Saturday, November 07, 2009
Valerie Casey
Valerie Casey works with start-ups, governments, and companies all over the world on challenges ranging from creating new products and services, to transforming organizational processes and behaviors. Fast Company writes, "Valerie Casey is rallying the creative community to her version of a Kyoto treaty for designers -- and her peers are signing on in droves." She is listed as one of Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment. (The image of Valery Casey is at Time magazine, attributed to BRIAN SMALE.)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Beth Shapiro
We can’t bring the dodo bird back, says Beth Shapiro (with the head of the most complete specimen, below), but we can learn from their remains. Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist. She focuses on tracing the population history of recently extinct (e.g., mammoth, dodo) or threatened species (e.g., bison, polar bears). She is a MacArthur Genius.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Elif Erdine Baskin
Elif Erdine Baskin is an architect and researcher. She loves mathematics and art, and she received her Master of Architecture and Urbanism degree from the Architectural Association Design Research Lab (AADRL) in 2006. She received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Istanbul Technical University in 2003, graduating as the top 3rd of her class.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Marissa Ann Mayer
Marissa Ann Mayer is the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at the search engine company Google. Vogue magazine calls her "the 34-year-old megamillionaire, Oscar de la Renta–obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons, San Francisco." She received her B.S. in Symbolic systems, graduating with honors, and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Zadi Diaz
Zadi Diaz is a new media producer and co-founder of Smashface Productions, a production company focused on developing original programming for the web, bridging new and traditional media, and building and cultivating online communit
ies.
ies. She is currently the co-creator and host of EPIC FU, a popular Streamy and Webby award-winning web series about internet culture, as well as co-founder of Pixelodeon, an annual screening festival recognizing innovation in global online video.
Though filming, writing, and directing are Zadi’s main focus, she also speaks on panels and teaches people around the world about social movement media and media literacy.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is an American science writer. She has published three books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008). She began her writing career at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on such topics as elephant wart surgery. (Source: Wikipedia)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. (July 8, 1926 – August 24, 2004) was a Swiss-born psychiatrist and the author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying. She is a 2007 inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees and by July 1982 had taught, in her estimation, 125,000 students in death and dying courses.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Debbie Berebichez
After obtaining the Doctorate Degree, Dr. Debbie Berebichez pursued two postdoctoral fellowships in applied mathematics and physics and conducted further research at Columbia University's Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics department as well as at New York University's Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She is a talented linguist, who speaks five languages. She currently works on Wall St. as a risk analyst and continues to develop video, articles and public communications
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner is one of my greatest heroes. He is a popular American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics. His mind roams far and wide. Learn more about him here, here, and here.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Laura Jane
Laura Jane is interested in "creativity, consciousness, memetics, mythology, religion, and human potential for the cosmically inclined."
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Julia Mullikin
"As a visual artist, I am interested in technology as a medium for storytelling." Her website is: http://www.electricgoddess.com/.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Jane F. Kotapish
Jane F. Kotapish, a native of Virginia, studied at the College of William and Mary and at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is a modern dancer and freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Salvage is her first novel. "I have always watched myself watching myself. And so I know that what I am doing is flirting with the possibility of going mad…. And I see that what I am doing is sad and pathetic and symptomatic of a pathological loneliness. And I also see that I am fine. I am as close to happy as I have ever been." A review of her book is here.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Gina Trapani
Gina Trapani is a tech writer and web developer based in San Diego, California by way of Brooklyn, New York. The lead editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and personal productivity, Gina has authored two books based on the web site: Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day (Wiley, December 2006) and the second edition, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better (March 2008).
Visit http://www.ginatrapani.org/
Friday, September 12, 2008
Olivia Judson
Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London. She graduated from Stanford University, and received a doctorate from Oxford. She wrote the popular book, Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. Learn more about her here.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Maggie Turnbull
Margaret Turnbull is an amazing astronomer who received her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2004. According to the Wikipedia: "Turnbull is an authority on 'Habstars,' solar twins and planetary habitability. In 2002, Turnbull developed the HabCat along with Jill Tarter, a catalog of potentially habitable solar systems. The following year Turnbull went on to further identify 30 particularly suitable stars from the 5,000 in the HabCat list that are within 100 light years of Earth. In 2006, Turnbull drew up two shortlists of just five stars each. The first will form the basis of SETI radio searches with the Allen Telescope Array (Beta Canum Venaticorum, HD 10307, HD 211415, 18 Scorpii, and 51 Pegasi). The second are her top candidates for the Terrestrial Planet Finder (Epsilon Indi, Epsilon Eridani, 40 Eridani, Alpha Centauri B, and Tau Ceti). In 2007, Turnbull was recently named a 'Genius' by CNN for her work cataloging stars most likely to develop planets that could support life and intelligent civilizations.The asteroid 7863 Turnbull was named in her honor." (Source: Wikipedia)
Monday, July 14, 2008
Melissa Lafsky
"Melissa Lafsky is the deputy web editor at Discover magazine. She was previously the editor of the New York Times's Freakonomics blog, and is a former associate editor of HuffPo's Eat The Press. Lafsky was a practicing attorney at a firm in New York before founding the blog Opinionistas.com, which became internationally known for its relentless skewering of the corporate world. She currently writes for magazines and newspapers, blogs on all things science and otherwise, and is working on a book." More info here.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Diablo Cody
Genius stripper-turned-blogger-turned-screenwriter. Memoirist. Oscar winner for screenplay. Best-selling author.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Matthieu Ricard
What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard says: We can train our minds in habits of happiness. See the TED video.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Nina Hachigian
Nina Hachigian is a Senior Vice President and Director for California at American Progress. Based in Los Angeles, she is the co-author of The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise. Earlier, Hachigian was a Senior Political Scientist at RAND Corporation and, for four years, the director of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy. Watch the video.
Friday, March 07, 2008
A. M. Homes
A. M. Homes is an American fiction writer known for her controversial and strange stories and books. "A Real Doll," A. M. Homes's short story about a boy who dates, seduces, and eventually rapes his sister's Barbie doll, is one of the most twisted, disturbing pieces of fiction I've ever read—and also one of the best. It's shocking, funny, strange, challenging, and indescribably real.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Audre Vysniauskas
After obtaining her degree in Electrical Engineering and spending 15 years working with factory automation and information systems, in 2001 Audre Vysniauskas made a major career change and, signing herself just audre, became a professional illustrator. At about the same time Audre became a vociferous advocate of the use of computers in creating art. She remains extremely active in the digital arts community, having contributed to various digital imaging conferences, conventions, magazines and ventures aimed at helping artists and entrepreneurs.
See Audre's work here.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Sasha Cagen
Sasha Cagen was born in Rhode Island and graduated from Barnard College. She is an author and entrepreneur who builds communities around passions and new ideas. Sasha’s second book is To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us (Simon & Schuster, 2007), a collection of 100 real, handwritten lists and the stories behind them.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Shannon Moffett
Shannon Moffett graduated from NYU with a B.A. She is currently a medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she’s received two Stanford Arts and Humanities Medical Scholars grants.
Learn how the Shannon experiences in a lab, a lecture hall, and a slaughterhouse led to "The Three-Pound Enigma".
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Shelley Batts
Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. She studies hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, and is just embarking on that quixotic quest called 'thesis.' She lies awake at night pondering how science intersects with politics, culture, policy, money, medicine, and religion in an attempt to be more than just a niche scientist sitting in the oh-so-lovely ivory tower. She writes: "Follow me and my parrot on the quest to get funded, get a PhD, and stay sane." Her blog is Retrospectacle. She also has a Wikipedia entry.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Karen Abbott
Sixteen years of Catholic school gave Karen Abbott an encyclopedic memory (thanks to daily oral catechism quizzes) and an interest in all things Magdalene. She wrote "Sin in the Second City."
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Tara C. Smith
Tara C. Smith is an American assistant professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa, deputy director of the University of Iowa Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, founder of Iowa Citizens for Science, and posts regularly to her science blog, "Aetiology."
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Jenna Glatzer
Jenna is the author of several books, including a few cool books for writers, Celine Dion's authorized biography, a couple of children's picture books, and adult nonfiction books on topics ranging from fertility to bullying. She is often a secret ghostwriter. She also write for many magazines and is a contributing editor at Writer's Digest.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Akiane
Akiane is an internationally recognized 12-year-old prodigy, considered the only known child binary genius, in both realist painting and poetry. Selected as 1 of 20 most accomplished visual artists in the world by Tribute Entertainment (London) and ABI (United States).Thursday, June 07, 2007
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American computer scientist and science fiction author, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas. His recent non-fiction book is "The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul." (Source: wikipedia.)
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck, (b. June 15, 1966) is a writer and advocate of psychedelic drug use and experience. Wikipedia says: "He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. In Breaking Open the Head, Pinchbeck explored shamanism via ceremonies with tribal groups such as the Bwiti of Gabon and the Secoya in the Ecuadorean Amazon. He also participated in the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and looked at use of psychedelic substances in a desacralized modern context. Through his direct experiences and research, and influenced heavily by the work of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, he became convinced that the shamanic and mystical view of reality had validity, and that the modern world had forfeited an understanding of intuitive and supersensible aspects of being in its pursuit of rational materialism." His recent book is titled "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl." Hot Link: Breaking Open the Head
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Danielle Trussoni
Danielle Anne Trusson graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison summa cum laude with a BA in History and English (1996) and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a MFA in Fiction Writing (2002). Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, The New York Times Book Review and Tin House, among other publications. Now she spends her time in the US and Bulgaria. Her most famous book is "Falling Through the Earth."
Learn more about her work here, here, and here.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Tish Cohen
Rex Pickett reviewed Tish's latest book: "Jack Madigan is the 36-year-old son of an Ozzy Osborne-like rocker who died a surreal death onstage involving a recalcitrant reptile. Jack has awakened from the rubble of a life on the road in a shambling mess of a four-storey Boston town house, bequeathed to him by his father ... with an acute, and apparently incurable, case of agoraphobia. But the money is running out, and the town house has grown decrepit from neglect.... Tish Cohen has written an original portrait of a pathetic man that is at times sardonically comic and humanly poignant. ... Cohen's Jack Madigan is a three-dimensional, albeit anomalous, lost soul of our modern, twisted, fractured society."
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Jennifer Ouellette
Jennifer Ouellette is a former English major turned science writer, through serendipitous accident. She has written extensively for the science trade press, and, increasingly, for the general public in such venues as Discover, New Scientist, and Salon. She's covered the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and NYC subways, the physics of foam, optics and art, and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience, among other colorful topics.
She is the author of: Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (2006) and The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007).Interests: Writing, reading, jujitsu, funky museums, biking, movies and DVDs, cooking, travel, crossword puzzles, Jackie Chan movies, theater, my iPod, John Donne's poetry, gothic horror, Edward Gorey, Emily the Strange, tarot cards, history, mythology, fairy tales, science, NUMBERS, HOUSE, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, all things BUFFY, and THE X-FILES. Her hot blog is here.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Ranya Idliby
Ranya Idliby grew up with a foot in the East Dubai and a foot in the West Mclean, Virginia. She feels that she is living proof that, though East is East and West is West, the twain shall and must meet. Her maiden name, Tabari, derives its roots from Tiberias, a Palestinian town by the Sea of Galilee. At Georgetown University, where she was introduced, to the art of pulling all-nighters, NoDoz, Bazooka gum, and dorm keg parties, she graduated from the School of Foreign Service. She then continued her post-graduate degree at the London School of Economics. Read about her book, The Faith Club, here and here.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Clio Cresswell
Author of "Mathematics and Sex," Dr. Cresswell spent part of her childhood on a Greek island, and was then schooled in the south of France where she was studying Visual Art. At eighteen she simultaneously discovered the joys of Australia and mathematics. Clio studied mathematics at The University of New South Wales and following a stint as an actuary, returned to university to win the University Medal and complete a PhD. More info here.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Jennifer Ouellette
Jennifer Ouellette is a former English major turned science writer. She has written extensively for the science trade press, and in Discover magazine and Salon. She's covered the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and NYC subways, the physics of foam, optics and art, and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience, among other colorful topics. She is author of two books for the general public: Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (published in January 2006) and the forthcoming The Physics of the Buffyverse (January 2007), both through Penguin.
Her excellent science blog is Cocktail Party Physics.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Christa Sommerer
Christa Sommerer is an internationally renowned media artist working in the field of interactive computer art. She is Associate Professor at the IAMAS Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan. In 2002 she completed her Ph.D. degree. Sommerer originally studied botany at the University of Vienna and modern sculpture and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (masters degree). She applies scientific principles such as artificial life, complexity and generative systems to innovative interface designs. Look at some of her wild interactive artwork here and here.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Nell Freudenberger
Harvard-educated Nell Freudenberger is a New Yorker who has taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi. Among her many works, she is the author of The Dissident, in which a Chinese painter is the guest of a dysfunctional family in Beverly Hills.
Nell's favorite piece of cockroach literature is a William Gass story called "Order of Insects." The narrator is a housewife whose fear of water bugs — Periplaneta orientalis — turns into a fascination with their construction; "I...observed the movement of the jaws, the stalks of the antennae, the skull-shaped skull, the lines banding the abdomen, and found an intensity in the posture of the shell, even when tipped, like that in the gaze of Gauguin's natives' eyes. The dark plates glisten. They are wonderfully shaped; even the buttons of the compound eyes show a geometrical precision which prevents my earlier horror. It isn't possible to feel disgust toward such an order. Nevertheless, I reminded myself, a roach...and you a woman."
Monday, August 21, 2006
Danica McKellar
As a child, actress Danica McKellar played Winnie on the TV show The Wonder Years. Later, she made many appearances on The West Wing. But she's also a mathematician who recently proved her own theorem. She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in mathematics. Here is her hot math paper.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Paul Laffoley
By Paul Laffoley's account, he spoke his first word ("Constantinople") at the age of six months, and then lapsed into 4 years of silence, having been diagnosed with slight Autism. In 1964, Laffoley began work (and lived) in an eighteen-by-thirty foot utility room, where he has produced much of his art. During a CAT scan of his head in 1992, a piece of metal 3/8 of an inch long was discovered in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland.
He has produced an estimated 800 of his immensely detailed canvases. At any given time there are dozens of these works already fully-articulated in his mind, waiting to be painted. Paul currently lives in Boston and is still producing his amazing transdisciplinary art.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Maria Manakova
Maria Manakova (b. 1974) is a phenomenal hyper-genius and Grandmaster of chess, born in Serbia. She is the only woman chess grandmaster ever to pose completely nude for a men's magazine! In a recent interview she spoke frankly about sex and chess. Another article appears in the Times (UK). A secret photo of her can be found here, at the Russian Blitz tournament.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Katrina Firlik
Katrina Firlik is a brain surgeon. She says: "People think of neurosurgery as something highly intellectual. They use phrases like 'it doesn't take a brain surgeon.' Of course, you have to be smart and make quick decisions, but, in part, a neurosurgeon is a kind of mechanic. We cut heads open, we use drills..... The pattern of blood vessels at the base of the brain is so weird, it's like a stange creature." Her latest book is: Another Day in the Frontal Lobe A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. She also draws weird things.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Marta Gonzalez
Physicist Marta Gonzalez studies the physics of friendship. By comparing people to mobile particles randomly bouncing off one another, she develops models for social networks. One of her papers is "Model of mobile agents for sexual interactions networks." You can learn more about Marta here. Click here for a secret photo of Marta.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Claire Berlinski
Claire Berlinski received her doctorate in International Relations from Balliol College at Oxford University. She has since lived and worked in Britain, Thailand, Laos, France, and Turkey as a journalist, academic, consultant and freelance writer. Her latest book Menace in Europe explores the mystery and ekpyrotic future of this surreal yet important continent. We’ve often thought of Europe as the charming continent of windmills and gondolas. But lately, Europe has become the continent of endless strikes and demonstrations, bombings, radical Islamic cells in every city, and murders for speaking frankly about Islamic immigration. This isn’t the Europe we thought we knew. What’s going on over there? (A secret photo of Dr. Berlinski can be found here.)
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Coral Hull
My friend Dr. Coral Hull is a respected writer, poet, photographer, editor, and publisher. The last time we chatted, she told me, "I am a multiple, part of a central psyche housing a system of over 50 selves." In particular, she is autistic and is a multiple personality. In some sense, she is a composite entity that can speak as one person (singular) or as many (plural) when required. 
She would like to be an example to other multiples and autistics to show them that they can still be who they are and contribute in a positive, responsible, ethical and loving way to human society and the well being of life on Earth. Learn more about her brilliance, caring, creativity, wisdom, and hive mind here, and here.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Zak Smith
Zak Smith’s is famous for sitting down one day and illustrating every single page of Thomas Pynchon's massive Gravity's Rainbow.
His work moves from sharply rendered poignancy to candy-colored excess. Within a general atmosphere of a dazed freneticism, he offers uncanny and excessive portraits, synthetically luminous abstractions, and somewhat narrative compilations of drawings. Together, they exist in a world that can’t decide whether it’s awake or asleep, gorgeous or vaguely psychedelic.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Daniel Paul Tammet
Daniel Paul Tammet is an amazing savant. According to the Wikipedia, for Tammet, each number up to 10,000, has its own unique shape and feel, and he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite and "see" results of calculations as landscapes in his mind. Tammet holds the European record for remembering and recounting pi.
One day, Tammet will be the Rosetta Stone for planet Earth. He can speak English, French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic, and Esperanto. Tammet is making a new language called mänti. Mänti has many features related to Finnish and Estonian.
Tammet can learn a new language within a week. For example, Tammet was challenged to learn Icelandic. Within seven days he was conversing well enough in Icelandic to undergo a live TV interview about his skills, and chat freely with the hosts. He is a avid golfer. He also created an online educational company named Optimnem. More information here, here, and here.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Kirsten Sanford
Kirsten Sanford is a black-belt wearing, radio show-producing grad student and science journalist. Her science radio show is This Week In Science. The kickass weekly science and tech show presents a humorous and irreverent look at our universe. Topics include genetic engineering, cybernetics, space exploration, neuro science, and a show favorite: "Countdown to World Robot Domination". The show is hosted by Kirsten, a Ph.D. candidate in neuro science, and Justin, a wisecracking professional washing machine salesman and armchair physicist. One of the top science radio shows on the web. Check it out and hear a science news program like no other. More info here and at the Wikipedia.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
George Chesbro
George Chesbro is my favorite mystery writer. Mongo, the lead character of Chesbro’s books, happens to be a dwarf detective, university professor, and a black belt in karate. Book slut says, "Chesbro created a unique witches’ brew of noir brutality, occult tension, detective science and bizarre villains. Playboy once described it as Raymond Chandler meets Stephen King but it was often more like James Bond on acid." One of Chesbro’s most famous books is The Beasts of Valhalla, which mixes science fiction and detective work in a story dealing with a family of disturbing geniuses who are messing with DNA sequencing, creating eerie creatures, and planning to devolve the human race back to Neanderthals -- in a plot with echos of Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings"!
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey is working to expedite the development of a 'cure' for human aging, a medical goal he refers to as engineered negligible senescence (senescence means the biological decline of aging). To this end, he has identified what he concludes are the seven areas of the aging process that need to be addressed medically before this can be done. In 1985 he received a B.A. in Computer Science. In recognition of his book on mitochondria and other publications, in 2000 Cambridge granted de Grey a Ph.D. in biology. He believes we will soon extend lifespans to 1,000.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Koren Zailckas
Who is Koren Zailckas? One Amazon.com reviewer suggets that Koren's book Smashed is a well-written, seriously scary book that will likely have many readers cringing when they read about the problems alcohol led to for Zailckas. A cautionary tale and an engrossing memoir. Koren writes lucidly and poetically about her past, showing the effects of her lifestyle without ever trying to invoke pity for anything that happened to her in the past.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Almost nothing is known of the enigmatic Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, aside from the fact that she is a beguiling and haunting author who lives in Washington D.C. Her best-selling biography is "Mencken: An American Iconoclast," a compilation of archival interviews, love letters, and FBI files, shedding light on the public and private life of journalist H.L Mencken. Menken was amazingly prolific, a blogging phenomenon before the term was invented. "A student of the American language, he might have liked the phrase, but would have urged bloggers to stress information over attitude. His style combined relentless facts, a disdain for cliches, and uncompromising integrity. In other words, he was a nightmare for media marketing experts." We do know that Marion Elizabeth Rodgers was an undergraduate at Baltimore's Goucher College when she first became interested in the lives and writings of Mencken and his wife, Sara Haardt. After college, Rodgers lived 3 1/2 years in Baltimore while working on her humongous biography of Mencken.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Cynthia Breazeal
The mysterious Cynthia Breazeal directs the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is internationally known for seamlessly blending scientific theories, artistic insights, and engineering principles to create transcendent robotic creatures that have a lively and compelling social presence to those who interact with them. Her current research extends these themes in the area of human-robot relations to create cooperative and capable robots that can work and learn in partnership with people.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Kati Astraeir
Kati is a mystical artist, born in Poland. Music underlies her creations. She writes, "This music makes it possible for me the ingress into deep trance states and automatic drawing, deadening of consciousness and opening into subconsciousnes..the higher consciousness..opening in infinite possibilities..the journey through the darkness is experiencing the light..the unity with the whole universe. In my feelings the source of this all lies within nature and primordial states of mind.. We dream eternally, only sometimes consciousness closes our minds to the reality of how the world really is." See her art here and here and here.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Margo
Forest-dwelling Margo is a cross between Michael Moore and Martha Stewart, but with a slant towards positivity, voluntary simplicity, and building a sustainable future. Her intention is to reach a general audience with briefs on interesting topics that are not given widespread attention in the mainstream media. She is a professional librarian and writer with expertise in finding, compiling, organizing, analyzing, and communicating information. She lusts for knowledge. In a world of specialists, she is a sparkling generalist with a wide variety of interests-- artistic, scientific, social, musical, mathematical, and technical.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Maria Chudnovsky
Maria Chudnovsky was born in Israel and is now assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton and a Clay Research Fellow at The Clay Mathematics Institute. The largest secret photo of her on the web can be found here.
Chudnovsky, 28, yearns to understand the world completely. Why do storm clouds appear before it rains? Why do we catch cold? What was really wrong with her car? Most of the time, she ends up frustrated. So she takes comfort in the abstract realm of mathematics, where all facts derive from provable universal laws. Let's follow her on her never ending quest.
Her research includes graph theory and combinatorics. She received he Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003. Her mind-blowing thesis was titled "Berge Trigraphs and Their Applications." A wonderful article about her appeared in Popular Science. Here is link to her CV. Here is a list of her publications.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Taylor Lockwood
Taylor Lockwood is an internationally acclaimed nature photographer specializing in beautiful and exotic mushrooms and other fungi from around the world. His library includes many thousands of film images and high resolution files. His entire life is devoted to mushrooms, and he has many more images of edible mushrooms, mushrooms on cutting boards, mushrooms in the pan, habitats, and beautiful people with mushrooms. He's traveled from Borneo to Zimbabwe to Siberia in his never ending quest to be the Mushroom King.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is the amazing founder and President of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation which operates Wikipedia and several other wiki projects. Wales is also founder of the for-profit company Wikia (unrelated to Wikimedia), within which he co-founded the Wikicities project.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Psymbiote
Adorned in titanium, latex, silicone, and electronic apparatus, Psymbiote places herself in the eye of the storm: the conceptual terrain at the collision of bodies and machines, the mutation of her own identity through transformation of the body. Ultimately the project seeks to fully transform the artist into a seductively organic yet entirely unfamiliar hybrid organism, a human/machine chimera with fully integrated control systems. The costume is being animated with movement, sound, and light; activated by manual triggers, automatic body processes, and remote control. As her evolution progresses, Psymbiote appears in public spaces to stimulate dialogue regarding the future of technological enhancements to the human body.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Benny Shannon
Benny Shannon is a researcher devoting his life to the study of ayahuasca (a psychedelic plant brew) and the psychology of altered states of consciousness. I loved his book The Antipodes of Mind. No one knows for sure why people taking this chemical so often see beings from a parallel universe and ornate sparkling palaces. I discuss this further in my own book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Judith Lindbergh
Lindbergh's latest book The Thrall's Tale required more than 10 years to write and research. When the book was ready to market, she had both an agent and a sale in less than a month! This historical novel takes place in the first Viking settlement in Greenland in 985 A.D. Lindbergh spent years of research for the book, including a voyage of her own on an ice-class research vessel from Iceland to Greenland, retracing the path of Erik the Red and the first Norse settlers. Also an accomplished photographer, Ms. Lindbergh's images of Greenland and Iceland have been exhibited at venues including The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and The Edward Hopper House.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
David J. Brown
David J. Brown is the most compelling interviewer on this planet. Mavericks of the Mind and Voices from the Edge contain thought-provoking interviews by Brown with over forty of the leading thinkers of our time on the subject of consciousness. In Conversations at the Edge of the Apocalpyse, David gathers the most interesting minds to consider the future of the human race, the mystery of consciousness, the evolution of technology, psychic phenomena, and more.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Candice Millard
Candice Millard’s mind explores the world on a daily basis. She’s a former writer and editor at National Geographic magazine. She's written on Ethiopian Christians and the lost Ark. Her latest work,The River of Doubt, is an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait -- the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubt is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Victoria N. Alexander
Victoria N. Alexander is Director of Programs for Thought for the The Dactyl Foundation. Alexander is co-founder and president. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY and did her dissertation research in teleology, evolutionary theory, and complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute. Alexander has investigated the use of chance in books by Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Louis Begley, Henry James, Milan Kundera, Nabokov, C. S. Peirce, Thomas Pynchon, and Shakespeare. Her novels Smoking Hopes and Naked Singularity pursue similar themes involving coincidence and emergent intentionality. Her honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Residency, a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, two Art & Science Lab Residencies (Santa Fe), Alfred Kazin Award for Best Dissertation, and the Washington Prize for Fiction.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Mac Tonnies
Mac Tonnies is an author/blogger whose futuristic stories and speculative essays have appeared in a variety of publications. His mind-stretching blog is Posthuman Blues. Mac is the author of Illumined Black, a collection of science fiction short-stories, and After the Martian Apocalypse and is a member of the Society for Planetary SETI Research. He believes that consciousness is a potential technology -- that we are exquisite machines, nothing less than sentient patterns. As such, there's no convincing technical reason we can't eventually upload ourselves into matrices of our own design.
Monday, January 02, 2006
Paula Fredriksen
Specializing in the history of early Christianity, Paula Fredriksen is author of several books and over a dozen articles on early Christianity. Among her numerous awards and honors is a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for University Professors. Her second book, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, received the Yale Press Governors' Award for Best Book in 1988. Fredriksen holds a Ph.D. in history of religions, ancient Christianity, and Greco-Roman religions from Princeton University and a theology diploma from Oxford University. She served as historical consultant for the BBC production The Lives of Jesus and was a featured speaker and historical consultant for U.S. News and World Report's "The Life and Times of Jesus."
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Casandra and Micsto
Myspace intermission: Occasionally, we take a break from the main "6000 list" to encounter people at Myspace. Who do you find more intriguing? Casandra writes, "Ethnically, I am half-German. Spiritually, I am half-Asian. Emotionally, I am half-Pashtun. Intellectually, I will blow your mind. My Chinese name is Chung Li. I fence competitively. I am an award winning artist and speaker. My free time is spent writing short stories in Vietnamese." Or Micsto, whose interests include "music, film, art, photography, dance (flamenco, middle eastern folkloric, bellydancing: traditional and tribal), drummer (mainly Middle Eastern), world politics, history, cooking, books, writing, traveling to obscure locations, people watching and causing chaos."
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Martina Hoffmann
German-born artist, Martina Hoffmann, spent her childhood in Germany and in Cameroon, West Africa, where she was raised bilingually in French and German, while surrounded by African, French and German culture. In her latest mind-blowing artworks, Hoffmann uses her inner visions as a guide for her paintings. She sees herself as a "translator" for these visions.
Read more: http://www.martinahoffmann.com/visions_fantasy/visions_fantasy.html
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Maggie Balistreri
Maggie Balistreri is author of The Evasion English Dictionary. Cultural criticism takes form in this book as Maggie make us all aware of the little linguistic games we play in order to "duck the truth," the words we use not to reveal our meaning but to mask it. Maggie Balistreri is also a performance artist and gifted, witty poet.
Read more: http://www.cafemo.com/eedict/index.html
Monday, December 26, 2005
Rick Strassman
Rick Strassman, MD, began the first new human research with psychedelic drugs in the United States in over 20 years. These studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a short-acting and powerful psychedelic. He administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60 human volunteers. He was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies. Perhaps excessive DMT production from the pineal gland is involved in naturally occurring "psychedelic" states such as those in near-death, mystical, and "alien abduction" experiences.
Read more: http://www.rickstrassman.com/
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Ninah Pixie
Ninah Pixie is a performer/artist/musician with a fascinating and popular Blog called Ollapodrida. She sings, plays piano, flute, and harmonium. She works a full-time day job for the National Center for Science Education (http://ncseweb.org/), which seems to tolerate her "bizarro-artsy-freaky lifestyle" and allows her the freedom to also pursue her role in the UBUIBI arts collective and Big City Orchestrae. She has experienced LSD and other aids to mystical enlightenment. She is currently producing an unusual music CD.
Read more: http://www.ollapodrida.net/blog/
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Max Tegmark
According to cosmologist Max Tegmark, parallel universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations. He suggests that right now there a copy of you reading this Blog. The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to close this window without finishing it, while you read on. The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10^28 meters from here.
Read more: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/index.html
Friday, December 23, 2005
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Jennifer Michael Hecht earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University. She is a Professor of History and book author. In her book The End of the Soul, she discusses the Society of Mutual Autopsy, which had the aim of proving that souls do not exist. The idea was that, after death, they would dissect each other.... In her book The Next Ancient World, she writes delightfully tricky poems that wildly bend the sense of our language.
Read more: http://jennifermichaelhecht.com/_wsn/page3.html
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Asya Schween
Asya Schween is an artist and mathematician who makes self-portraits that encourage us to shiver. She writes, "I'm Asya Schween, age 24. Immersed in incarnadine-hued twilight of my mind. Alone. I read no poetry but mathematical manuscripts and the Holy Bible. I'm a good girl. I will perish."
Read more: http://www.myownself.com/new/saveme.html
Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson's books and writings span the range from the subatomic to the far reaches of space, time, and mind. English-born American physicist, mathematician, and futurist, he is famous for his work in quantum mechanics and his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the winner of the Templeton Prize for his thoughts on science and religion. He writes: "I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Bianca
"I've always wanted to meet an alien. I've always wanted to know if there were aliens on this planet right now, that pose as people. I also want to meet David Icke." Other interests: Conspiracies, metaphysics, quantum physics lucid dreaming, OBEs...
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bee_original
Tatiana Cooley
Give Tatiana Cooley 15 minutes to memorize 100 faces and names and she'll remember 70 of them in a snap. Give the reigning and only USA National Memory Champion strings of 4,000 numbers, "70093518 555899 ..." or 500 words: "liquid, dairy, digit, district, garden, hair ..." and she'll repeat them better than most. Same with a 54-line poem or a deck of cards.Read more: http://www.s-t.com/daily/02-99/02-24-99/b04li047.htm
Stelarc
"Simply, the body has created an information and technological environment which it can no longer cope with. This sort of Aristotelian impulse to continuously accumulate more and more information has created the situation where human cortical capacity just can't absorb and creatively process all this information. This is one of the human and technological pressures that make for the computer. It was necessary to create technology to take over what the body can no longer do."Read more: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
Maria Spiropulu
MARIA SPIROPULU, a physicist, is currently at CERN. She has been working at the Tevatron with UCSB and was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the EFI/University of Chicago. She is interested in collider signatures of supersymmetry and extra dimensions.Read more: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/maria.html
Xeni Jardin
Xeni Jardin (say: /SHEH-nee zhar-DAN/) is a tech culture journalist and co-editor of the collaborative weblog BoingBoing, the award-winning "Directory of Wonderful Things." She is a Contributing Writer for WIRED Magazine, and "Xeni Tech" contributor for National Public Radio's daily program "Day to Day."Read more: http://xeni.net/
Fiorella Terenzi
Described by Time Magazine as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna", astrophysicist, author and recording artist Dr. Fiorella Terenzi received her doctorate in physics from the University of Milan, has studied opera and composition at Conservatory G. Verdi, Corsi Serali, and taught mathematics and physics at Liceo Scientifico, MilanRead more: http://www.fiorella.com/
Ray Kurzweil
We are witnessing intersecting revolutions in a plethora of fields: biotechnology, nanotechnology, molecular electronics, computation, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, virtual reality, human brain reverse engineering, brain augmentation, robotics, and many others.
Read more: http://www.kurzweilai.net/
Teja Krasek
One of Teja's goals is to unite science, mathematics, and art. Her works have been featured at international exhibitions. My colleagues consider her Eastern Europe's "MC Escher" and Slovenia's "gift" to the world.Read more:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/tejak.html
Lisa Randall
Lisa Randall studies particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University , where she is Professor of Theoretical Physics. Her research concerns the fundamental nature of particles and forces and how matter's basic elements relate to the physical properties of the world that we see. Prof. Randall has worked on a wide variety of ideas for what might lie beyond established particle physics and cosmological theories, including grand unified theories, supersymmetry, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, string theory and, most recently, extra dimensions of space. She has made seminal contributions in all these areas and as of last autumn, was the most cited theoretical physicist of the past five years.Read more: http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall.html
Alex Grey
Alex developed his depictions of the human body that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality, and reveal the interplay of anatomical and spiritual forces. After painting the Sacred Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as praying, meditation, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth, nursing and dying. Grey’s recent work has explored the subject of consciousness from the perspective of “universal beings” whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and infinite galactic swirls.
Read more: http://www.alexgrey.com/
Read more: http://www.alexgrey.com/
Natasha Vita-More
Natasha Vita-More is a cultural strategist. She has given talks on the culture of the future, the future of the human body, and how technology will affect the design of the future. Natasha has appeared on more than a dozen televised programs, featured in magazines such as Wired, Marie Claire, Anna, The New York Times, and LA Weekly.Read more:
http://www.natasha.cc/
Suggestions for people
I welcome your suggestions for more people to add to "The Six Thousand."
