Origins Podcast with Ryan McGranaghan

Show Notes:

• Polar mission, Solar-Terrestrial Physics Science Initiative, Van Allen Probes mission, and Parker Solar Probe mission (01:05)
• NASA Heliophysics Division (01:20)
• Nicky at South by Southwest (03:20)
• Nicky on the TEDx stage (03:35)
• Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle (04:35)
• Solar energy effects on GNSS (06:50)
• Idea of assessing your presentations from the questions you receive (08:25)
  • Power of ‘I don’t know’ (08:50)
• ask questions to discover (12:20)
• Goddard Space Flight Center (15:50)
• imposter syndrome (16:45)
• Mentors:
  • Mario Ocuña (27:50)
  • Bob Hoffman (28:05)
  • Barry Mauk (29:30 and 39:40)
• Applied Physics Lab (APL) (29:20)
• Living With a Star initiative (29:20)
• What is Space Weather? (30:45 and 39:00)
• ‘Transdisciplinary’ in science (31:15)
  • Heliospheric System Observatory and diversity of thought (33:25)
• What is Heliophysics? (32:20)
• IMAP mission (32:40)
• Norbert Weiner “fruitful areas for growth in no man’s land between the various established fields” (36:40)
• MIT Media Lab and Joi Ito - antidisciplinary (36:40)
• NASA’s Next Generation Principal Investigator (37:40)
  • NASA PI incubator program (37:50)
• Make sure people are equipped and give them the confidence to do things (44:20)
• Forms of empowerment (45:40)
• Book: Hidden Figures (51:45)
• Find Nicky online:  
  • Twitter
  • NASA
• 'Five-Cut Fridays’ series  
  • Nicky's playlist

Show Notes: 

• Andrés’ first website: “a small trip through Columbian music” (04:10) 
• Cosmos (TV Show and Book) by Carl Sagan (05:50) 
• Jesuit Ignatian spiritual retreats in reference to Ignatius Loyola (08:00 and 11:15) 
• How do you create space to listen to yourself? (13:30) 
• NASA Frontier Development Laboratory - FDL (15:51) 
  • ‘Deep Learning’ (17:00) 
• What makes a team fail? (18:00) 
  • Enhancing the effectiveness of team science
• 'Treat colleagues as customers’ (22:30) 
• ‘Fixing problems with data’ - data wrangling (22:40) 
• Questions leaders of teams must ask (23:45) 
• The idea of taking something from another field to apply to your own (28:50) 
• Open source (29:15) 
  • Fear of being ’scooped’ that exists in science (29:45) 
• First images of the sun to maps that exist now (31:00)  
• Lika Guhathakurta (32:00) 
• ’The great majority of amazing commercial products are new applications of existing technologies’ - power of knowledge transfer (34:40) 
• ‘Being open by default’ (38:10) 
• Kepler mission (39:10) 
• TensorFlow Software (40:30) 
• Wang-Sheeley-Arge ENLIL (41:50) 
• Experiencing and interacting with fear in our lives (43:30) 
• ‘Being first is overrated’ (44:30) 
• Science as a social endeavor (45:45) 
• Lightning Round (52:50): 
  • Momo by Michael Ende 
• Music is the passion that has guided him (54:00) 
  • ‘Communication at any level is a performing art' 
  • 'Five-Cut Fridays’ series 
    • Andrés’ playlist
  • If you have help you can recover from almost anything’ (58:30)
  • ‘Gives you control of your own narrative' (58:50)

Show Notes:  

• Geodesics (12:40) 
• Booz Allen Hamilton (21:00) 
• Kirk ’surprised’ himself through the cognitive ability test at a job interview - the idea of surprising ourselves through exposing ourselves to new ideas (25:00) 
• "Cognitive view of the whole, and not just a narrow silo’ed view - the bias buster” - systems thinking (26:40) 
• Underfitting and Overfitting (27:00) 
• Data Science: the application of scientific discovery from data (30:00) 
• ‘Miracle Year of Physics’ - Albert Einstein’s immaculate year (32:00) 
• The Hubble Telescope (35:50) 
• “Any job worth doing, is worth doing poorly” (37:50) 
• “All models are wrong, but some are useful” - George Box (38:30) 
• “Fail fast to learn fast” - discussed in Tim Ferriss’ conversation with Google’s Astro Teller (40:30) 
• Palomar Mountain (46:00) 
• Kirk’s approach to information deluge (47:00) 
• Data literacy (48:45) 
• We discuss the ‘lens’ we each put on the world - here’s a brilliant take on the subject by Maria Popova (51:30) 
• "The message is in the madness” (57:00) 
• Lighting Round: 
  • Book: Language in thought and action by Hayakawa (01:05:30) 
  • Family has been most important to setting Kirk’s trajectory 
  • Making his hear sing: contribution to a book “Demystifying AI for the enterprise” (59:40) 
• Kirk’s Five-Cut Fridays
• Find Kirk online: 
  • Twitter: @KirkDBorne 
  • LinkedIn
  • Personal blog: http://rocketdatascience.org/ 
• Find us at originspodcast.co  

Show Notes: 

• Matt’s bands (1:30): Tiny Danza and RVNNERS 
• Being singularly focused versus pursuing multiple curiosities. Tim Ferriss blog on one way to think about this: Push vs. Pull Processes 
• Sonification (9:03) 
• TEDx talk University of Toronto (10:12) 
• Matt’s interaction with the six-year old fan of his work (11:00) 
• Matt discusses acting almost unconsciously during his TEDx talk because of his preparation - this might be similar to a ‘flow state’ (discussed by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi on the TED stage) (13:30)  
• Course on astronomical sonification (16:30) 
• Idea of education being built on ‘really clear scaffolding’ (18:40) 
• Antidisciplinary and Joi Ito  (20:45) 
• Sara Mazrouei and dating craters on the moon and listening to their impacts (24:15) 
• Matt on Twitter (@astromattrusso) (26:30) 
• The age of data (28:10) 
• Looking to what’s next vs. living in the now (32:00) 
• Derek Sivers “if it’s not a HELL yes, then it’s a no” (34:55) 
• Books: 
  • Planet Hunters (36:50) 
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (37:00) 
  • Music of the Spheres (37:20) 
  • Figuring (37:45) 
  • Breakfast of Champions (39:00) 
• Nerding out about taking notes (41:00) 
• Where to find Matt online:  
  • Planetarium shows: System sounds 
  • Matt’s website
• Matt’s Five-cut Fridays and my Spotify account with all Five-Cut Friday playlists 
• If you like this podcast, then share it with someone you think you will love it, too  

Show Notes: 

• Apache Open Source Software Foundation (4:00) 
  • Apache projects: Tika (26:30), Nutch (15:10), Hadoop (36:05) 
• Chris’ resume and the ‘web of activities’ (7:15)
• “It’s all got to relate to one another”-Chris (7:15) 
  • Tim Ferriss’ scratch your own itch
• “JPL” (8:05) NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• USC ’systems perspective’ (8:25) 
• ‘Architect software’ (8:35) 
• ‘Big software systems’ (8:53) 
• Search engines (9:43) 
• Similarities between web search and science data search (11:56) Google’s take
• (12:15) Big changes in data and compute in Earth Science missions: Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO, and OCO-2) vs Quick Scatterometer (QuickSCAT). ‘Drawing inspiration from the grid’ section of this article
• open source (17:58) 
• Ellis Horowitz (19:44) 
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS) (19:50) 
• What is a developer? (21:10) 
• Jérôme Charron (22:11)
• Information deluge (24:55) 
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy babel fish (27:10) 
• Apache Tika software (28:00 - 30:00) 
• Number of file types on internet (28:09) 
• Panama Papers (30:05) 
• Python and Java (31:03) 
• Data science (31:31) 
  • DJ Patil, Jeff Hammerbacher, Hillary Mason
  • Data science Venn diagram
• Do the ‘hard work’ and pay attention to weaknesses (38:45) 
  • Seth Godin thoughts
• Nenad Medvidovic (41:02) 
• Lightning round (44:08):  
  • One Minute Manager
• Chris’ Five-Cut Fridays playlist (50:20) 

Show Notes: 

• Kerry’s quilt kickstarter (~3:00)
  
  
• Vipassanā mediation/retreats (~5:30) 
• Sitting practice meditation (~12:55) 
• We discuss morning routines and I’m a complete nerd for people’s routines - here are a few examples of morning routines from other thought-leaders (~14:40) 
• Sam Harris morning guided meditation (~17:05) 
• Julia Cameron The Artist’s Way (~22:00) 
• Sam Harris guided meditation app (~23:00) 
• Auburn University Rural Studio (~19:15) 
  • Director of Rural Studio and Kerry’s mentor: MacArthur Fellow Samuel Mockbee (~20:38) 
    • “You are the architect of your education” and other quotes
• Philadelphia Charter High School for Art and Design (~25:40) 
• Big Yellow Arrow (no link, because, believe it or not, this was before Instagram ruled everything we do! Just imagine an 80-foot yellow arrow carried around and positioned across the country...brilliant!) (~27:16) 
• Remaining permeable to new ideas - Debbie Millman and Ingrid Fetell Less discuss this on an excellent episode of Design Matters (~32:20) 
• The idea of streamlining your life to free your mind to focus on your passions (~33:30) 
• My Five-Cut Friday’s Playlists - see all of the playlists on my Spotify account (~45:50) 
  • Kerry’s Five-Cuts with the theme “Searching for Space"
  • My Five-Cut Fridays for April 12, 2019 (the date of the release of this episode) 
• A list of five books hand-picked by Kerry: 
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer 
  • When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön 
  • Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner 
  • You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin by Rachel Corbett 
  • His Dark Materials (Trilogy) by Philip Pullman 
• Where to find Kerry online:  
  • Personal website (KerryLarkin.com) 
  • Comma Workshop (CommaWorkshop.com) 
  • Instagram (@commaworkshop) 

Show Notes: 

• The Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Network (CHAIN) - http://chain.physics.unb.ca/chain/
• Jay’s research group: 
  • http://radio.physics.unb.ca/jayachandran/
• Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station 
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumba_Equatorial_Rocket_Launching_Station
• Books mentioned: 
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!   
  • Alice in Quantumland
• Authors mentioned:  
  • Henning Mankell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_Mankell) 
  • Ian Rankin (https://www.ianrankin.net/) 
• The audio cut off prior to the details of where to find Professor Jayachandran online, so here is the important information  
  • His research group: http://radio.physics.unb.ca/jayachandran/

Show Notes: 

• Work-Life balance vs. alignment (7:00) 
  • Link to follow-up on: https://bit.ly/2SnMPIz
• TED talk about the silent man (31:30): John Francis (https://www.ted.com/talks/john_francis_walks_the_earth?language=en) 
• We talk a lot about being quiet and the various forms and meanings of that. Here’s a link to a TED Radio Hour episode about ‘Quiet’: https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/357846020/quiet  
• Writers mentioned:  
  • (44:30): CS Lewis (http://www.cslewis.com/us/) 
  • (44:40): Shawn Achor (http://www.shawnachor.com/) 
• Books mentioned:  
  • (45:04): If you’re so smart then why aren’t you happy? Raj Raghunathan (https://www.amazon.com/Youre-Smart-Why-Arent-Happy/dp/1101980737) 
• Nutrition Facts website mentioned (46:50): https://nutritionfacts.org/
• Contact Jacob: 
  • [email protected]
  • Jacob’s research group at UCLA: https://dept.atmos.ucla.edu/jbortnik

Show Notes: 

• STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/main/index.html
• Living With a Star Program: https://lws.gsfc.nasa.gov/
• Jack Eddy: https://aas.org/obituaries/john-allen-eddy-1931-2009
  • The Jack Eddy Fellowship: https://cpaess.ucar.edu/heliophysics/jack-eddy
• What is Heliophysics? (4:45 & 38:00) https://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics
  • What is a magnetosphere? (41:45) 
    • https://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics/focus-areas/magnetosphere-ionosphere
  • What is an ionosphere? (41:45)  
    • http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/ionosphere.html
  • What is space weather?  
    • https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena
    • My own TED talk on space weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOVHUo_qbgc
• Book by Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen (7:50): The Argumentative Indian (https://www.amazon.com/Argumentative-Indian-Writings-History-Identity/dp/031242602X) 
• NASA Frontier Development Laboratory Artificial Intelligence Program (15:00 & 35:05): https://frontierdevelopmentlab.org/
• Astrophysics (22:30): https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics
• Lika spoke the following words (24:30): "Once you can talk and relate, nothing else matters.” There is a wonderful TED talk that everyone should listen to on 10 ways to have a better conversation by Celeste Headlee (https://www.ted.com/talks/celeste_headlee_10_ways_to_have_a_better_conversation/discussion) 
• Lopchu Tea - “The single malt of tea" (29:20): https://www.quora.com/What-is-Lopchu-tea
• NCAR - The National Center for Atmospheric Research (33:30): https://ncar.ucar.edu/
• HAO - The High Altitude Observatory (35:30): https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/
• The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (36:30): https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/
• The Parker Solar Probe Mission (42:40): https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe
• LASP - Laboratory for Atmospheric and Solar Physics (43:00): http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/
• Tagore philosopher and Nobel Laureate in literature (46:21):  
  • https://www.scots-tagore.org/philosophy
  • https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Rabindranath_Tagore
  • Gitanjali (Song Offerings) book (47:00): https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gitanjali-Song-Offerings
• Lika talks much about the importance of philosophy. For a wonderful podcast on philosophy check out “Philosophize This!”: 

Origins are conversations with thought-leaders across an eclectic mix of disciplines (science, engineering, art, and design), crafted specifically for the category-defying society that we live in.

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