Economist Laurence Kotlokoff paints a gloomy picture of United States economic future in the below talk at MIT and in his book The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future.

The aging United States demographics means that there will be more older people collecting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid than there are young people generating enough money for these programs. This financial gap will get larger and larger the more time we wait. Kotlokoff says we need to do something immediately otherwise the fiscal system is headed for a meltdown. He has his own ideas as to what we should do. But will the politicians listen is a different story.

The talk was given on April 28, 2004 as part of the authors at MIT series.

The below video is a parody of Disney created by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. It explains the U.S. copyright laws and the types of work that it protects such as music, film, dance, etc. It says that ideas can not be copyrighted. Only the form in which that idea is express is copyrighted. It talks about the duration of copyright and when a work goes into public domain when copyright expires. And finally it explains the copyright fair use doctrine.

Puzzle-master Will Shortz of NPR radio will introduce us on the rules of KenKen puzzles and how to solve them.

The above video was showing a KenKen that only uses the add operation of the digits. However, general KenKen puzzles have add, minus, multiply, and divisor operators indicated next the results number within their cages. The below video shows how to work out these more difficult forms of the puzzles.

You can give the game a try by playing KenKen online here. There you will find the rules for the game as well.

Gary King explains why “Real Winner Never Cheat”…

Why are people so consumed about winning that have to give up integrity and character by cheating? Not to mention the negative effects of cheating on health. Because cheating cause guilt on every level and certainly that is not good for health. Watch this other video about the negative effects of lying on health.

This video, Gary King explains why lying negatively affects your health…

And many people believe that lying can cause cancer. MRI machines can detect differences in brain activity when people are lying and when they are not. This implies that lying can change brain functions. It would make sense that lying has negative consequences on health since lying causes stress and stress decreases the immune system.

Dr. Dean Ornish talks about cardiovascular disease and obesity at the TED conference. He says that diet and lifestyle and prevent and sometimes reverse this epidemic.

He also talks about how genes are not our fate. Diet and lifestyle and change how your gene expression…

Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University professor and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, talks in about the state of the world at the Long Now Foundation seminar.

The North Pacific Gyre is a section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that is accumulating trash due to the nature of its water currents. This garbage patch in the ocean consists of trash debris and non-biodegradable plastic that just breaks up into more tiny pieces.

This video on YouTube sumarizes it best…

saying that there is 7 million tons of floating waste spanning an area twice the size of Texas. Birds and wildlife die when they mistaken these plastic bits as food. A lot of these garbage get washed up on beaches.

The latimes.com also has some video pieces on the North Pacific Gyre here.

And this video is a more detailed explanation of trash in our oceans…

The reason why there is not a lot of good photos of the North Pacific Gyre is that most of the garbage is just underwater and is somewhat spread out as explained in theoystersgarter.com.

This is a great concise summary of global warming explaining, what is it, what causes it, and what are its effects.

The Discovery Channel website also has several good videos about global warming.

Dr. John Medina, developmental molecular biologist, gives an informative and humorous talk at Google about brain science and his book “Brain Rules”.

In this talk he talks about brain rule number one which is that aerobic exercise boosts cognitive performance especially executive function. He says “if you have an active lifestyle you have a 50% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer”. He answers the question of how much exercise if required to get these benefits: Two to three times a week for 20 minutes per session. Aerobic exercise increases blood flow to the dentate gyrus of brain and elevates BDNF which is like Miracle Grow for brains.

Then he talks about stress on the brain. Stressed brains does not learn the same way and hurts learning. He says “stress damages cognition in virtually every way cognition can be measured.”

And he ends with the most important brain rule of all: curiosity.

Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

In this 2004 documentary “Super Size Me”, Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s for a whole month. Doctors tracked what happens to his health during this experiment. The film explores the obesity epidemic and how much fast food is contributing to this.

The first person to discover Nirvana was a prince in India 400 years before Christ. His name was Siddhartha and he discovered Nirvana while sitting under a tree through contemplative meditation. Then there is brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor in the modern world of today who during during a stroke to the left hemisphere of her brain experienced nirvana.

Watch both stories below…
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This documentary shows archaeologists uncovering the history of Buddha. Buddha was a prince in India 400 years BC by the name of Siddhartha. In his teens, he went outside the insular palace walls and discovered there was great suffering in the world such as old age, disease, and death. He journeyed in the lands as well as in his mind to find answers to the end of such sufferings and discovered it through contemplative meditation while sitting under a tree. There he reached nirvana and became Buddha, the “awakened one”. This was the start of the Buddhism.

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor gave this talk at TED where she showed us a real brain and how it consists of two separate halves. The right half thinks in parallel and knows the concept of “we”. The left half thinks in serial and knows that concept of “I”. One day she had a stroke on the left hemisphere and she is able to describe to us today what happened on that day as her brain functions started to shut down. She described how she lost the normal brain chatter that are always in our head, how she gained a perspective as an outsider looking at herself, and how she experienced nirvana.