Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScISoul Searching by David Malone Episode 2HYPERLAND2024-07-18 | ...U.S. think tank says the Chinese Government should be legally liable for covid deaths and costs.HYPERLAND2024-07-17 | U.S. think tank says the Chinese Government should be legally liable for covid deaths and costs.
The boys chat about a political bombshell in the Covid story that the mainstream press haven't even reported, undates on birdflu and their reaction to the interview with Sunetra Gupta.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScISunetra Gupta on Science and Narrative Why are we here?HYPERLAND2024-07-17 | ...Soul Searching by David Malone Episode 1HYPERLAND2024-07-16 | ...Swing to the Right OR Rejecting the Centre?HYPERLAND2024-07-14 | Swing to the Right OR Rejecting the Centre?
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScITop Bird Flu and Covid Expert who was silenced.HYPERLAND2024-07-11 | The Covid expert who was silenced.
Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University speaks of being silenced, about lock-downs and her work on a Bird Flu vaccine.
Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University's Department of Zoology, having graduated in 1987 from Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of London.
Sunetra has an interest in the public understanding of science and also in the connections between science and literature at the level of language and narrative.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIWhat We Still Dont KnowHYPERLAND2024-07-07 | ...The Politicisation of ScienceHYPERLAND2024-07-03 | The Politicisation of Science
Do we control science and technology or do they control us? Roger Lewis joins the boys for a Hyperland/Grubstreet Gogglebox.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIBeyond the Pale with The SlogHYPERLAND2024-06-26 | Beyond the Pale with The Slog
A conversation with a banned political blogger.
The boys chat to The Slog. The Slog is a political blogger who was a serious thorn in the side of the official narrative at the same time as David was writing the GolemXIV blog.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIVoices in My HeadHYPERLAND2024-06-25 | ...Jewish Voice 4 Peace, Ronnie Kasrils 6 April 2022HYPERLAND2024-06-18 | Webinar organised by Jewish Voice 4 Peace 2022. Part of a QnA session that followed the event.
Ronnie was one of two who took part, the other being Yonatan Shapira who joined Jonathan Sugarman @WhistleIRL in our Podcast below.
facebook.com/groups/130898253302317Jewish Voice 4 Peace, Yonatan Shapira 6 April 2022HYPERLAND2024-06-18 | Webinar organised by Jewish Voice 4 Peace 2022. Part of a QnA session that followed the event.
Yonatan Shapira joined Jonathan Sugarman @WhistleIRL in our Podcast below.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScITesting God 3HYPERLAND2024-06-13 | Not too many films have ever been broadcast on British television with a Latin title. ‘Credo Ergo Sum’ was George Carey’s suggestion. How he got it past Channel Four I shall never know. But it was perfect. “I believe therefore I am” plays a salutary counterpoint with the more familiar Cogito Ergo Sum. ‘Cogito’, translated as ‘think’, has come to be seen as synonymous with logical, rational, scientific and, in the minds of some, with atheistic thinking. While ‘Credo’ translated as ‘believe’ strikes the militant atheist as alarmingly recidivist. And yet‘Credo’ works just as well.
We chose Credo partly, I have to admit, just to stir things a bit and more importantly because we wanted to emphasise that belief is something we all do, scientists as well as ‘believers’. The idea that belief and believing are ignorant and out-dated states of mind, that survive only in the thinking of the feeble and the religious, is tosh. Science and scientists believe all the time. The believe in the unproven while they work to prove or disprove it.
Belief is essential to creatures, who as Andy Clark and George Steiner, each in their own way say, have to make up their minds about things they don’t have enough information about and don’t have the time to properly consider. Questions not answers are the human genius.
The ability to believe is not to be sneered at. And those who do, betray something shallow about themselves. Dislike stupid and hurtful beliefs by all means but not belief itself, or you reduce people to something less than human.
Anyway, forgive me, that was a bit of a rant.
Of three films in the series I found this third one the most difficult but also the one truest to my own thinking. Where this film ended, with George Steiner’s encomium to questions and uncertainty, was where I began the film ‘Dangerous Knowledge’ which I made seven years later. There is a strand of my films which I thought of as all being connected. Each picking up on questions left open by the film before. I often used to say I was trying to make one of those grand series which my father made, but I had to make mine by stealth because the fashion for grand narratives had passed.
Before I set out to film Testing God I had written a complete script for each of the first two films. About 30 pages each. Each took about six weeks to write. I was about two weeks in to writing film three when George Carey called me to his office and told me I had to start filming pronto. I said I didn’t know how they did things in News and Current affairs where he had worked, but that filming without a script on a series which is about ideas rather than a given event or crime made me worried. He said, in as many words, stop snivelling and man-up. So off we went.
I knew many of things I wanted to have in film three I just didn’t yet know how they would all go together and what exactly they would all say when they did. We cut the films in order and by the time we got to film three we were in a zone. By ‘we’ I mean me, my film editor Ed Harris and my assistant producer Tom Alkin. Tom and I had different ideas. Tom had a more ‘buddhist’ outlook. We had a few memorable disagreements. At one point I think I threw him out of the cutting room. I hope he can forgive me. But his and Ed’s impassioned commitment to the series was a major part of its success. I had the last say and so its flaws are mine.
And of course there was George Carey. In our last-but-one viewing George came in and Ed and I knew we were in deep trouble. The edit had gone massively over. The only time I have ever done that. I had known it would happen because there had been no script when we were filming, and so I had left a big ‘hidden’ pot of money to cover the extra cutting room time. We weren’t over budget but even so George was rightly alarmed and after viewing the still not finished film he went very quiet. Ed and I wisely said nothing and waited like men before a storm. George actually shuddered (he really did) and in a strangled, barely controlled voice said, “What the F**k have you been doing in here?” I had never heard George raise his voice or swear before. I had never been sworn at in my editor’s cutting room before.
Something about that kick in the backside broke the mental block. We watched a couple of key transitions in the film. We had them all cut, pictures working beautifully, but somehow I had just not been able to find the right words. Suddenly they came.Testing God 2HYPERLAND2024-06-12 | I have no idea why the algorithm chose this frame from the film. Don’t be put off thinking this film is a church sermon. It isn’t. Film Two of Testing God is about good and evil, altruism and selfishness, about genes and culture and about AI, belief and the take-off of culture.
I knew from the start that this would be, for me, the least rewarding of the three. Not because it’s dull stuff, but because the arguments about selfish genes and culture already felt tired, worn out and destined to get bogged down with people talking past each other. More than the other two films in the series it is where the two world views of traditional religion and modern science, have come into the bitterest and most implacable opposition. As Richard Dawkins says early in the film, in his usual provocative way, ‘Biology is where god did his best work and so Darwin pulled out a far larger rug from under God than physics ever has’. I suspect this is the film, being so directly about us as human animals, which so annoyed both Richard Dawkins and the Christian organisation who complained about the series.
It has been my experience that you can just about suggest that God might not have created the universe in six days, but might instead have set up some physical rules by which the universe is set spinning, and people will still remain in their seats. Should you, however stray into questions of what makes as we are and non-believers and believers alike take to their barricades. Neither side seems to be content to let the other side think what they wish. Dawkins felt compelled to say that religious ‘explanations’ by which he seems to mean all religious beliefs are mentally degrading. While the more fundamentally minded believers of Islam and Christianity want the theory of evolution to be removed from schools and their children to not even have the chance to reject it for themselves AFTER they have learnt what it is. They have it rejected for them, which seems to me to be a wholly unsatisfactory way of bringing up children.
There is a generation (perhaps more than one) of believers and anti-believers who are, it seems, permanently locked together in mutual distrust. Not having been brought up in any religion, I have never felt either the censure of medieval or bronze age restrictions, nor consequently the burning need to reject them. Anyway this was the quagmire in which I feared we would get bogged down.
I wanted to find some structure in which we could set a discussion of genes but which would reach out beyond them to include the actual experiences (including religious belief) of being human. You have to start with the actual experiences of being human and at least try to explain them, not set them aside as ‘illusions’ or explain them away. Sadly, many biologists have resorted to both these ploys.
The idea I had for trying to set a frame, was to bring together into the same film the life testimony of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who as a young girl in World War Two survived both Auschwitz and Belsen concentration camps, and Jürgen Moltmann who was perhaps Germany’s most famous theologian and had, as a boy, been forced to man the anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg. Perhaps not everyone will agree but I feel that bringing them together made a container powerful enough to let both genes and belief, both Darwin and the Divine have their say. I found both Jürgen and Anita very moving and compelling.
Picture wise, Maltmann’s story allowed me to continue the fiery visuals of creation that we set running in film one. This time the fire of creation was the creation of conscience and belief which are, after all, both parts of the natural order of things.
As I’ve already mentioned I am not myself religious and have felt the need neither to believe in a god nor to cry out against one. So when we went to see Maltmann I wasn’t looking for any sort of religious affirmation. I was there to speak to him, much as I had spoken to Anita, as a person of deep personal belief, based on profoundly life-changing experience, more than as a bookish theologian. I ran away from Sunday School when I was 4 after telling the elderly teacher that I thought she was stupid. I was not seeking scriptural enlightenment. But I got it anyway. When Maltmann turned the parable of The Prodigal Son (which I have always found to be utterly unconvincing) on its head, I felt humbled. Here was a man who had truly had his ‘dark night of the soul’ and come out of it with an understanding I had never glimpsed. I still do not share Maltmann’s belief but his parable of ‘The Waiting Father’ opened a door for me to understand his belief.
And it is belief that becomes the focus of the second part of the film, looking at whether AI might come to believe, (which I think it will) for reasons similar to why humans believe. It’s a tricky argument that I am not sure we got quite right. But I think we were on the right track. It is the theme that we then took on in to film 3.Testing God 1HYPERLAND2024-06-11 | This is the first part of a three part series I made for Channel four.
My boss was George Carey, now retired, who was one of those old, unreconstructed Television execs who I would fondly liken to Gene Hunt from ‘Life on Mars’. I say fondly because George, for all he could be fiery and formidable was also brave and loyal. He would always fight for what he believed was right. He was one of the very best I ever worked for.
I didn’t know that when I first met him. He’d sent me an outline for a series that his company had developed. It was to do with science and religion. He asked me what I thought of it and for once I thought, “I must try to be diplomatic”, so I said, “This is in the foothills. We need to be on the summit.” To his credit he didn’t laugh at me nor did he hold it against me. I think many TV execs would have.
Instead he just said, “Fine. Get it there.” We discussed the sort of thing I had in mind and that was that.
The goal I set myself was to make a series which avoided what I call ‘The Christmas Tree’ structure. That’s my name for when a documentary claims it is going to give two very different views equal weight but then allows (sometimes deliberately sometimes unconsciously) one of the world views to provide all the underlying intellectual assumptions and structure, while the other is fitted around it like baubles on the end of the branches. Both views are there but one is reduced to mere decoration. I was determined that we should allow neither the science world view nor the religious to dominate. George was fully behind this.
I think we succeeded. Obviously, every viewer will have their own opinion. But my reason for thinking we did avoid letting either world view dominate, not allowing either side to provide the structure of unspoken assumptions that the other would then be forced to fit into and therefore be destined to ‘loose’ to, was this. A few days after the first part (or it may have been after all three parts. I can’t remember) was broadcast, I received a notice from Channel Four to say there had been a formal complaint. It was from a Christian organisation that said Channel Four had blatantly lied about the series being even handed. The complaint said it was obvious that the series was entirely biased toward science.
This was a proper, formal complaint (to Ofcom or its equivalent back then) that could have serious consequences so I had to write a formal reply. I remember feeling a little dismayed. For some reason I decided that I would ring Richard Dawkins who was in the series. I can’t remember exactly why, but phone him I did. I don’t know Richard terribly well but I have interviewed him numerous times. We have always had a somewhat prickly relationship.
Richard said immediately he was glad I had phoned because he was furious. He felt I had lied about the series being even handed. It was obvious to him the series had been entirely partisan in favour of religion and biased against science. Now after twenty years I cannot swear to the exact words and Richard if he remembers it and me at all might tell a different story. But my memory is that after feeling a little taken aback (no one likes being accused of lying twice in one morning) I recovered enough to explain about the Christian organisation’s complaint. I said of course he should make a formal complaint if he felt we had been biased but wondered if I could put him in contact with the first complainant so they could coordinate some sort of pincer movement.
I don’t remember Richard being amused. And of course memory may have embellished what really happened. But there was a complain and Richard did accuse me of anti-science bias.
In my reply to the first complaint I mentioned my call with Richard. I never heard anything more from either side but felt, all in all, the morning had not been wasted.
Ian and I plan on doing a podcast about the ideas we explored in the series in the coming weeks.Religion, the vagueness of consciousness and seeing things when youre blind.HYPERLAND2024-06-10 | Religion, the vagueness of consciousness and seeing things when you're blind.
Ian has been reading. Dangerous, but sometimes it can't be helped. So we have a chat. First about religion and belief and then about consciousness and awareness.
First up - Tanya Luhrmann's take on religion in her book How God Becomes Real. I met her when I chaired last year's Holberg debate. Her take is that to simply say, 'people who believe in a god are mistaken or stupid' does nothing to help undertand why people believe, nor why many of them say it helps them to believe . She wants to understand religious belief not dismiss it. I'm not a believer but I found her work to be insightful and fascinating. Her point is that "...the puzzle or religion is not the problem of false belief, but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans."Next we look briefly at 'Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness' by Michael Tye. It's slim little book but don't let that fool you. It might look like a puddle but in fact it's a well. One of those rare science/philsophy books where an academic deep-thinker says, 'I have been wrong all these years and here's why.' Basically he began as a staunch supporter of the view that consciousness comes from witing togeher ordinary non-conscious stuff in a clever way. He now thinks this is unworkable and shows why. Leaving him to join the growing number of pan(proto)psychist people who think consciousness has to be a fundamental property of matter.And this leads us to a discussion about how there can be a difference between what your mind/brain can 'know' and what you become 'consiously' aware of. It's a fact that your mind registers, and sometimes even 'knows', a whole lot more than you do. We are all in some respects the Ronald Reagans of our own brain - just the fellow who gets handed the memos and reads them out for the public. He takes the credit but does none of the work. I jest but blind sight experiements among many others show how the brain/mind contains far more than we are consiouesly aware of. Which raises questions about the self and its role.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIBBC - The Flow of Time Roger Penrose, Jim Al Khalili (Jan 1999)HYPERLAND2024-06-07 | This is one of those lovely little films that just seemed to make itself.
I was asked to make a 30 min film on 'time' and given a rather small budget. This was after John Birt (Thatcher's boot boy) had begun his premeditated vandalism of the once great now sadly diminished BBC. In my slightly bolshie way I said I would not do it for the budget they offered and 'demanded' (in so far as a lowly producer can 'demand' anything) a further 10K. It was slightly cheeky because I knew they were a bit stuck and needed me to do it. I suspect others had said 'no thanks' to a film about Time, before they offered it to me. We reached a compromise - I got the bigger budget, but the film would have to be 40 not 30 minutes long. They seemed OK about it, I was delighted.
I decided I would make it about the 'flow' of time. Our experience of time is that is seems to flow past us from future to past. But does it? Modern physics says it doesn't.: That time is static, and our impression is a 'mistake'. Film, with its series of static images which when passed at 24 frames per second appear to us to move and 'flow', seemed the perfect medium to explore their 'mistake'.
This was a one-off film and so I was left alone, largely free to do and say what I wanted. One arc of the film was to point out that the picture of a timeless, static universe that comes from Einstein's theory of relativity is in fact a modern return to an old idea. Medieval Christian thinkers had also believed (for very different reasons obvioulsy) in a timeless and static universe. Many people who watch science documentaries (at least back when I was making them) were enthusiastically, militantly atheist and hated any reference to religion in a science documentary. But I have always sought to see science in a broader historical context. Both medieval christian theologians and modern science have believed (this is changing now) that the proper way to understand the universe is by discovering the universal and timeless rules which underpin it; the 'god's eye' view. Even if God has been banished his timeless rules remain - just under new management.
Counter to this is what we associate with the Renaissance but whose seeds actually took root in the medieval period, which is placing the personal experience at the centre. Rather than say, if your personal experience disagrees with our theory of timeless rules, then your experience is a mistake, say instead, well if your theory cannot account for a universal human experience then perhaps your theory is wrong. Rather than deny what we experience, find a theory that can accommodate it. It's the same argument that surrounds 'consciousness'. Materialistic science cannot so far account for conscious experience and has therefore, spent the better part of a centry saying well perhaps consciousness doesn't exist and your experience that it does is a mistake.
Anyway, this was what was in my mind. I wanted film, the pictures and the sound, to speak to our experience of time. I got Roger Penrose to be in the film. We had met before and I really liked him. He is a gentle and deeply thoughtful man. He too feels that there has to be something amiss in our physical theories if we cannot accommodate our experience that time flows and that 'change' is central to how the universe is. We also agreed that music was a great way in to talking about time. So at the beginning of the film, I got Roger Penrose and a friend of mine Faun Flynn to talk about music and its relation to time.
The film was in many ways a quite personal film. Personal to me in many ways and personal in that it is rooted in our felt experiences. The film was an early exploration of ideas which still absorb me - the idea that we can and perhaps should describe the universe in terms of processes, which flow and change, rather than in terms of static and timeless rules. The debate goes back to at least Heraclitus and Parmenides and is as central today as it was then. It is for me at least.
Western science at the time of Newton and Leibnitz wrested from God his static and timeless universe and set it in motion, in the era when more broadly our sense of our own individuality and agency was emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards. But lurking within this new scientific understanding was always a pretension to our own god-like power. A power to understand and pin down. And so, science revived the perfection of a timeless creation, only without God.
The Flow of Time was my small question mark about this ordered universe. I returned to these ideas many times looking at them in different ways. Today I am writing a book about it.Latest - Bird Flu, Cows, Chicken Feed and CovidHYPERLAND2024-06-06 | Latest - Bird Flu, Cows, Chicken Feed and Covid
Did Bird Flu get into America's cattle because they were being fed infected chicken feed? And the offical covid narrative continues to unravel.
Should we be worried? Sadly yes and on two counts. First bird flu in cattle means it now has hunderds of millions more carriers in which to mutate and pick up what it needs to infect us. And second, could this latest jump be less to do with wild birds and more to do with feeding infected chicken-feed to cattle? Did the agro-industry learn nothing from BSE ?
And lastly the official covid narrative continues to unravel. Daszak gets thrown under the bus and no one cries.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIBBC2 Horizon - Death Wish, the Untold Story - Feb 7th 1994HYPERLAND2024-06-05 | The pleasure of this film was getting to tell the story of the kind of quiet, unassuming hero-scientist that one does not get to meet too often. Andrew Willey, as one of the other scientists in the film Martin Raff said, was in the wilderness, his work ignored, for years. I had the great good fortune to meet him and tell his story at the precise moment his life's work was quite suddenly seen for what it was - fundamentally, game-changingly important. He was the hero of the piece. He died in 2022.
I also got to meet (as will you) and interview his mentor, Sir Alastair Currie. It was Professor Currie in fact who gave the ability of cells to commit suicide, the name 'Apoptosis'. Apoptosis comes from ancient Greek and means the falling off of petals from the flower. I thought at the time that it was typical of this sort of educated and gentlemanly scientist, that they should wish to give their discovery a fitting and poetic name.
At the time I interviewed Professor Currie he was dying of leukaemia or cancer - I'm afraid I can't remember which it was. He had lost all his hair and was worried he would look peculiar. So, he wore a hat. He was such a lovely old gent that when he died before the film was broadcast, I asked the BBC if I could dedicate the film to him.
The film is full of top flight scientists who could now see what Willey and Currie had suspected decades earlier but had not been able to prove, that Apoptosis could hold the key to a 'magic bullet' cure for cancer. Willey got his moment of recognition. After so many years dedicated to an idea whose moment had not yet come - and for all he knew might never come if he was wrong about it - he started to get invited to some of those elite scientific meetings. You get to see him introduced at the first one. It was a lovely moment of recognition - the first of many.
And today as I sit and write this, the Guardian newspaper reports on a new wonder treatment for bowel cancer - "Drug that ‘melts away’ tumours could replace surgery for bowel cancer" says the headline.
The drug, pembrolizumab is an immunotherapy compound. It works by apoptosis. Cancer cells that previously would have to be blasted with highly toxic chemotherapy chemicals, the kind that kill all your healthy cells as well, simply melt away on their own by triggering cell suicide -apoptosis.
Professor Willey was right.The Mockery of International LawHYPERLAND2024-06-03 | International Law! What is it good for!? Absolutely....?
In the week Donald Trump was found guilty in a court of law, we ask do nations really care a damn about the law? Or is it as Benito Mussolini remarked about an earlier attempt at international law, The League of Nations, "the league is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out"
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIHorizon 30th Anniversary The Far SideHYPERLAND2024-06-03 | This is the first Horizon I ever made. It was also the first time I had a major complaint made against me and the first time I had to officially defend my job. Jana Bennet was Horizon editor at the time. She was one of the best I have worked for. She had brains and bottle.
I was very young to be moved up to Horizon and an 'anniversay' programme was seen as an easy stepping stone. All you were supposed to do, what Jana asked me to do, was pick 'golden moments' from previous Horizons, stitch them together and bingo! I didn't do that. I wanted to say something more than "remember this bit!" I thought here was a great opportunity to look at how science broadcasting has protrayed science, its roll in society, what cultural image or narrative of science in society had been created by science broadcasting? Horizon was the oldest and best at the time and has had a huge influence on most other science broadcasting around the world. What was the narrative? What idea or ideal of science and its relation to us were we presenting?
This seemed to me a great chance to look at the ideology (if there was one) of western science and science broadcasting.
The way I did it was to watch probably 90 or so Horizons and take footage and narration from about 70 of them. Rather than stitch together memorable clips I chose instead to use the footage as if it were raw rushes straight from the camera. Often, in fact most of the time, I took the narration written for one film and played it over the footage of another film. The effect was to get one film to comment upon and shed light on the unspoken assumtions of another from the same era.
Overall, I aimed to present a brief history of how we had seen - or been told to see - the role of science in society. I wrote no commentary of my own telling people what to think, but let the narration from the original films comment on the assumptions embedded in them that had been left unsaid but were there nevertheless. I wanted the archive to tell its own story and speak for itself.
Ian and I are going to talk in more depth about this film and reactions to it on a Hyperland pocast in the next few weeks.Imperial America - Death rattle or birth pangs?HYPERLAND2024-05-27 | The boys debate if 2024 could see the beginning of seismic political change in America, Europe and Britain?
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIAn Emergency FillerHYPERLAND2024-05-01 | COMMENT AT:
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIConsciousness - Having it and understanding it are very different things!HYPERLAND2024-04-06 | Consciousness - Having it and understanding it are very different things!
David's appearance at Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains? The 2023 Holberg Debate, feat. Seth, Luhrmann, Sheldrake.
It is hugely long. Nearly three hours. Three speakers: Anil Seth (neuroscientist Sussex U), Tanya Luhrmann (Anthropologist Stanford U) and Rupert Sheldrake (Notorious English Heretic).
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIHow the W.H.O. lied about ChernobylHYPERLAND2024-03-19 | Nuclear Controversies by Wladimir Tchertkoff, 51min, 2004
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIUkraine - A mad and bad dictator invaded! But is that really all there is to say?HYPERLAND2024-02-20 | Ukraine - A mad and bad dictator invaded! But is that really all there is to say?
The film was made by the US Department of Defence and the Rand Corporation which was THE cold war think tank. The speaker is Paul H. Nitze - Representative of the Secretary of Defence to SALT.
The other is from a fictional film called Count down to Looking Glass released in 1984. The clip is from a 'presidential address'.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIA New Gold Standard? - Billionaire Boys bank update.HYPERLAND2024-02-06 | A new Gold Standard? - Billionaire Boy's bank update.
Metal-backed money in a world of debt and fiat currency?
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIThe Billionare Boys BankHYPERLAND2024-01-30 | The Billionare Boy's Bank
Why are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk interested in A.I. and rockets? And what do either have to do with banking?
If this wets your appetite David has written much more on his substack with many-a-link to prove it's not all pie in the sky mumbo jumbo! Link below.
End theme - Gerry Anderson's Space:1999 Opening Titles (Season 1)
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScISearching for a New ScienceHYPERLAND2024-01-17 | Feature length version from the series Why are we here?
whyarewehere.tv shows.acast.com/hyperlandBACK AT IT.HYPERLAND2024-01-17 | Apologies for the silence. Here's some of what we've been up to and a brief look forward. Plus for reasons known only to Ian he starts a conversation about Consciousness.
Why are we here? Series is up on our YouTube channel, link below
whyarewehere.tv shows.acast.com/hyperlandH2 - Hydrogen 2HYPERLAND2023-11-08 | H2 - No, not the idiotic, money-wasting "Hey we can do high speed rail too you know ! - Oh, wait no, actually we can't" - government railway scheme. No not that. This is Hydrogen. Again. It comes in pairs.
This time we compare the costs of the Dogger Bank wind farm with Hinkley C nuclear power station and wonder which testicle the government is using to think with? The penny drops on Ian's big old flat head about balancing the grid and we look at electric cars and their batteries.
whyarewehere.tv shows.acast.com/hyperlandExtraordinary Neglect - The Non-Education of our ChildrenHYPERLAND2023-10-25 | What kind of society neglects its own children? Surely it is one that has given up. That has decided somewhere in the deepest recesses of it's collective mind that it has already failed and should just eek out its declining days. Such a society looks at the clear signs of it's decay and failure with a sort of resigned, fatalistic calm.
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScITestimony from a War - First hand impressions from a close friend in Tel AvivHYPERLAND2023-10-11 | Testimony from a War - First hand impressions from a close friend in Tel Aviv
How do you talk about the horrific brutality and hysterical inhumanity that war unleashes? How do we make sure that the words and arguments, we use don't subtly cover over the atrocities that shatter and obliterate or which over years and decades slowly and remorselessly strangle all hope?
There are of course the safe and undeniable platitudes that are the refuge of every politician. There are the cries of agony and loss that cannot be denied or unheard. But what else?
Is it possible or even right to try to stay calm, to analyse, to try to get beyond reciting the list of atrocities? Sometimes, speaking of such things in the vocabulary of politics and power relations, 'isms' and theories seems to verge on being disrespectfully emotionless. And yet how else is it possible to stay afloat when storms of hurt and hatred break?
I have an old friend who now lives in Tel Aviv. For months we have been talking about what has now erupted. Not in the sense having forseen it but in the more ordinary sense of discussing the broader context and 'knowing' that the actions of bad actors was not, could not ever, lead to any good outcome.
This is the testimony of someone who is not a politician, nor a professional policy expert, but a thoughtful, educated, despairing Israeli. He makes no claims to have answers, nor to have any sort of olympian, or 'objective' over-view
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIAI - The Demon of DemocracyHYPERLAND2023-10-10 | Elon Musk described AI as summoning a demon. I agree with him. I suspect, however, that might be the extent of our agreement.
INTRO CLIP
youtube.com/watch?v=Wy4EfdnMZ5g2001: A Space Odyssey - I'm Sorry, Dave: The Hal 9000 computer refuses to obey an order from Bowman (Keir Dullea) by simply responding in monotone, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
BUY THE MOVIE: fandangonow.com/details/m...Watch the best 2001: A Space Odyssey scenes & clips: • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | Movie ...
Music by HYPERLAND Graphics by Caroline Large Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIVOTE HOMEHYPERLAND2023-09-19 | Beyond the failure of Left and Right
When a system finally fails it fails everwhere all at once. Are we at that point?
Intro AudioFun Boy Three - The Lunatics Have Take Over The AsylumTerry Hall, Lynval Golding, Neville Stapleyoutube.com/watch?v=7aItpjF5vXc
Reservoir Media Management (Label) (on behalf of Chrysalis Records); Sony Music Publishing, MINT_BMG, CMRRA, LatinAutorPerf, ASCAP, BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, LatinAutor - SonyATV, Abramus Digital, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, ARESA, and 6 Music Rights Societies
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIUK Intelligence Services and the overthrow of Salvador Allende - an Untold Story.HYPERLAND2023-09-11 | UK Intelligence Services and the overthrow of Salvador Allende - an Untold Story.
The Other 9/11 attack that murdered thousands of innocent civilians.
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIUpdates, lies and looking ahead.HYPERLAND2023-09-08 | Updates, lies and looking ahead.
Fun for the whole family.
https://www.who.int/news/item/12-07-2023-ongoing-avian-influenza-outbreaks-in-animals-pose-risk-to-humanshttps://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.htmlSky Australia youtube.com/watch?v=gFDcYBy-ljYNamibia bans poultry imports from Denmark, Netherlands due to bird flu
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIFear, Corruption or Naivete - Whats Eating Western Science?HYPERLAND2023-07-25 | From the top labs and the powerful scientists who run them, to the puff-piece journalists who uncritically protect them, something is very rotten in the corridors of Western Science.
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIBank bailouts, bribes and housing bubbles - The Middle Class Opiate.HYPERLAND2023-07-18 | Who benefits and who pays when banks get bailed out? Bank bailouts and housing bubbles are two parts of the same failure.
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIJonathan Sugarman: My Big Fat Irish Banking ScandalHYPERLAND2023-07-18 | Every country has had one - some more than one. This is the inside story of Jonathan Sugarman's one man fight to do what was right and all the forces that have been hell-bent on burying him.
Here's some further links from Jonathan. PLEASE help and support via paypal or patroen. Thanking you in advance. David and Ian
Music by HYPERLANDGraphics by Caroline LargeImage NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIThe Hydrogen Future - An insiders view of the coming transitionHYPERLAND2023-07-13 | Top scientists, industry chiefs and government advisors are already holding meetings to decide the energy policy of the future. We talk to someone who was there.
Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScIThe Media - One truth to rule them all.HYPERLAND2023-07-13 | The Media - what happened to them? Speaking truth to power is out. . Defending the narrative is in. One truth to rule them all....The Media - One truth to rule them all...