#tedxseattle

“We are finite beings within infinity, and if we are alive to this, it sharpens our appreciation of the fact that we exist.”

The main question of this talk is, “What’s wrong with dying?”

It’s not often how I think about it, because I understand death is a necessity. Life requires life. Life continues through the death of other life. Even as a vegetarian, I need plant life to live. My cats, obligate carnivores, need creatures to die so they are sustained.

Life needs life.

So what is wrong with dying?

I can think of many personal, selfish things that make dying “wrong”, but I understand that my desires are at fault. Wanting to go on forever does not make it right, or even a good. Not in the scheme of things. Yes, I will be inconvenienced by death, and yes, I desire to go on endlessly (unlike the woman in the Ted Talk, I think I’d be okay being Sisyphus)...but I am aware that all that she says is true. 

So let’s ask “what’s wrong with dying?”

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Pacific Hyperloop retains chugging alongside amid curiosity in ultra-high-speed transit

Pacific Hyperloop is transferring forward with its idea for tube journey between Seattle and Portland, in hopes of using within the slipstream of the Pacific Northwest’s rising curiosity in ultra-high-speed transit.

“If Seattle and Portland have been simply 20 minutes aside, what may we accomplish collectively?” Charlie Swan, a College of Washington senior who’s Pacific Hyperloop’s co-founder and regional engagement supervisor, stated on Saturday throughout the TEDxSeattle 2017 convention.

Swan stated sending magnetically levitating pods between the 2 cities would assist knit collectively the area, leading to a “kind of human interplay just like the world has by no means seen earlier than.”

However turning that imaginative and prescient into actuality isn’t completely as much as Pacific Hyperloop, which Swan says presently consists of a five-person crew. Estimates recommend that it’d take someplace between $24 billion and $42 billion to create an ultra-high-speed system connecting Seattle and Portland in addition to Vancouver, B.C. to the north.

That’s the preliminary evaluation popping out of a $300,000 examine commissioned by the Washington State Division of Transportation. Companies corresponding to Microsoft are contributing tens of 1000’s of extra in assist of the examine, which is to be accomplished and despatched to the Washington Legislature by Dec. 15.

Throughout an October assembly of the examine’s advisory group, consultants stated the choice on whether or not to go along with a Hyperloop-style magnetic-levitation system or a extra conventional high-speed rail system would have be addressed by “extra evaluation past this examine.”

“Hyperloop expertise is in its infancy,” in response to an advisory group report issued in September. “It is going to be thought-about, nevertheless it doesn’t have business information to match to business information of confirmed applied sciences.”

After his TEDx discuss, Swan instructed GeekWire that the examine is more likely to information Pacific Hyperloop’s future course.

“The state examine can be indicator of the geographical feasibility from a technical standpoint,” Swan stated. “I feel our function is to align incentives for personal business and work out how we are able to contain the numerous firms now we have right here within the area.”

Swan declined to call the potential enterprise companions concerned within the discussions, nevertheless it’s price noting that fellow co-founder Ahmed ElAyouty has 9 years of expertise as a Boeing engineer.

“Proper now there are some things within the pipeline that Ahmed has been principally heading up … business partnerships, taking a look at how completely different firms that presently make the most of that [Seattle-Portland] route so much, how they will leverage that chance,” Swan stated. “We should always have an announcement within the subsequent few months.”

Within the meantime, Pacific Hyperloop is making an attempt to assist companies and the general public change into extra aware of Hyperloop expertise, which generally entails sending magnetic-levitation pods by way of low-pressure tubes at near-supersonic speeds.

The idea was specified by 2013 by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. Since then, a number of business ventures have begun work to make the idea a actuality. Musk himself is backing a enterprise known as The Boring Firm that goals to make use of some facets of Hyperloop expertise for underground transit methods.

Final month, British billionaire Richard Branson revealed that Virgin Group was investing tens of millions of in a distinct enterprise known as Hyperloop One. That firm is testing a prototype system in Nevada and is engaged on improvement offers within the U.S. in addition to the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands and India.

Pacific Hyperloop was one of many groups that participated in a Hyperloop One competitors for transit proposals, and acquired so far as the semifinalist spherical earlier than it was eradicated in September.

Swan was sanguine about not making the ultimate lower. He stated the competitors raised Pacific Hyperloop’s profile, even when it wasn’t chosen as one of many 10 winners. And as he assessed the challenges going through 21st-century transportation applied sciences, he fell again on truisms which were round for tons of of years.

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How artists add humanity to digital actuality

Seattle filmmaker Sandy Cioffi has amusing over an experimental virtual-reality undertaking that introduced members collectively in actual life as properly.

Digital actuality could have gotten its begin with shoot-’em-up video video games and porn, however now artists are making VR that places the emphasis on actuality in addition to humanity.

And Seattle filmmaker Sandy Cioffi argues that the Pacific Northwest might properly blaze the path on the multimedia frontier.

“If something is that this highly effective, you must do one thing extra with it than design it to earn cash,” stated Cioffi, the founder and government director of fearless360º, a brand new media and VR manufacturing firm. “And Seattle is the place to do it.”

Why Seattle? Throughout her TEDxSeattle discuss on Saturday, Cioffi cited the area’s “embarrassment of riches” on the tech entrance, its cultural range and its pure magnificence — in addition to its rising pains.

“Whether or not we prefer it or not, we’re a laboratory,” she stated. “What sort of laboratory can we wish to be? I say, let’s be the Silicon Rainforest, the place we develop VR for human good.”

Utilizing media as a power for good is a purpose that Cioffi has been pursuing for years, not solely with  fearless360º, but in addition with extra conventional initiatives resembling “Candy Crude,” a 2009 movie that appears at how the consequences of stepped-up oil manufacturing provoked an outcry within the Niger Delta area of Nigeria.

If at present’s VR instruments had been as extensively accessible again then, Cioffi stated she may properly have made the movie as a digital actuality undertaking. Going ahead, she plans to make use of VR as a device to immerse an viewers in dramatic however completely reality-based environments — beginning with Seattle.

“We’re going to do some group tales, and we’re going to do the physique swap and listen to these oral histories,” she stated. “We’re going to ask ourselves, ‘What distinction may it make to cities creating so rapidly and so considerably as Seattle if we hear each other’s tales whereas we really feel as if we’re strolling in one another’s pores and skin?’ ”