The Six Thousand

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."