More than a decade ago, roboticist Dennis Hong debuted a new generation of cutting-edge robots. Now he’s back to reveal how his lab at UCLA has eclipsed its own achievements with a fleet of wildly advanced and delightful humanoid robots. Part demo, part time capsule, part glance into the future, Hong brings you into the excitement and potential of the next evolution in robotics engineering.Read transcript

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxManhattanBeach, an independent event. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.

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About the speaker

Dennis Hong

Roboticist, magician, chef and professorSee speaker profile

Dennis Hong is a professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory) at UCLA. His research focuses on robot locomotion and manipulation, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

About TEDx

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” It supports independent organizers who want to create a TED-like event in their own community.

Dick Van Dyke an • Jan 16, 2023 Dick Van Dyke reads a speech, written by Rod Serling, that he delivered on 5/31/64 at the LA Coliseum amongst notable presenters as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

(Courtesy of Ben Gilberti, H.W., M.)

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

When he was twenty-one, artist and writer James Harmon stumbled into a bookstore and found himself mesmerized by a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the central concerns in which — love, fear, art, doubt, sex — resonated powerfully with his restless young mind and inspired him to envision what advice to young people might look like a century after Rilke. So he set out to create an antidote to the “toxic cloud of tepid-broth wisdom” found in books “with the shelf life of a banana” that the contemporary publishing world peddled and reached out to some of the most “outspoken provocateurs, funky philosophers, cunning cultural critics, social gadflies, cyberpunks, raconteurs, radical academics, literary outlaws, and obscure but wildly talented poets. The result, a decade in the making and the stubborn survivor of ample publishing pressure to grind it into precisely the kind of mush Harmon was determined to avoid, is Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two (public library) — an anthology of thoughtful, honest, brave, unfluffed advice from 79 cultural icons, including Mark Helprin, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and William S. Burroughs.

One of the most poignant letters comes from philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who makes an eloquent case for the importance of cultivating a rich inner life by celebrating emotional excess as a generative force, embracing vulnerability, not fearing feelings, and harnessing the empathic power of storytelling.

Martha Nussbaum

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.

What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

Complement with some timeless meditations on the meaning of life from other cultural icons, then revisit Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility and the intelligence of the emotions.

The Queen of Swords

The Queen of Swords indicates a woman who is blessed (or cursed) with sharp perception, and highly honed intuition. She is acutely analytical, with a razor-sharp ability to get to the heart of a situation, seeing exactly what is, rather than what others would wish her to see.

She is a private woman, unwilling to let people too close to her until she is satisfied she thoroughly understands their motivations. But once won as a friend, she is unfailingly loyal, honest and supportive.

She’s usually very intelligent, with a dry sense of humour. Her penetrating insight will often reveal aspects of themselves to others that they had previously been unable to grasp – thus she is a capable therapist, teacher or leader.

The woman represented by this card will be experienced in the flow of life, understanding a great deal about both the great triumphs, and the deepest failings of the race. Her clarity and measured expression will be of great value at times of confusion and sadness.

Sometimes in a reading, this card will turn up to indicate a woman in a particular phase of her life, where she temporarily becomes a Sword as a result of what is happening to her. In that case the card is not quite so positively defined, for it can indicate a woman left alone, and perhaps embittered. She may be a widow, or a woman passing through the aftermath of divorce.

In this case we often see the more negative aspects of the Queen – coldness, judgementalism, criticism. At these times there is a certain sourness about her, with cynicism and sharpness making themselves felt.

It should be said that these qualities are inherent to the woman who is a Queen of Swords by nature too – if the woman concerned has not evolved sufficiently you will often find that the card represents a person who is hard and cold toward others.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

“The soul of every man does possess the power to learn the truth. Just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world until its eye can bear to contemplate reality.” Plato (427-347 B.C.) Greek Philosopher

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875 – December 29, 1926), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. Wikipedia

Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. Wikipedia

(Courtesy of Rob Brezsny)

What does inclusive leadership look like? Artist and TED Fellow Constance Hockaday shares how the captain of a trans-Atlantic community raft taught her how to voice her hopes and desires, inspiring a vision of possibility for the future. Hockaday calls for mentors everywhere to step up and invites aspiring leaders to answer one crucial question in order to unlock their agency and power.Read transcript

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.

Check out Connie’s latest art project, the Disaster Furniture Showroom.

About the speaker

Constance Hockaday

ArtistSee speaker profile

Senior TED Fellow Constance Hockaday is an artist and an organizational development leader.

The oldest known land animal spends his days on the island of St. Helena, eating and banging away

By Reid McCarter

PublishedJanuary 27, 2022 (avclub.rom)

In the more innocent era of early 2020, we learned about Diego, a roughly 130-year-old Galapagos giant tortoise that had finally retired after spending decade upon decade singleclawedly banging his species as far away from the endangered list as he could. As impressive as Diego was to us then, he now looks slightly less magnificent in comparison to another tortoise—the oldest known land animal in the world—named Jonathan.

PetaPixel tells us that 190-year-old giant Seychelles tortoise Jonathan has been living on St. Helena island for nearly two centuries, first having his presence on the island recorded in a letter by a British governor in 1882. Though he’s outlived the usual 150-year lifespan of most giant tortoises and suffers from age-related health problems like cataracts, Jonathan is still having a great time hobbling around to eat and making very, very slow love to his island friends.

Teeny Lucy of the St. Helena Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals says Jonathan “has a very good appetite,” loves chowing down on lettuce, and enjoys hanging out (and… more) with David, Fred, and Emma, the other three giant Indian Ocean tortoises on the island with him.

A veterinarian who tends to Jonathan said: “In spite of his age, Jonathan still has good libido and is seen frequently to mate with Emma and sometimes Fred,” explaining that “animals are often not particularly gender-sensitive.”

If you’re interested in seeing what this scaly stud looks like, you can check out Jonathan photographed back in 1886 and then again today. He poses with a bunch of long-dead guys in the first image and, in the second, taken this week, he looks out triumphantly, appearing exactly the same despite all the time that’s passed. (You can see a side-by-side at the top of the PetaPixel article.)

In short: Despite being almost two centuries old, Jonathan is still out there making our entire species—and even a few others—look pathetic and boring for not living life to the fullest, filling our beaks with delicious plants and banging away our retirement years like he will apparently continue to do for years to come.

For more Jonathan, read the PetaPixel article.

(Submitted by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

The Six of Disks

The Lord of Success is a card full of the promise of bounty. When we have achieved a degree of inner confidence and self-belief, we release new streams of energy which create a powerful and rewarding reality around ourselves. New ideas are easy to implement. New projects are fruitful. We are energised and enthusiastic about the work we have in hand.

This level of productive harmony comes from a deep-rooted trust in the self. Once we simply allow our power to flow, we find ourselves capable of high levels of success and fulfilment. These things flow naturally as a reward for the hard work we have invested in ourselves.

When the card comes up in a reading to indicate everyday matters, it promises that projects currently in hand will be lucrative and abundant. We will do exactly what we had hoped we might – and probably receive even more than we had hoped for. Financial and material matters will be positive and prosperous, allowing us to gain a stable and comfortable position.

There is often, during a period like this, such good fortune that we end up with more than we actually need. If this happens to you, make sure that you continue to allow money (which is after all only energy) to keep flowing. Use the abundance that comes to you, and be generous with your bounty. Ensure that others benefit appropriately from your abundance. That’s the best way that you can thank the Universe for flowing with you.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)