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The Padverb Podcast with KMO
By PadverbTechnology
The Padverb Podcast with KMO episodes
- 022 Digital Humanities with Ben Blatt
Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and the Harvard Lampoon. Ben is a numbers guy who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, map-making, the Beatles, and Jeopardy.
This conversation centers around Ben's book "Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve" (2017). It's a book about what we can learn about writing and authors based not on what they say, or what impressions we get from reading their books, but on something that results from applying rigorous data analysis to their actual texts. Specifically, KMO and Ben discuss:
- 00:25 – Moneyball and its influence on Ben
- 02:12 – The attraction of baseball for analytical people
- 04:25 – Ben's interest in numbers and writing
- 06:40 – Patterns, correlations, and writing advice
- 10:00 – -LY adverbs
- 12:00 – British vs American English
- 14:40 – Bloke, blimey and the Harry Potter Effect
- 16:00 – Loud vs quiet verbs
- 19:08 – Pronoun and characters stats
- 20:00 – Comparing authors' noise levels
- 23:00 – Gender differences in literature
- 27:50 – Professionals and amateurs: the statistical differences
- 30:25 – Reading fan fiction
- 32:50 – Restraining style choices to foster creativity
- 34:50 – Revising one's novels
- 36:00 – Fame and success affecting one's writing style
- 38:00 – Data tools
- 40:15 – Vonnegut
- 42:10 – The validity of "write what you know"
- 43:10 – Digital Humanities and Franco Moretti's "Atlas of the European Novel"
- 47:15 – Ben's advice for aspiring writers
- 50:15 – Creating writing and progress in AI
- 52:05 – Ben's next project
Ben (The Guest):- Twitter: @BenBlatt
KMO (The Host):- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast58 min - 021 Cyber Republic with George Zarkadakis
George Zarkadakis is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books, who describes himself as a science communicator, an artificial intelligence engineer, a futurist, and a digital innovation professional. His most recent book is called "Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (MIT Press, 2021).
In this conversation, KMO and George discuss:
- 06:05 – Why democracy needs to be reinvented
- 06:50 – Incorporating technologies into democracies
- 18:10 – Animal labor's role in creating inequality and its implications
- 25:40 – The psychological dimension and transforming spectators into actors
- 32:40 – Financial time machine
- 37:30 – Running out of units of measurement
- 41:30 – Obviating the need for trust with the blockchain
- 46:00 – Precarious creative gigs and AI's progress with artistic tools
- 57:20 – Blockchain technology in search of problems to solve
- 65:05 – The current web's dysfunctional nature
- 01:07:50 – George's book
George (The Guest):- Twitter: @zarkadakis
- georgezarkadakis.com
KMO (The Host):- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast1 hr 16 min - 020 Moons and Planets with Francis Nimmo
Francis Nimmo is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research specialty is understanding the structure and evolution of rocky and icy planets.
KMO and Francis discuss:
- 02:30 – The importance of the James Webb and other telescopes
- 03:40 – NASA probes, the AI connection, and technical challenges
- 08:30 – The possibility of finding life and the radiation factor
- 09:45 – Europa and Enceladus
- 10:42 – Breaking molecules at fly-by speeds
- 11:50 – Technology limitations and ambiguity in our search for life
- 14:40 – The question of independent emergence of life
- 16:05 – Subsurface oceans
- 18:40 – Moons
- 23:25 – Saturn's rings
- 26:05 – The Kuiper belt and beyond
- 28:00 – Autonomy and hibernation
- 29:25 – Gas giants vs ice giants
- 31:25 – Pluto
- 35:50 – Mission re-assignment
- 40:10 – Canned apes and getting to Mars
- 42:30 – Sci-Fi future we were promised
- 44:15 – Venus
- 49:40 – Mercury
- 53:45 – Comets
- 56:05 – The Earth
- 57:40 – Deep Time
Francis (The Guest):- websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/
- Francis Nimmo @ Wikipedia
KMO (The Host):- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast1 hr 6 min - 019 Forget and Imagine with Lauren Aguirre
Lauren Aguirre is an award-winning science journalist who has produced documentaries, short-form video series, podcasts, interactive games and blogs for the PBS series "Nova." She has covered everything from asteroids to human origins to art restoration, but is particularly fascinated by the brain. "The Memory Thief" is Lauren's first book.
In this conversation, Lauren and KMO discuss:
- 02:03 – Lauren's memory incident
- 06:42 – Waking up and not knowing where you are
- 08:28 – Retrograde and anterograde amnesia
- 13:10 – The fentanyl connection
- 20:53 – Experimental brain surgery
- 24:18 – Amnesia sufferers' self-worth
- 29:13 – Faking anterograde amnesia
- 31:18 – Science communication
- 33:38 – Disappointment in science
- 34:53 – The Memory Thief's target audience
- 36:28 – Multilayer narratives
- 39:13 – Our shared experience of forgetting
- 43:08 – Remembering our remembering of events
- 44:38 – The trauma connection
- 47:35 – Optogenetics
- 49:08 – The scientific process and the pursuit of truth
Lauren Aguirre (The Guest):- laurenaguirre.com
- @lsaguirre
KMO (The Host):- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast55 min - 018 Humanoids Need Not Apply with Carla DianaCarla Diana is a designer, author, and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. Her latest book, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human," published by Harvard Business Review Press, came out in March 2021. Carla and KMO discuss: 02:20 – Carla's book's title 02:30 – What 4D design is 04:40 – Robot friends 13:05 – What a robot is 21:10 – What "entities" are 28:55 – Robots' association with labor 33:28 – Robots interacting with the environment 37:15 – Robots, faces, and shared attention 44:45 – Whether humanoid robots a good idea at all 48:50 – Science fiction affecting robot design and key concepts from Carla Carla (The Guest): carladiana.com KMO (The Host): Twitter: @Kayemmo en.padverb.com/kmo Padverb: The Padverb Telegram Channel: t.me/padverbpodcast Featured quote “Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike.” ― Kim Stanley Robinson, 23121 hr 3 min
- 017 Us and Not Us with Michael J. SpiveyMichael J. Spivey is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California Merced. He earned his BA in Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz and his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Michael moved to UC Merced to help build a department of cognitive and information sciences. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters on the embodiment of cognition and interactions between language, vision, memory, syntax, semantics, and motor movement. His most recent book, published in 2020, is "Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness." (MIT Press)In this conversation, KMO and Michael discuss:
- 03:20 – The book's title and table of contents; externalism and egregore
- 07:30 – The role of the prefrontal cortex in our conception of self
- 11:30 – Non-scientific view of interactions between brain parts
- 12:50 – Mental representations of the world and the tricks they can play on us
- 15:35 – Letting go of oneself
- 17:25 – The value of familiar environments
- 18:45 – The futility of widely used time-management tricks
- 19:40 – Extending our mind past our skin
- 25:20 – The skipped question of emergent group intentions and desires
- 26:15 – Connecting to other bodies and life forms; emergence, again
- 28:25 – Murmurations and being in charge of a flock
- 28:45 – Boundaries between objects
- 35:20 – Perceiving objects as extensions of ourselves
- 37:02 – Virtual reality and tracking the direction of gaze
- 43:15 – AI and dogs
- 44:55 – Computer-generated imagery; deep fakes and their antidotes
- 49:35 – Extending your sense of self to the planetary scale
- 53:55 – Apocalyptic predictions, prepping, and the future of civilization
- 55:47 – Going beyond our planet and contacting life elsewhere
- 58:20 – Anti-natalism, suffering, and feeling one with the universe
- 1:02:28 – Michael's closing points; practical advice in the book
Michael (The Guest):- Michael's page at ucmerced.edu
- Who You Are at MIT Press
KMO (The Host):- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast1 hr 9 min - 016 Differential Outcomes with James FodorJames Fodor is a science podcaster, an essayist, and currently, a PhD candidate in computational neuroscience and computational linguistics at the University of Melbourne (Australia). His intellectual and research interests cover such diverse areas as cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, theology, and economics.In this conversation, KMO and James discuss:
- 02:07 – A brief history of "The Science of Everything"
- 10:08 – How neural networks learn vs how humans learn
- 12:52 – The uncomfortable question of back-propagation
- 16:00 – Acquiring language and concepts
- 19:52 – Why and when machines' way of learning is important
- 23:22 – Illogical language models and the Internet lurking behind
- 25:52 – Conversation starters and GPT's talking to one another
- 27:45 – Modeling the mind vs the "just a neural network" cop-out
- 33:08 – A space of possible minds and complementing human intelligence
- 36:50 – Idiot chat bots and fearing AI
- 38:15 – The near-term future of AI
- 41:38 – Predicting the prosperity of nations
James Fodor:- The Science of Everything Podcast : fods12.podbean.com
- The Godless Theist Blog: thegodlesstheist.com
- James on YouTube: youtube.com/c/JamesFodor/
KMO:- Twitter: @Kayemmo
- en.padverb.com/kmo
Padverb:- The Padverb Telegram Channel:
t.me/padverbpodcast1 hr 15 min - 015 Bacterial Magnificence with Jean-Marie Volland
Dr Jean-Marie Volland is a scientist at the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems and an affiliate scientist at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. He is also the lead author on a recent research paper that announced the discovery of something that most people, including biologists, had scarcely thought possible: a gigantic bacterium which is thousands of times larger than its fellow microbes – so large, in fact, that it can be seen with the naked eye.
In this conversation, KMO and Jean-Marie discuss:
- 01:50 – Thiomargarita Magnifica and its discovery
- 05:05 – Geography refresher
- 06:25 – JM's stumbling into biology
- 10:20 – Etymological remarks
- 10:55 – Sulfur-eating lifeforms and KMO's mammalian privilege
- 13:15 – Bug size competition
- 13:55 – The three-domain classification (Eukarya, Archaea, Bacteria)
- 16:45 – Taxonomy of the living forms
- 18:38 – Reproduction and evolution
- 22:13 – T. magnifica's unusual structure (with a brief mention of Anton Petrov's YouTube videos)
- 26:20 – Evolutionary advantages of being large
- 30:00 – Cooperation and competition in the natural world and beyond (way beyond, including the economy); ramifications of this dichotomy; symbiosis, parasitism, and commensalism; why is symbiosis so abiding when its game-theoretical disadvantages are also evident?
- 44:40 – JM's two closing take-home messages
Host and Guests:
- KMO: @Kayemmo |
en.padverb.com/kmo- Jean-Marie Volland (LRC Systems)
Links and Resources:
- Thiomargarita magnifica (Wikipedia)
48 min - 014 Bridging the Culture Gap with Dr. Batja Mesquita and Simon Ager
Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is the author of "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions." In this episode's first interview, KMO and Batja discuss:
- 03:10 – Batja's background and story
- 04:26 – What's WEIRD about Western countries
- 05:46 – US vs Netherlands: cultural differences
- 10:30 – Translating emotions between cultures
- 32:48 – Batja's take on the KMO's interview with Rich Firth-Godbehere
- 36:08 – The nature-culture dichotomy
Our second guest, Simon Ager, is the founder, developer, and proprietor of Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of languages and writing systems. In this episode's second interview, KMO and Simon discuss:
- 47:40 - Learning Japanese writing
- 51:58 – Change in language learning methodologies
- 52:33 – Writing scripts on Omniglot
- 53:16 – Tolkien's invented languages
- 54:32 - Sonja Lang's Toki Pona
- 55:48 – Emojis
- 57:20 – Making random changes to the Klingon grammar official
- 58:18 – Languages, pidgins, creoles, and dialects
- 59:18 - Mastering accents as adult learners
- 1:01:37 – Watching foreign media and acquiring fake accents
- 1:06:23 – Omniglot's unusual pedigree as a one-man linguistic orchestra
Host and Guests:
- KMO: @Kayemmo |
en.padverb.com/kmo- Dr. Batja Mesquita:
@batjamesquita | www.batjamesquita.com |Wikipedia- Simon Ager
omniglot.com/aboutme.htm |@Omniglossia1 hr 13 min - 013 Balance of Error with Paul Thagard
Dr Paul Thagard is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind. He is the author of many interdisciplinary books, including, most recently, "Balance: How it Works and What it Means." In this conversation, KMO and Paul discuss:
- 03:32 – Balance, Paul's book of two parts
- 04:47 – The inner ear and its role in balance
- 06:50 – Comparing balance and scales
- 08:40 – Using metaphors, Scott Adams, and Sam Harris
- 15:52 – Toxic metaphors and AI monitoring live conversations
- 20:00 – How prevalent misinformation is
- 22:52 – Opinions on vaccination
- 23:28 – The notion of consensus reality
- 25:40 – The no-longer binary (strong/weak) nature of AI
- 30:48 – The vacuously eloquent linguistic models
- 34:32 – Panpsychism and its relation to neuroscience
- 37:38 – Neural representation of meaning
- 41:08 – Whether larger brains means more intelligence
- 45:22 – Cats vs Boston Dynamics robots and the generality of human skill
- 47:26 - AI ethics
- 50:20 - Our future moral duties to suffering-capable AI entities
Host and guest:
- KMO: en.padverb.com/kmo | @Kayemmo
- Dr Paul Thagard: paulthagard.com
Links and references:
- Overpopulation on Mars - quoteinvestigator.com/2020/10/04/mars/
- Eliezer Yudkowsky – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky
1 hr 3 min
About The Padverb Podcast with KMO
From the publisher's feed
The Padverb Podcast with KMO explores the interplay between technology, innovation, communication, and cognition, and examines the role knowledge networks and data-driven technologies play in helping progress along.
Our guests are interdisciplinary thinkers and innovators who have harnessed the creative power of combinatorial thinking. Some call them "dot connectors," others – "new knowledge synthesizers." We like to think of them as philosophers of the networked age.