Tara and I created the presentation – with me doing most of the writing and her doing most of the graphics. Our friend Michael Capozzola hand-drew the final slide for us (primitive technique but effective!).

We attempt to tell a 14-billion year story in five minutes: “A Tale of Two Elements” takes us from the Big Bang to the Earth and touches on a problem that many people are not aware of – the helium shortage (a local problem). Enjoy!…

What is Ignite?

The evening consisted of about fifteen 5-minute PowerPoint presentations.  Each presenter gets 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.  Within those limitations, you create a presentation that should be of interest to geeks.

Since Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis started Ignite in Seattle in 2006, events have been happening all over the world and hundreds of presentations have been given.  Recently, they started putting them online, one per week, with some post-production added.  Ours is Episode 11.

It was presented on April 1, 2009, at the Ignite SF event, which was also a party for the Web 2.0 Conference going on that week (hence, the 2.0 reference in the piece).

Links:

Brian Malow – Ignite Presentation – “A Tale of Two Elements”

Brian Malow on Hydrogen and Helium at O’Reilly’s Ignite Show page

For more information about Ignite, visit http://ignite.oreilly.com/show/

Ignite on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/ignite

…Basement Universes aren’t just for basements any more! The Galactomatic-1000 comes with an attractive imitation wood-grain negative-matter case that makes it perfectly at home in your den or family room. The case reduces its total mass to zero, so you won’t have to worry about imploding your house into a black hole, or discoloring the walls with unattractive gravitational redshifts (**)…

(**) Although the Galactomatic-1000 has no mass, it still has volume, so a shipping and handling charge will apply.

- Carl Feynman,
Extropy #13

Once upon a time there was a little transhumanist magazine called Extropy.  I probably still have an issue or two around here somewhere. Most of the content was serious but I remember this one fake advertisement for The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Basement Universe.  It was hysterical.  Science comedy at its best!

Written by Carl Feynman, computer engineer and son of Richard Feynman, the piece appeared in Extropy #13 (6:2), Third quarter 1994, page 39.

The magazine and the Extropy Institute itself are now defunct.  But god bless the internet for its archival uses.

Witness the glory of…  The Galactomatic-1000 (TM) Basement Universe!

Why is there something instead of nothing?

But I have my own theory:

It was a tax write-off.

It was more beneficial to have a universe than not to have one. And it was designed to fail – which it has, if local conditions can be taken as any indication.

- Edward P. Tryon