine.

  • It's the equivalent of people saying "Brains.

  • Brains" So, we take this data, right?

  • This is every campaign contribution, not every one,

  • but this is a cobalt base file of every campaign contribution

  • that every member of Congress has ever received.

  • And we make it so that people can easily say, that hey, maybe

  • our health care system is messed up because of campaign

  • contributions and lobbyists and stuff like that, right?

  • So, this is TransparencyData.com where you

  • can easily get all of the Nelson's campaign contributions

  • at the State or Federal of level over the past 30 years

  • and you can get API.

  • You can do cool things with the it, like integrate it with

  • Gmail, so you can see who is contributing.

  • It does a look up for the sender of the email.

  • It also checks for lobbyists, so you can be aware registered

  • federal lobbyists that email you.

  • So, in 4000BC, writing was a trade secret of

  • a professional scribe.

  • It was locked up and not given to people.

  • And, I think something interesting has changed now.

  • Instead of writing, it's truth that's a trade secret of

  • professional scribes.

  • And, it's up to developers to really bust down that barrier,

  • because we have the power to change Washington, DC through

  • giving people better access to the truth.

  • Now these are currently truth-tellers.

  • They're called "Bloggers" Well, on

  • the left you have a Blogger, next the Blogger, and Social

  • Media Expert and, then you have a Marketing Consultant and some

  • dude who got poisoned with LSD or something like that.

  • But developers can tell the truth through code.

  • They can start using data to give people better access to

  • the truth and build tools like for transparency data or tools

  • on top of transparency data to give people access the

  • sane, rational thought.

  • You go to this web site here, the National Data Catalog, and

  • say hey, maybe a mine exploded and you wanted to see the mine

  • safety records of all of the United States.

  • You can get that data right here and start saying, hey

  • maybe Massey Energy isn't doing well by its employees, and

  • is killing its employees.

  • You can do the same thing with, say there's an oil spill.

  • You can see where people are getting their oil from, and

  • how much foreign oil we are actually dependent on.

  • Then you can start tying all this data together.

  • This is a web site that one of our grantees built called

  • LittleSis.com that allows people to tie alll this data

  • together, and build profiles.

  • It's a mandatory Facebook of influential people.

  • It's pretty awesome.

  • So.

  • That's a Zombie.

  • So these tools help you fight these people, and make it so

  • that your arms don't get chewed off by a pretty,

  • blue eyed Zombie.

  • So, one last thing, fighting Zombies makes you money.

  • GPS, weather, all kinds of data initiatives coming from

  • government have created massive economies, massive industries,

  • and this isn't just a social cause, it's something much

  • more significant than that.

  • So, thank you very much.

  • You guys have been great!

  • Let's hear it for Brady.

  • BRADY FORREST: And thank you very much, Clay.

  • And now we're going to move away from DC.

  • All the way back to Mountain Dew, and Seattle with the

  • former Googler, the woman behind the original

  • Web Master Central.

  • Please welcome up Vanessa Fox, a seeker of truth.

  • VANESSA FOX: Okay.

  • Thank you, Brady.

  • So, normally, we have these things in a pub, and you're

  • all drunk and its awesome, and I'm so much better.

  • But, so, since we're not in a pub today, we're going to find

  • out the meaning of life.

  • I checked Google first.

  • The meaning of life, of course, they say it's 42, which used to

  • be really awesome, but now with the movie coming out, a

  • few years ago, everyone knows the answer is 42.

  • If you do the Flicker search, you see that it's old hat.

  • So, we're not cool anymore to really know anymore

  • the answer 42.

  • But they also think the meaning of life is Google,

  • so that scared me.

  • So, I thought that I would look for the meaning of life on

  • Bing, because that's the decision engine.

  • Sorry Google.

  • They told me I should look for what's my dragon name, which

  • lead me to a site to find a dragon name for my dog,

  • horse, cat or child.

  • That was very disturbing.

  • I thought, perhaps that I instead, I would try Yahoo,

  • another search engine.

  • It told me to find the meaning of life on these

  • 3 places, in this order.

  • And, the bible is the only one in lower case which I didn't

  • know exactly what that meant.

  • So I went to Twitter first and it actually pointed

  • me to Facebook.

  • And so, I thought, okay.

  • And the meaning of life is Robert Pattinson looks like

  • a foot, of Twilight fame.

  • I didn't think this was really leading me in the direction

  • I had been looking for.

  • So, I thought I'd do another search on Facebook, What's

  • the meaning of Life?

  • It told me to YouTube, back to Google, right?

  • The number 2 engine is YouTube.

  • This is what YouTube said that the meaning of life was.

  • This is actually disturbed me maybe just as much as Robert

  • Patterson looks like a foot.

  • So, I didn't learn the meaning of life, but what I did

  • learn was that people are crazy on the internet.

  • And, I was like, OK, maybe I'm just looking at

  • the wrong thing.

  • Maybe I just really need to know why are people on

  • the internet so crazy?

  • So, this is the next search that I did.

  • And, what I found was that this.

  • I do research a serious subject and what I found find is that

  • the author would like to shoot the pope, or would like to do

  • strange things to my unmentionable parts.

  • And also, by the way, why do all the crazy people

  • use the caps button?

  • And these things seem to be an equal interest to this person.

  • So, I thought, well, that's a good question?

  • So, why do all crazy people use caps on the internet?

  • And what I found was, does anyone have a good recipe

  • for a red velvet cake.

  • And, I was like, yeah, dude I love cake.

  • I ended on this site, which with a bunch of people in a

  • flame war about whether the Star Trek characters should

  • really be on the cake because really, was he a navigator?

  • And ended up with this guy saying, have you kissed a girl?

  • Turn off caps-lock on your computer.

  • So I thought I'm going to really go to the root of crazy

  • people and ask them what the meaning of life is, which of

  • course, lead me ChatRoulette.

  • Then, I looked into Chatroulette, and I was

  • like, you know, I'm not going after all.

  • I don't need know the meaning of life that bad.

  • So, instead that validated that people on the internet or crazy

  • but also the other thing, of course, is that we

  • all search, right?

  • You've all been searching, and you found that people

  • wanted to things to your unmentionable parts.

  • So, we do 2.9 million searches a minute.

  • We use major search engines for everything. 71% of us use major

  • search engines for looking for health information.

  • So, life or death.

  • Are we going to live?

  • Are we going to die?

  • And we're doing searches with all of those crazy people on

  • ChatRoulette, and this is how we're getting our information.

  • The same is true with government information.

  • A study just found that search engines was how we get our

  • government data that apparently cause us to be Zombies, so

  • that that's a bit scary.

  • We used to use the library to get information, but it turns

  • out that the days, that only 13% of people use the library

  • as that place to find information. 58% use it to look

  • for reference books, but except that 65% use it to go on the

  • internet where all the crazy people are.

  • So there is a Slate article that talked about this.

  • That we really like to seek and search, and when we do that, it

  • causes the chemicals in our brain to mimic the state that

  • we're in when we're on cocaine.

  • And so that causes us just to keep searching more and more.

  • Sort of, that's how I ended up seeing that cat crazy guy.

  • So apparently when you search, this is what happens.

  • So this is kind of article ended.

  • If humans seeking machines, we've created the perfect

  • machines to allow us to seek endlessly.

  • So, what does that mean, right?

  • So some other experts have looked it, and said, OK we

  • don't get really good search results, but the reason we

  • don't, is because most of the queries we do are

  • a single word.

  • So its our own fault.

  • It's all you guy's fault that you ended up at the crazy

  • people, because you just didn't know how to search correctly.

  • Some other people are like, well, maybe

  • that's not the problem.

  • Maybe it's just that there's so much information out there.

  • There's not a good way to catalog it, and we think

  • if it's popular or in the top 10 search results,

  • it must be accurate.

  • Which isn't true.

  • So what should we do with this?

  • So, I would say this.

  • When we search, its like we're on drugs, so therefore

  • we're not going to stop.

  • We're going to keep doing it more and more.

  • And yet, what we're ending up with is a world full of crazy

  • people so what does that mean for the future of how we

  • interact with information?

  • Thank you.

  • BRADY FORREST: And we're lucky to have our next speaker here,

  • because he was almost eaten over the North Atlantic.

  • Please welcome Bradley Vickers.

  • BRADLEY VICKERS: I'm going to talk about rowing across the

  • North Atlantic ocean from New York to Thalamus, England.

  • It's a journey of about 3200 nautical miles.

  • And, I completed it in about 71 days.

  • Just over 71 days with my 3 other teammates.

  • And we recognize by Guinness World Records as having had the

  • first landfall to landfall crossing of the North

  • Atlantic ocean.

  • I think that you can take some hopefully observations from

  • this crossing and apply to whatever projects you guys

  • might be involved with.

  • The actual expedition took about 18 months to prepare for.

  • And part of that was getting our team together.

  • The 4 of us had rowed together in college, and

  • we figured, why not?

  • Let's row across an ocean.

  • We also had to outfit our 28 by 6 foot ocean rowboat with a

  • solar panel and that fueled our communications and our

  • navigation systems and it also powered our desalinator, which

  • converted salt water into fresh water.

  • Now the actual crossing is both the mental and

  • physical challenge.

  • As you can see from the slide behind me, the transformation

  • both physically and mentally that I underwent.

  • That last one, I'm loosin' it!

  • Get me to shore!

  • Part of the physical nature of this, is we were rowing in

  • shifts of 2 hours. 2 hours on, 2 hours off. 2 on, 2 off, 2 on,

  • 2 off. 24 hours a day, someone's at the oars

  • for 12 of those.

  • So we're continually sleep-deprived.

  • You see Jordan there, in the corner, sleeping were 1

  • eye open in the cabin.

  • It's a very cramped cabin.

  • It's about 8 foot by 5 foot, so you never getting full rest.

  • You're also having to keep yourself clean and your

  • clothing, because you don't want to get salt waters sores.

  • And we were downloading satellite images of the North

  • Atlantic and weather reports and uploading our blog via

  • Iridium satellite phone.

  • So we need to the eat during our 2 hours off.

  • And we had budgeted between 8, sorry 7 and 8,000 calories

  • per rower per day.

  • It was an immense amount of food.

  • I was in charge of planning the food, and I miscalculated.

  • Which is not a fun thing to tell your teammates.

  • I realize it on day 14 and it took me until day 17 that I

  • worked up the courage to tell my teammates.

  • We would lose a combined 137 pounds.

  • I lost 28, Dylan 32, Jordan, 35 and Greg, 42 pounds!

  • Now, ultimately we were successful in achieving our

  • goal which was rowing across the North Atlantic without

  • physical assistance, so we couldn't be resupplied by food.

  • We achieved that, and I think the outlook that we had and the

  • process we went through can be applied to getting through

  • challenging settings with a group of people in

  • a team dynamic.

  • We were on a 29 by 6 foot boat and we couldn't get off, so

  • we had to work together.

  • One of the ways that we work together is we had

  • conversations for the boat, and we had conversation for land.

  • If it was constructive, if it was productive,

  • it was for the boat.

  • If it was destructive, or if we are trying to find out

  • whose fault it was, mainly mine, it was for land.

  • Hopefully, over a large a warm meal and multiple

  • cold beverages!

  • So we kept ourselves focused on solution based suggestions.

  • The other thing is our process.

  • Immediately upon realizing that we were short on food, we

  • inventoried the entire boat, so we could start dealing with

  • some facts and numbers and we realized if we rationed, we

  • could make it to England.

  • So we had a plan.

  • And we had that plan, we had something to focus our efforts

  • and our energies towards, rather than bickering amongst

  • ourselves, and we made progress towards our goal.

  • And with that plan, we learned more information.

  • We learned how we responded the low calorie intake.

  • And we constantly readjusted our plan, but our goal

  • remained constant.

  • And I think that's huge when you're working on a project.

  • Don't shift your goal to meet the settings that

  • you find yourself in.

  • Constantly adjust your plan and your own actions that you're

  • taking to achieve that goal.

  • I've really enjoyed sharing my experience with all of you and

  • I hope that you're able to take these stories and apply them to

  • whatever pursuits that you're in and whether personal,

  • professional, whatever passions they are, I wish you the best

  • of luck in achieving your own adventures.

  • Thank you.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • BRADY FORREST: Thank you very much, Bradley.

  • As I mentioned, there are Ignites around the world.

  • And we're lucky to have the organizer of the Community

  • Leadership Summit Ignite here.

  • He does a lot of work with helping people get together

  • communities build communities and keep them together.

  • He's here to share some secrets.

  • Please welcome Van Riper.

  • VAN RIPER: Just to be clear, I'm not a Communities

  • Serial Organizer.

  • Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, I'm here

  • talking today about my work as a Serial Community Organizer.

  • I know, bad joke.

  • You're supposed to be drinking.

  • These are some of my communities.

  • The bird is Juggie.

  • The JUG's mascot.

  • JUG stands for Java User Groups, probably not what

  • some of you were thinking.

  • I did create this Yahoo group for a production

  • of Hello Dolly.

  • The theater director of my daughter's show did say to

  • me, so, I see, you are a community organizer.

  • Shortly after that, my career as a community

  • organizer really began.

  • At BayChi, I helped others organize their own small

  • communities for more than a decade.

  • I also learned the importance of regular, in person meetings

  • to build communities.

  • Oh, yeah, the lady in the lower left, she's taken.

  • She's my wife's, Mary Von Riper.

  • The Silicon Valley web job that was the first

  • community that I started.

  • I escaped the imploding start up world for a

  • safe haven at Verisign.

  • The pay was good, but the legacy code work

  • was killing me.

  • For fun, I would hang out with other Java

  • Developers at my JUG.

  • Java, Java, Java, Javajava jing jing jing.

  • These folks are my Java possie, in particular Aaron Houston, in

  • baseball cap, played a pivotal role in my efforts as a

  • community organizer with the JUGS and the Java

  • champions communities.

  • In 2006, I came close to burning out.

  • If Kevin had not come along -- Are you here, Kevin?-- All

  • right, if you had not come along and played Robin to my

  • Batman who knows what would have happened?

  • But it quickly evolved into a relationship of equals.

  • These global maps are all created by me in KML.

  • And maps that's like these are a great way to support

  • a global community.

  • One of these is not like the others, and you'll have

  • to ask Brady why that is.

  • So, it's kind of like code camp, its a free annual event

  • by developers, for developers.

  • That lunch line had 1,000 hungry developers in it.

  • We gave of almost 200 large pizzas that day, and its

  • already open for registration.

  • This shirt is showing the tag cloud of the most recent code

  • camp, and Peter Kellner and Tammy Baker are the original

  • organizers, and I help them now.

  • You can see how Java has become a big part of last year's camp.

  • Chris Shaw is actually behind the start of the Google

  • technologies user groups.

  • And, we had our first meeting in January, 2008.

  • Stephanie Lou and Jason Cooper are our current sponsors and

  • look for the GTUG camp out this summer.

  • But whether you're looking for a GTUG near you, or you want to

  • start a new group, you should come check out the

  • GTUG lounge here.

  • That's where you'll find people like me hang

  • out during the break.

  • And please do visit GTUGS.org on line.

  • Organizing developer communities is fun, but I

  • needed something more.

  • I attended the first leadership summit in the summer of 2009.

  • I was swimming in as the sea of community organizers.

  • That event was a natural high for someone like me.

  • Jono Bacon, , the author of "The Art Of

  • Community" organized the first CLS.

  • He believes in building family values in your communities

  • through events.

  • With Marcy Hennin egging me on, I decided to put this into

  • practice, organizing the first regional CLS event.

  • Thus, CLS West in January, 2010 came to pass.

  • Irene Koehler found us a great venue.

  • Dave Neilsen and Sudha Jamthe were our fundraisers

  • extraordinaire.

  • Colea did her magic running the conference, Sonya Barry did an

  • amazing job handling the food.

  • Its hard to believe, but the second edition of the main CLS

  • event is only 2 months away and I've been asked to

  • help organize it.

  • I've somehow become the organizer of

  • community organizer.

  • If you do community work, you have to be there.

  • I was a map volunteer for Global Ignite Week.

  • It inspired me to plan something similar for the

  • CLS movement in 2011.

  • On this stage, I'm officially announcing plans for a regional

  • month next January, And you could be a part of it.

  • See me to find out.

  • People often ask how I can put so much effort into these

  • volunteer activities.

  • I did start out to scratch my own itch.

  • But, I soon found it was enriching my life.

  • Brian Sharp has some concrete practices that'll make you a

  • better leader and a better person.

  • Google has some great community technologies.

  • But technology doesn't build communities.

  • People build communities.

  • Spend time getting to know people here.

  • Don't just soak up the technology, even for geeks like

  • us, it's still about the people whose lives we have touched.

  • I like fortune cookies.

  • Next time you open one, add in community leadership to

  • the end of your fortune.

  • It's not as a titillating as the traditional game, but you

  • might be surprised by the results.

  • That's all, folks.

  • BRADY FORREST: Thank you very much, Van.

  • Yeah I met Van when he was helping out with

  • Globaal Ignite week.

  • Thanks again.

  • Our next speaker, I met just two weeks ago?

  • A week and a half ago?

  • She is on a Knight Ridder scholarship to research

  • journalism, and she's trying to learn how to tell stories

  • through locative media, and it seemed to me that the home of

  • Google Maps might just be the perfect place for her

  • to tell her story.

  • Please welcome for Chrissy Clark.

  • CHRISSY CLARK: Hello, my name's Chrissy Clark, and and I make

  • documentaries for public radio, but don't worry, I'm not going

  • to ask you for money right now.

  • I'm going to tell you about a vision that

  • I had in the desert.

  • But to understand that vision, you need to know

  • a little bit about me.

  • I am a fifth generation Californian.

  • My great-great grandfather came to the bay area in 1848 on a

  • mule, and the legacy of that is it that as a kid when I was

  • growing up I heard a lot of stories from my dad about the

  • world that I was driving through all the time.

  • So, he would point at things and he would say that

  • used to be that.

  • That industrial wind farm used to be our family's

  • general store.

  • Or, that big, 8 lane freeway that goes out onto the Golden

  • Gate bridge, that you see to be was my dad's

  • personal jungle gym.

  • He claims to have climbed it that when the bridge

  • was under construction.

  • I don't know if I believe that.

  • But what I did learn through all of that was that a

  • landscape is made out of stories.

  • It's sort of the layers and layers of stories like the

  • geologic strata, and that is what inspired me to

  • become a radio reporter.

  • I started moving around the world and asking questions

  • about how places got to be the way that they were.

  • So one of those questions was it bad neighborhoods.

  • We've all been through bad neighborhoods or avoided them.

  • Why are they the way that they are?

  • How did they get to be that way?

  • I asked that question about a neighborhood in San Francisco

  • in the western addition.

  • And it turns out that neighborhood was not always

  • a bad neighborhood.

  • In fact, it used to be in the 1940's a cultural mecca for the

  • African-American community.

  • It was called the Harlem of the West.

  • But in the 1960's it was a target for urban redevelopment

  • and so there were at 13,000 families been were moved out of

  • San Francisco a lot of buildings were raised

  • and, voila, you get a bad neighborhood.

  • Another question I started asking about the landscape

  • in San Francisco was, why is this city gay?

  • Why of all of the cities in the world, is San Francisco gay?

  • And so it actually has a lot to do with this building up here,

  • which is 710 Montgomery Street.

  • It's now kind of a yuppy restaurant, but in the 1940's,

  • it was a cafe called The Black Cat Cafe and a guy named Jose

  • Sarria would come and dance in drag, these lovely black

  • evening gowns and sing songs about his life as a

  • homosexual male.

  • They were flamboyant and funny and provocative and political

  • and people started flocking to them.

  • And the reason that he didn't get kicked out of that bar, as

  • he would of in most other parts of the country at that time is

  • that San Francisco, it wasn't that it was so liberal, but is

  • actually it was a loophole in a post prohibition way that

  • bars as are regulated.

  • In most parts of that country, bars the regulated by a

  • morality police, or were back then.

  • But in San Francisco bars were regulated by tax collectors and

  • so they just wanted to get money.

  • They didn't care what was going on in on, and, voila, the

  • gay rights movement was born in San Francisco.

  • So these sorts of stories were on my mind as I was driving

  • through a desert in Utah a couple of years ago and I saw

  • this cabin and had this urge I wanted to know the stories

  • about this cabin, because I was in the middle of nowhere.

  • Why the hell was cabin here?

  • And I wanted the click on that cabin, like you would

  • click on a hyper-link.

  • Maybe I'd had been in front of a computer for too long and I

  • know that was a delirious idea back then.

  • But, as you know it is not a delirious idea anymore, thanks

  • too many of you in this room.

  • You can click on the world.

  • You can click on the world, and get information.

  • So, if we're driving through the Utah desert, right now, and

  • we clicked on this cabinet, what kind of information

  • would we get?

  • Well, we'd get some cool Wikipedia articles.

  • We'd be told that it is it desert, which we

  • kind of all ready knew.

  • We would also get some Yelp restaurant reviewes maybe.

  • Some other bits of sorts of drips and drabs

  • from the internet.

  • And that stuff is amazing.

  • Mind blowing.

  • My great-great-grandfather would be amazed.

  • But one of the things that we aren't getting yet is stories.

  • The personal dramas, the economic policies, the

  • environmental issues, the political struggle that make a

  • place what it is and shapes the people who live there.

  • It's sort of getting the meaning onto the landscape.

  • And as a journalist those are the sorts of stories that I

  • tell all of the time and they're actually thousands and

  • thousands of archives of those sorts of stories that are

  • locked up right now and don't really have a home

  • out in the world.

  • And so, what I'm interested in doing is getting those stories,

  • those archives on to the world so that we can click on them.

  • So, say we're driving through Utah, we see that cabin, maybe

  • we click on it and we find out, and it's true, I researched it,

  • that it cabin happens to be as desolate as it is in the one of

  • the counties that have the highest in job growth in the

  • country over the last 10 years.

  • Or we find out that it was a place where a radioactive waste

  • facility is about to be built.

  • So its those sorts of stories not just in Utah but all over

  • the country, all over the world that I'm interested and putting

  • onto the landscape and if you want to talk to me

  • about that, please do.

  • My email is there, you can click on me.

  • Thanks.

  • BRADY FORREST: She didn't know what Ignite was a week ago.

  • Thank you very much.

  • Our next speaker is a digital artist, and I think it's best

  • just to say he makes beautiful things through code.

  • Please welcome up Aaron Koblin.

  • AARON KOBLIN: Thanks.

  • So, in addition to being a technology lead at Google's

  • creative labs, I also have a passion for making art with

  • with large data sets and large groups of people

  • on the internet.

  • So I'm going to try to breeze through really quickly a few

  • projects I have been working on recently.

  • Particularly crowd sourcing projects.

  • Some of you may be familiar with this.

  • Barron Wolfgang von Kempelen mechanical

  • chess playing machine.

  • This is actually a robotic chess player, except for the

  • fact that it's not at all.

  • There's a leg-less guy who sits a box and he controls this

  • thing, acting like he's machine.

  • I thought this was a particularly bizarre story,

  • especially because Amazon created a web service based off

  • this that some of you may be familiar, with called The

  • Mechanical Turk, and it uses the premise that there's

  • certain things that are easy for people but hard

  • for machines.

  • And now can farm out these tasks to a large

  • number of people.

  • And they can do these little things in complete isolation

  • from one another.

  • And they call it artificial, artificial intelligence.

  • So it's a really weird concept.

  • There's like thousands of people, and none of them have

  • any idea what they're doing but you can ask them

  • to do anything.

  • So I thought what can I do and how can experiment

  • with the system?

  • I decide to make a first project where I asked them to

  • draw sheep facing to the left.

  • And I said I'll pay you $0.02 for this task.

  • And, it's a very simple drawing tool that has a side slider and

  • a gray slider and you can start drawing away at your sheep.

  • And I started collecting sheep, a large number of sheep.

  • These are a few of sheep that I collected.

  • You can see kind of a really interesting juxtaposition.

  • You have this very mechanized huge system and all

  • these individuals.

  • I also captured the drawing process of

  • each individual sheep.

  • I am going to rattle off a bunch of URLs.

  • Hopefully maybe some you will get to check them later.

  • TheSheepMarket.com you can see where where all these sheep

  • were drawn and you can actually purchased them, which is

  • another interesting topic.

  • I don't know if I have time to get into in the Ignite.

  • But, you can browse through the all.

  • See them all here's some stats for the project: There's

  • about 11 sheep per hour were coming in over 40 days.

  • There were 662 sheep that didn't meet "sheep like

  • criteria" [LAUGHTER]

  • and were through out of the mix.

  • There were 7,599 unique IP addresses, so that you

  • an idea about how many people participated.

  • But only one of them asked this!

  • It's a really valid question, and I really expect

  • a lot more that.

  • There's a lot of reasons that people drawing sheep, reference

  • to cloning, reference to labor, I don't have time

  • to get into it.

  • This is another project.

  • I took a frame Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.

  • On the left side, you have the frame then divided

  • into 16 pieces.

  • Individual people drawing different portions for $0.05.

  • Amazing dedication that was going to these tasks.

  • And this is a sample from a project that I worked on

  • with my friend, Takashi Kawashima, which was based

  • on this notion where you give somebody something and they

  • recreate what they see without knowing what it is that

  • they're working on.

  • We decided to take it quite literally what the mechanical

  • turk was used for, making money.

  • And we created a hundred dollar bill.

  • We pay the workers the literal values their contribution, so

  • that's $0.01 for 10,000 people maybe making this

  • massive forgery.

  • What you see here is everybody's contributions.

  • If they drew a smiley face, its in there.

  • There if they actually drew what they where asked to do

  • it's also there so you can get a sense of what's going.

  • I really don't have time to talk about this one, but if you

  • get a chance, Bicyclebuiltfor 2000.com is the audio

  • version of this.

  • I worked with my friend Daniel Massey, and we collected sound

  • samples and did a granular synthisism of the sound bicycle

  • built for 2000 where can hear individual people making tones

  • and emulating tones to make the song.

  • Another audio based project that I got to work on - I got

  • to work with Radiohead, one of my favorite bands, and director

  • James Frost, and we shot this video using laser

  • scanners as 3D data.

  • We made music video without video.

  • We were looking at it as time [INAUDIBLE]

  • space.

  • We basically then released it as an open source project on

  • Google Code, and we allow people to download some source

  • code to play with the data and also the data itself, and

  • people started making their own versions.

  • This probably my favorite part of this project.

  • The fact that it really start to create a community of people

  • making interesting content.

  • And you see here on the bottom left, the pin board version

  • of the of Tom York singing.

  • There's a Lego version.

  • In the center, there's someone who actually 3D printed Tom

  • York's face so now, there's this physical manifestation

  • of it as well.

  • I thought this was really exciting.

  • That there were people working together and they knew

  • what they were doing.

  • And I thought, let's do something like that.

  • That led to this project, Johnny Cash Project,

  • which we just launched.

  • This is Johnny Cash's last album, making music video for

  • the song "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down" and

  • we're actually kind of resurrecting, director Chris

  • Milk and I ressurecting Johnny Cash through individual

  • users drawings.

  • So you can see here none of these are photographs.

  • They are hand drawn frames that people can contribute to make

  • this music video that's constantly changing.

  • So it's not a single video.

  • There's actually different tracks and different community

  • around it rating and judging.

  • This is Gray Area Foundation for the Arts and I

  • wanted a quick call out.

  • Here in San Francisco we have workshops that basically lead

  • different types of thinkers to use programming and other tools

  • and get artists and designers and other people kind of using

  • technology to interesting ways.

  • One of things we talk about a lot is this to tool called

  • processing which basically a series of libraries in Java

  • which makes it really easy for artists and designers and

  • people aren't necessarily familiar with Java which

  • or programming to start doing creative coding.

  • I highly recommend that you check it out.

  • Finally, last but definately not least, I want to mention

  • Chrome Experiments which is a website I helped launch at

  • Google, which is showing a bunch of the really interesting

  • HTML5 and Javascript hacks and demos, some stuff you may have

  • not realized you could do in a browser.

  • And since you are all developers, I'd love for you

  • to check it out and also contributed if you

  • get a chance.

  • Thanks very much.

  • BRADY FORREST: Thank you, Aaron.

  • Who loved to the animation behind the speaker's

  • this morning?

  • With the wires that create Google?

  • You can thank him for that as well!

  • And, his team, and his team.

  • Now as you may guess, we're about to talk about

  • someone else's hobby.

  • The physical manifestation of You Sunk My Battleship.

  • Please welcome James Young!

  • JAMES YOUNG: Thank you.

  • Model warship combat is taking World War 1, World War 2

  • battleships and building 1/42 scale models of them, arming

  • them with working BB guns and going to a pond and just

  • the shooting the crap out of each other.

  • It's a game, a game we play, and like all games, it's got

  • rules and everybody has to obey the rules for

  • the game to be fun.

  • These are the rules for the various formats and like Mac

  • versus Linux versus Windows.

  • You take your pick, and you stick with your religion.

  • Big Gun is, in my opinion, the most fun.

  • You have 1/4 ball bearings.

  • You fire everything, you man everything, you do everything

  • as much to scale as you possibly can.

  • And that's what these boats are.

  • The guns can be really complex, from rotating to pressing

  • turrets, to really simple guns that fire fast as

  • you possibly can.

  • And they are all C02 powered.

  • They run quite well.

  • You're going to start with original ships.

  • They have to be ships that were really lay down or built in

  • World War 1, World War 2.

  • This is the Cleveland in that corner.

  • This is the Rodney from the UK.

  • You're going to learn about the people that served on, and it's

  • really fascinating to find out the history of the ships.

  • And you can pick whatever kind of ship you want, aircraft

  • carrier, submarine.

  • Battleships are the easiest to do.

  • You've got the most space, the most room.

  • There's room to work with.

  • There's room to put all of your guns and do everything that

  • you want to do with it.

  • You can find plans on line.

  • A lot of people in the hobby make plans for these ships, or

  • you can go straight to the Library of Congress, get the

  • original plans from the Navy, scale them down to 1/44 scale

  • and build it yourself.

  • You can buy fiberglass wholes on line, or you are good with

  • wood working skills, you can make it yourself.

  • You're kind of making a framework to lay a thin layer

  • of balsa wood around the ship, and that balsa wood is

  • what you're shooting.

  • And how it sinks and takes damage.

  • You can go really detailed.

  • This is a fine example.

  • This is the Yamoto here on the right, or you can you can be

  • really simple like mine, and like the other one up there.

  • It really depends on how much time and skill that you

  • have to dedicate a hobby.

  • And it it's really about money and time.

  • People say how much does it cost, and I'm like, well,

  • anywhere from about $500 to $2000.

  • It really just depends on how much skill you can put in the

  • one and how much is you ust want to buy from somebody else

  • that's done the work for you.

  • Once you've got your ship, once its all ready, you go to the

  • pond, you put it on the pond with everyone else,

  • and you have battles.

  • And they usually have an objective so the access team

  • has to get their transports across the pond and back across

  • the pond without sinking and the allies have to accomplished

  • some goal without being destroyed, maybe it's just a

  • death match style battle and everybody just goes out there,

  • and everybody tries to sink everybody else, and the last

  • man on the top of the pond wins the game.

  • But they're really shooting BBs.

  • They're really doing damage to each other, so stuff's going

  • to get shot off your ship.

  • You're going to have

  • holes punched in the side of your ship.

  • You've got bilge pumps.

  • You can see the spray on that one up there, the where the

  • bildge pump is spraying up and you're going to sink, and

  • it's part of the game.

  • Everybody sinks, it kind of sucks, but, that's what you are

  • there for, is to what you're out there for, is to

  • sink and be sunk.

  • So the ships are all designed, you waterproof

  • as much as you can.

  • You've got protection around your electronics, so you

  • just pull your boat out of the water.

  • You patch the holes on it.

  • And, 15 minutes later you ready to fight another battle.

  • The kind of damage you can take can be pretty severe.

  • I've got some pictures right there of the

  • damage that you'll take.

  • It's not small.

  • You're really getting your boat shot to pieces.

  • And so to repair it, you can either put masking tape over

  • it for a temporary repair.

  • There's a really thin cloth that impregnated with glue

  • that you can put on there.

  • And in the wintertime when the when the ponds are all frozen

  • over, you ust peel off your balsa wood and put new

  • balsa wood on there.

  • There are clubs that do this all over the world, from

  • Australia to England and in the United States.

  • There's clubs in almost every region of the of the country.

  • I am from Utah, and I'm a Navy of one.

  • It's just me.

  • So if anybody here from Utah then give me a call,

  • and I'll bring you out.

  • Who's here from the bay area?

  • Give me a shout.

  • OK, these are your people.

  • These guys are in San Jose and they're from all

  • around the bay area.

  • And we'll be at Makers Fair this weekend and we'll have a

  • huge battle at Maker's Fair.

  • RC Naval Combat is the place you want to go.

  • This is where we all talk on line and this is

  • my contact info.

  • I love to talk about this hobby.

  • I have to say thank you to my wife and to my best friend

  • Sam [? Rosskelly ?]

  • who made this hobby possible.

  • Thank you very much.

  • BRADY FORREST: James, we normally don't have time

  • for questions, but I just have to ask.

  • How many eyes do you lose a year?

  • Thank you.

  • Our next speaker has been experimenting with Wave from

  • the beginning and has made homage to what I can only

  • assume is Buffy the Vampire Slayer with ElizaBot.

  • Please welcome Anne Veling.

  • Anne Veling I'd like to share with you a little adventure

  • I've had with Google Wave over the past year.

  • Let me ask you a question.

  • Who was here at IO last year.

  • It was great.

  • I was here to and I was excited to meet so many smart

  • people just like today.

  • I was also excited to hear about Google Wave, and even

  • though a year later Google Wave may not have been the overnight

  • success that we've may

  • have hoped, I feel strongly believe in the vision behind

  • Google Wave, because instead of us juggling around the objects

  • between the people who need to collaborate and sending it back

  • and forth, Google Wave, actually turns that model

  • upside down and as all these people collaborate and go

  • towards the wave, and move toward the object

  • collborate on that.

  • I also like wave because of the protocol well so technology.

  • And as I'm a nerd, what's the best way to find out?

  • Actual programming.

  • So when I came home last year, that's what I did.

  • I thought, lets create a Google Wave robot and as I have a

  • background in artificial intelligence.

  • I thought let's create Eliza.

  • L Eliza, it was created by Professor Weizenbaum in 1966 as

  • a simple pattern recognition script that looks for certain

  • words in your what you are typing, juggles them around and

  • creates questions back just like to shrink would do.

  • Only a shrink would charge you money, and Eliza's for free.

  • I looked up on the internet got an open source Eliza script and

  • played around with it just a week after IO.

  • I used Google Wave Robot API, app engine, App engine,

  • which I'd never used before and I used this Eliza.

  • Grouped it all together.

  • Two hours later, I had this Elizabot just for

  • myself and it worked.

  • I was happy.

  • This is her name ElizaRobot@Appsbot.com Feel

  • free to use her and you can confide in her.

  • She has a doctor-patient confidentiality so she

  • has nothing to say.

  • So, I chatted with her.

  • Had fun.

  • Learned a lot about Google Wave.

  • Had fun.

  • Learned a lot about Wave and blogged about it and I thought

  • that's where the story ended.

  • To

  • my big surprise what happened is she got enormous

  • amount of attention.

  • I believe I was the first person outside Google to

  • create a Google Wave robot.

  • And a lot of people would start chatting with her, inviting

  • me to Waves with her.

  • There's YouTube fan videos of her.

  • It's amazing.

  • But, as always there's also a dark side.

  • Because, what would happen is that one person, one funny

  • guy would add Eliza to a public wave.

  • And because of the scalability of app engine and Google Wave

  • robot, all of these Eliza's would respond to everybody at

  • the same time immediately.

  • It was amazing.

  • And remember in those days, you could not throw somebody

  • out of a Wave, right?

  • So Google have to create Bouncy, which had special

  • privileges to kick somebody out.

  • And, it's only since last month, that in Google Wave,

  • you can actually remove a participant from a Wave.

  • I can understand that because, it's not just about technology,

  • its about what do you want?

  • How do you want it to work?

  • And who is allowed to restrict access?

  • And why?

  • What happens to the state of the the person, what

  • he's already seen?

  • And all of those functional aspects are important.

  • And, how do you even know who he is a roobot, and who is not?

  • So thats quite important.

  • I think that's one of the lessons that you can learn from

  • this type of this n technology.

  • It's become so easy nowadays to create powerful web

  • applications by meshing up a sort of different web services

  • from different areas.

  • How do we make sure we don't misuse that trust?

  • How do we make sure a Google Wave robot does not copy

  • everything you put in the Wave, and sends it off to somebody

  • you don't want to be able to listen in on your wave?

  • How do you know?

  • If we have an android app, how do youy know this android app

  • isn't looking at your Gmail context address book, apps, and

  • whatever, and does something that you you don't want to do?

  • That, you don't want, right?

  • Whoever reads what's in here?

  • It's become like a software license.

  • Yes, yes, yes, yes.

  • So, I think that's one of the big challenges for us today.

  • I think the answer also lies in the social networks themselves.

  • The power lies also in the strength of the networks and

  • you see more and more people and companies using this.

  • I know one person who you can trust.

  • That's Eliza, the robot shrink.

  • Feel free tonight when you're alone in your hotel room

  • have a chat with her.

  • This is her address.

  • That's my address.

  • Please come to me later if you want to talk about Eliza,

  • interesting stories or if she's helped you through

  • your depression.

  • Thank you.

  • BRADY FORREST: Thank you very much.

  • Now we've got just two more speakers, and in case you came

  • in late, everybody here is doing Ignite talks, they are

  • just five minutes long. 20, 15 second slides, but the

  • speakers have no control over their sides.

  • Have pity on them.

  • Our next 2 speakers are pretty experienced, though so

  • I'm not worried about it.

  • You may know him as the King of the Cheeseburgers.

  • Please welcome up Ben Huh.

  • BEN HUH: Hi you guys.

  • You may know me from such highbrow web sites as failblog

  • Icanhascheezburger.com and one of our newer sensations

  • verydemotival and we run about like 50 other web sites now,

  • and growing on a weekly basis, so Brady has asked me to talk

  • about the evolution of the meme, pronounced meeeemmmmeee.

  • Which is the idea that ideas are transmitted

  • from person to person.

  • A meme is something passed on for one person to another.

  • An evolution of memes have occurred throughout our lives

  • and we may not have noticed it.

  • And I'll tell you about the definition and the rules of the

  • meme, that as we know it today are something that anybody

  • can participate in.

  • Even this guy.

  • We don't actually control who is a part of meme or not

  • because everybody owns the idea.

  • Even that old guy, and that busty chesty lady and that

  • nice, sexy legs, they can all participate because everybody

  • owns what a meme is and this is part of a communal process

  • in generating things.

  • And, I don't want you to get confused about memes

  • and viral content.

  • Meme's are not same thing viral content.

  • Viral content is a subset of memes.

  • It's related in that way where a burrito is related

  • to a clogged artery.

  • And also, it's not an internet kind of thing.

  • In fact, this is not owned by Al Gore.

  • Memes actually started well before the internet, and

  • actually word meme came from a book well before the internet

  • was ever even created.

  • We want to delve into the history of this.

  • I started looking back and I tried to figure out when to the

  • idea of virus start and it looks like it actually started

  • well before civilization.

  • Once people try to figure out how things worked, like they

  • developed a skills set they could actually pass along to

  • each other and passing along a skill from person a

  • person was a meme.

  • And, what we're trying to do here buy buildings cities, and

  • figuring God, and religion is to try and to create

  • order in and our world.

  • So this is early civilization.

  • Ideas of viruses were designed to create order and structure

  • of how we understand the universe and now we all know

  • thanks to that, you cannot walk in the [? motor. ?]

  • And also, after we-- I'm competing with my own damned

  • slides -- all right.

  • I'm just going to sit here quietly and let you guys watch.

  • So, once we how the world worked, and we thought how

  • do we use the world to liberate ourselves?

  • How we become free of the constraints of

  • our physical world?

  • We started to publish things.

  • We created a printing press.

  • We set scientific knowledge and scientific methods and ideas

  • that can transmit to other people.

  • And then we decided that advertising would set us free.

  • We could create products and sell to each other and it would

  • make our glory holes clean.

  • There was a backlash to that.

  • And the backlash to advertising was internet culture.

  • And a lot of us here are fans of internet culture because we

  • realize that internet culture is about to chasing happiness.

  • That we could, in turn take mass media turn it upside-down

  • and make ourselves and each other happy because we're angry

  • at pop culture because it gave us Twillight.

  • And if you don't notice those two guys are the two main male

  • characters who are supposed to be kissing Bella, but these

  • these hands had made them kiss each.

  • The problem with pop culture is it's owner oriented.

  • It's one way.

  • It's top down.

  • It's actually not controlled by the masses.

  • It's actually controlled by the few people who control the

  • medium that it works in.

  • But, internet culture is different.

  • We can enjoy this very simple photo, and laugh at it and get

  • hours of laughter out of it.

  • You can actually progress that and put somebody else's face in

  • it, try a different animal, photoshop it and actually

  • evolve the culture because we're subverssive.

  • Thank you Google will for this wonderful suggestion.

  • And, in fact an entire grassroots community of people

  • have developed around about the idea that you could make fun of

  • Google by looking at the suggested results, and because

  • this is a limitless this property that we can actually

  • take culture, re-appropriate it and continue to grow an

  • audience people who enjoy subverting, and sharing this

  • culture with another without actually owning it.

  • And we have to use our powers for good.

  • You can't just spam your friends for Farmville

  • gifts all the time.

  • You have to actually think about how your subversive

  • nature effects one another and I would argue that this world

  • is more about making making each other happy

  • than anything else.

  • And to make ourselves a little bit happier, I'm going

  • dance on stage with Matt.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • Where the hell is Matt?

  • And that's the end of my presentation and here is Matt.

  • MATT: OK, I realize that using this here is a fail on many

  • levels but it's gonna avert disaster.

  • OK, here we go.

  • A great circle is an imaginary line around the earth.

  • It splits it into 2 equal halves.

  • We all know the equator, but you can actually draw an

  • infinite number of them by extending a line between

  • any 2 points on the globe.

  • Using Global Earth, I made one that starts at Barbra

  • Streisand's house, and passes through Dick Chaney's private

  • residence in McClain, VA.

  • Continue the line all the way around and you've got

  • yourself a great circle.

  • Today, I'm going to talk about another slightly more

  • substantial great circle.

  • I call it the imaginary line of you ancient cosmic weirdness.

  • But, first a disclaimer.

  • This is not my own research.

  • I got obsessed with the great circle website by a guy named

  • Jim Alison and I'm basing my talk on his work.

  • To define the imaginary line in question, I'm going to start

  • with 2 very well-known ancient sites; the pyramids at Giza in

  • Egypt and the mysterious Nazclines of the west

  • coast of of Peru.

  • Now that we've got our lines, we're going to follow it around

  • to see what else we run into.

  • For over 4,000 years, the pyramids of Giza were the

  • tallest structures ever built by man.

  • Some believe the adjacent sphinx is even older,

  • serving as a gateway to the afterlife for some

  • of pre-egyptian culture.

  • Fitting then is that today, you can admire it from across the

  • street, while consuming a deep dish meat lover's combo.

  • Way out in the Sierra, the Oasis of Siwa is believed to

  • have been settled around 10,000 years ago.

  • It was known as the Oracle of Amon Ra in 332BC when Alexander

  • the Great marched 500 miles in the wrong direction to

  • ask it if he was a God.

  • The Oracle confirmed that he was the son of Zeus.

  • That has nothing to do with imaginary lines.

  • It's just awesome.

  • Heading east, the line follows Moses's path out of Egypt

  • across Israel and into Jordan where we reach the city

  • Petra founded by the Nabateaens in 500BC.

  • The written language that emerged out of Petra is

  • known today as Arabic.

  • And, of course Petra is where Indiana Jones

  • found the holy grail.

  • Crossing Saudi Arabia and into Iraq, the line take us to the

  • ancient Sumerian city of Ur, one of the oldest human

  • settlements in existence.

  • Somewhere around 2000BC, a guy named Abraham grew up here,

  • before wondering west and starting the Hebrew tribe.

  • All sorts of crazy stuff happened after that.

  • You should Google it.

  • The line take us into Iran where we find Persepolis

  • founded by Cyrus the Great.

  • Persepolis was the capital of the vast Persian empire, until

  • it conquered by Alexander.

  • Still coasting on his Godliness Alexander got drunk and burned

  • the city down on a dare.

  • Which is why Persians still know him today as

  • Alexander the Douch.

  • In Pakistan we find the remains of city of Mohinju Daro which

  • in 2500BC was one of the most advanced cities in the world.

  • It thrived for a thousand years until the Harappans

  • suddenly disappeared in an archaeological puff of smoke.

  • We don't know anything else about the Harappan people,

  • because no one could read their handwriting.

  • The imaginary line continues in Asia passing through ancient

  • cities in India, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia which

  • brings the tally up to 10 sites that fall within its pass.

  • The line enters the vast blue emptiness of South Pacific

  • ocean, where it crosses directly through tiny island

  • 2000 miles from any other land worth mentioning.

  • That would be Easter Island, home to the Rapa Nui people who

  • once carved 100's of massive stone heads called Moai and

  • scattered them all over the place for no good reason.

  • Entering South America we find the city of Machu Picchu is a

  • bit too far north of the line, with but if we go south, from

  • the famous Inca trail, we quickly reach the much larger

  • city of Ollantaytambo, which lies directly under

  • the line's path.

  • And finally, the last stop.

  • The massive line drawings of the Nazca people.

  • So large that can only be seen from the air.

  • They don't show a great satellite imagery though, so

  • I've overlaid a clear map.

  • Notice how the drawings are oriented not along the North

  • South polar axis but strictly parallel to the imaginary line

  • of ancient cosmic weirdness.

  • What does this mean?

  • Is civilation somehow drawn to or catalyzed by this

  • particular bearing?

  • Is the line tied to the positions of the stars?

  • Are there undiscovered cities buried in the sand

  • dunes of the Sahara?

  • And, I'll just go ahead and say it.

  • Where's the lost island of Atlantis on in all this?

  • Here's my best answer.

  • Apophenia.

  • The tendency to see meaning in random data.

  • Human intelligence relies on our ability to see patterns and

  • it's constantly delivering us false positives which is why we

  • see a face on mars, find Jesus in a potato chip, and buy

  • into corney theories in horribly written novels.

  • There are thousands of ancient settlements that are nowhere

  • near the imaginary line of ancient cosmic weirdness.

  • The real link between the places I've shown is that they

  • were inhabited by people with the same compulsion to ascribe

  • meaning and important to random data around in an attempt to

  • make some sense out of life.

  • That said, I want to throw one more thing that you.

  • The Piri Reis Map completed in 1513 by the Turkish mariner of

  • the same name, drawn on the hide of a gazelle for lack

  • poster board, it features an accurate likeness of the

  • South American coast line.

  • Why is that weird?

  • Because by 1513, no western explorer had mapped the

  • South American coast line.

  • Some even claimed that stretch of land on the bottom is a

  • fairly accurate depiction of the Antarctic Coast, which no

  • one is supposed to have seen until the 1820's.

  • The map also shows the correct distance between Africa

  • and South America.

  • Without a reliable way to measure longitude, maps

  • from centuries later still got that wrong.

  • In the margins, Piri mention compiling a map from 20

  • different sources, some dating back to the time of, here he is

  • again, Alexander, effectively preserving knowledge from other

  • maps have been lost to history.

  • Now take a look at these two islands the mid-atlantic.

  • We've got a spot on depiction of South America and yet there

  • to huge phantom land masses that we know for certain

  • do not exist today.

  • What the hell is islands?

  • Here's Google's earth satellite view the area described

  • the Piri Reis.

  • Here's the map overlaid on top of it.

  • Now, let's bring back the imaginary line of the

  • ancient cosmic weirdness.

  • BAM Atlantis.

  • Done.

  • Thanks for your time.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • BRADY FORREST: Dancing's a lot easier, isn't it?

  • All right.

  • Thank you all for coming.

  • I hope you enjoyed it.

  • These videos will be up on the Ignite show and you should

  • start one in your town.

  • Take care.

BRADY FORREST: Hi.

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