Obviously the best way to divulge a secret

is to tell someone to not say anything about it.

(Laughter)

Secrets. I'm using PowerPoint this year

just because, you know, I'm into the TED thing.

(Laughter)

And when you use these things you don't have to go like that.

You just press it.

(Laughter)

Oh, man. Um, yes.

(Laughter)

Yes. I'm sure! Just change it!

(Laughter)

Is Bill Gates here?

Change it! Come on! What?

(Laughter)

Ah! Okay.

That's not my slides, but it's okay.

(Laughter)

As you can see, these are all maps.

And maps are important devices for transferring information,

especially if you have human cognitive ability.

We can see that all formulas are really maps.

Now, as humans, we make maps of places

that we seldom even go,

which seems a little wasteful of time.

This, of course, is a map of the moon.

There're some very delightful names.

Tranquilacalitis, [unclear]. My favorite is Frigoris.

What are these people thinking? Frigoris?

What the Frigoris you doing? Names are important.

Frigoris? This is the Moon. People could live there one day.

I'll meet you at Frigoris. No. I don't think so.

(Laughter)

There we see Mars, again with various names.

And this is all done, by the way,

by the International Astronomical Union.

This is an actual group of people

that sit around naming planetary objects.

This is from their actual book.

These are some of the names that they have chosen, ladies and gentlemen.

I'll go through a little of them. Bolotnitsa.

That, of course, is the Slavic swamp mermaid.

(Laughter)

Now I think the whole concept of a mermaid

doesn't really blend into the swamp feel.

(Laughter)

"Oh look! Mermaid come out of swamp. Oh boy!

It's time for Bolotnitsa!"

(Laughter)

Djabran Fluctus.

If that don't flow off the tongue, what does?

(Laughter)

I mean kids are studying this stuff

and they've got the word "fluctus" up there. That's wrong.

(Laughter)

One dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life.

(Laughter)

"It fluctus up, Mama."

Hikuleo Fluctus.

That's a little more flowing. Hikuleo

sounds like a kind of a Leonardo DiCaprio

17 syllable thing.

And that's the Tonga underworld.

And one of my favorites is the Itoki Fluctus,

who is the Nicaraguan goddess of insects, stars, and planets.

Now, if you're a goddess of stars and planets

wouldn't you relegate insects to somebody else?

(Laughter)

"No, no, really, I'm so busy with the stars.

Would you mind taking the insects? Thank you darling.

Oh take the spiders too. I know they're not insects, but I don't care.

Monkeys, chimps, just get rid of the hairy creatures."

(Laughter)

Now, we're going to be going to Mars one day. And when we do,

it's going to be unfair for the people that are living there

to have to live with these ridiculous names.

So, you'll be on Mars, and you're at

Hellespointica Depressio

which has got to be a really "up" place.

(Laughter)

Yeah, I'm at the Depressio, and I want to get over to Amazonis

so I plug it into the Mars map,

and click the button and there's my directions.

I go to Chrysokeras.

(Laughter) Left to the Thymiamata.

Then to Niliacus Lacus,

which is not a bad name.

Niliacus Lacus, try to get the practice, slick-a-tick-a-bacus.

That's a cool name. I will say that.

So, I hold back a little of my venom

for these astronomical misnomers.

And then of course Arnon to Thoth.

And of course there will be advertisements.

This is from their rule book, the International Astronomical Union.

And you know they're international because

they put it "en Francais" as well.

L'Union Astronomique Internationale,

for those of you who don't speak French.

I thought I'd translate for you.

From the rulebook: Nomenclature is a tool.

The first consideration, make it clear, simple and unambiguous.

And I think that Djabran Fluctus,

that fits that mode.

(Laughter)

That's simple, the goddess of goats, very simple.

Djabran Fluctus.

"Now, Frank is this clear to you, Djabran Fluctus?"

"Yeah, that's the goat goddess right? The Abacazanian?

(Laughter)

It's clear to me."

"Listen, I'm going back to the swamp mermaid. Can you call me in a little while?"

(Laughter)

Also, from the actual document

I highlighted a part I thought may be of interest.

Anyone can suggest changing a name.

So, I look to you, fellow member of the Earth community.

We've got to change this stuff up fast.

So, these are actual names of people that work there.

I did some more investigation.

These are more people working for this group.

And, as you can see, they don't use their first names.

(Laughter)

These are people naming planets, and they won't use their first names.

Something is askew here.

(Laughter)

Is it because his name is really Jupiter Blunck?

(Laughter)

Is that Ganymede Andromeda Burba?

(Laughter)

Is that Mars Ya Marov?

I don't know. But it's investigative material, no doubt.

There are some mapping people who do use their names.

Witness please, Eugene Shoemaker,

who, diligently, from a young boy

decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies.

Must have been a very interesting day in the Shoemaker house.

"Mom, I want to make maps."

"That's wonderful Eugene. You could make maps of Toronto."

"No, I want to make maps of planets."

"Yeah, go to your room."

(Laughter)

Martians, Venusians, Jovians.

We have names for places where people don't exist.

That seems a little silly to me.

There are no Jovians.

Getting back to my premise, I used stamps, by the way,

because you don't have to pay anybody for the rights.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

There is obviously Einstein, Niels Bohr,

de Fermat's last theorem, and I'm not sure whether that's James Coburn

or Richard Harris.

(Laughter)

It's definitely one of the two. I'm not really clear which one.

But obviously the point is that numbers are maps.

And within numbers, is there an underlying secret to the universe?

That is the premise of this particular presentation.

By the way, that's a natural picture of Saturn,

no adjustments. I mean that's just beautiful.

So beautiful that I will even give up a laugh

to explain my love of this particular planet,

and the day Saturday, named after it, wonderfully.

So, formulas relate number to form.

That's Euler, his formula

was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory

which is kind of cool, not that funny, but it is cool.

(Laughter)

He was also famous for having no body.

(Laughter)

Which a lot of you are like, "How did he figure that out?"

He's got no body, no man, just a head floating high.

Here comes Euler.

(Laughter)

And that's an icosahedron,

which is one of the five sacred solids, very important shapes.

You see the icosahedron again.

The dodecahedron, it's dual.

There is a dodecahedron which I had to do in my room last night.

The five sacred solids, as you can see there.

Which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads.

(Laughter)

Blue cheese, ranch, oil and vinegar, thousand islands and house.

I suggest the house.

The reality, now here is something important.

What's important about this is

these shapes are duals of each other.

And you can see how the icosahedron

withdraws into the dodecahedron

and then they just merge into each other.

So, the whole concept of branes in the universe,

if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron

this is a very good map of what could possibly be.

And that is, of course, what we are here to talk about.

What a coincidence!

October 9th, in France, Jean-Pierre Luminet

said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron,

based on information that they got from this probe.

This would be a normal wave pattern.

But what they're seeing, way out there in the far reaches

of the microwave background,

is this kind of odd undulation.

It doesn't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be.

So, you can kind of get an idea from this

extrapolating that back under this huge picture,

so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like.

And judging from this, it looks a little like a cheeseburger.

(Laughter)

So, I'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger.

And for me, that's a win-win.

Everybody goes, I'm happy.

(Laughter)

Better really hurry up.

I just threw this in because

as important as all of our intellectual abilities are,

without heart and without love it's just -- it's all meaningless.

And that, to me, is really beautiful.

(Laughter)

Except for that creepy guy in the background.

(Laughter)

Getting back to the point of my particular presentation,

Kepler, one of my great heroes,

who realized that these five solids, which I spoke of earlier,

were related somehow to the planets,

but he couldn't prove it. It freaked him out.

But it did lead to Newton discovering gravity.

So, maps of things leading to organized understandings

of the universe in which we emerge.

Now this is Isaac from a Vietnamese stamp.

(Laughter)

I am not suggesting at all that my Vietnamese brothers and sisters

could maybe use a little art class here and there. But ...

(Laughter)

that's not a good picture.

(Laughter)

Not a good picture. Now, my friends in the island of Nevis

are a little better. Look at that! That's Isaac Newton.

That guy is rockin'.

(Laughter)

What a handsome cat.

Once again, Nicaragua let me down.

(Laughter)

And Copernicus looks like Johnny Carson, which is really weird.

(Laughter)

I don't get that at all.

Once again, these guys rock it out.

Isaac is kickin' ass. Man, he looks like a rock star.

This is freaky is a major way.

This is Sierra Leone.

They got little babies in there, floating in there.

(Laughter)

Man. I don't really need to comment on this.

But I didn't know that Isaac Newton was in the Moody Blues. Did you?

(Laughter)

When did this happen?

(Laughter)

It's a different kind of course. And they've got five apples?

I mean these guys are extrapolating in realms

that are not necessarily valid.

Although five is a good number, of course.