I just made a really cool discovery on TED. It’s an old Douglas Adams lecture at the University of California in 2001. It was filmed shortly before he died. The video quality is lacking, but the talk itself is excellent – a 1.5 hour look at some stuff that interested him. He talks about primates, lizards, long-term history, torrential rain, and thoughts on the beauty and diversity of life on Earth.
Things I learned from the talk
- Lemurs were once the dominant primate on the planet.
- New Zealand was spawned from gunk under the ocean and not a part of the pre-Australian land mass.
- Life is opportunistic.
- British people actually say the word “tarpaulin” instead of “tarp.”
- Douglas saw a 13-foot long Kimodo Dragon lizard (“fucking huge” is his technical term).
- There’s a flightless bird that doesn’t realize it can’t fly.
- You can just walk over to and pick up a blue-footed booby (bird) with no difficulty. They assume you’ll just put then back when you’re done.
- This is because, prior to man, there were no predators.
- Noise pollution is a big deal if you’re a blind fish that maneuvers via sonar in a river.
- You create your universe based on the sensory data that you take in.
- In a pinch, you can record underwater sounds using a condom stretched over a microphone.
- Acquiring a condom in Shanghai, when you can’t speak the language, is difficult. Also hilarious.
- There is mostly entirely nothing in the universe.
- For the first time, we know how valuable information is.
- Unlike every previous analytical tool, the computer puts things together. We can strain to see processes at work.
- Like the blue-footed booby, the human strategy that has worked up until now may not work for our future.
- Humans look for intention in all things.
I Miss That Guy
Listening to this talk only made me miss Douglas Adams even more. I’m a fan of a few authors, but he’s one that I appreciate more with time. This talk is a prime example. The subject isn’t relevant; he makes talks fun and interesting. He’s another ambassador of wonder at the world around us.
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