Category: Reading List

Apocalypse Soon: Meet The Scientists Preparing For the End Times

October 5, 2014 - David Feldman Show, Reading List, The News From Around The World, Top Stories

The men were too absorbed in their work to notice my arrival at first. Three walls of the conference room held whiteboards densely filled with algebra and scribbled diagrams. One man jumped up to sketch another graph, and three colleagues crowded around to examine it more closely. Their urgency surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. These academics were debating what they believe could be one of the greatest threats to mankind—could superintelligent computers wipe us all out?

I was visiting the Future of Humanity Institute, a research department at Oxford University founded in 2005 to study the “big-picture questions” of human life. One of its main areas of research is existential risk. The physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists, computer scientists, and mathematicians of the institute are students of the apocalypse.

Predictions of the end of history are as old as history itself, but the 21st century poses new threats. The development of nuclear weapons marked the first time that we had the technology to end all human life. Since then, advances in synthetic biology and nanotechnology have increased the potential for human beings to do catastrophic harm by accident or through deliberate, criminal intent.

In July this year, long-forgotten vials of smallpox—a virus believed to be “dead”—were discovered at a research center near Washington, DC. Now imagine some similar incident in the future, but involving an artificially generated killer virus or nanoweapons. Some of these dangers are closer than we might care to imagine. When Syrian hackers sent a message from the Associated Press Twitter account that there had been an attack on the White House, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market briefly fell by $136b. What unthinkable chaos would be unleashed if someone found a way to empty people’s bank accounts?

Joan Rivers Remembered: Read Daughter Melissa’s Funny Eulogy in Full

September 11, 2014 - David Feldman Show, Reading List

Joan Rivers once wrote that she wanted a Hollywood-style funeral, with Meryl Streep crying in five different accents and a toe-tag designed by Harry Winston. She came close. The service, held at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street on Sept. 7, was indeed a red-carpeted, star-studded affair — Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Walters, Clive Davis,Diane Sawyer and a slew of other luminaries filed past the paparazzi and into the temple to bid Rivers goodbye. Howard Stern, Cindy Adams and Deborah Norville delivered three of the eulogies, and at one point, Hugh Jackman sang Peter Allen‘s “Quiet Please, There’s a Lady on Stage.”

But if Rivers’ funeral was a “show,” the high point must have been the eulogy delivered by her daughter, Melissa, 46, who stood before the crowd and read an excerpt from A Letter to My Mom, a collection of letters by celebrities that will be published in April by Crown Archetype. In recent years, Joan had been staying in a room at Melissa’s L.A. residence when, once a week, she flew in from New York to tape E!’s Fashion Police. Apparently — according to correspondence Melissa wrote before Joan died and read at her mother’s funeral, printed in its entirety below — Joan had some issues with the accommodations.

Read the full eulogy here

Bill Hader

September 3, 2014 - David Feldman Show, Reading List

In his eight years as a cast member on Saturday Night Live , Bill Hader had frequent opportunity and the perfect venue to show off his great gift for impersonation. Ever since his very first episode, in 2005, when he and fellow newbie Andy Samberg had an “impression off,” Hader has amassed an incredible menagerie of mimicry bits—from his Vincent Price to Alan Alda, from Tim Burton to James Carville, from John Malkovich to Garrison Keillor, and even Al Pacino. While he created some widely beloved characters during his run—not least of all the droll and delirious “Weekend Update” correspondent Stefon—these imitations of real-life personalities were his signature bit.

For years Hader, now 36, would be invited on to late-night shows, seemingly only as an opportunity to showcase his awesome Jabba the Hutt impression. But the digital archives from these guest visits are a gold mine. Watching Hader “do” Charlie Rose in front of Charlie Rose, sending the staunchly earnest talk-show host into snot-bubbly giggling fits on live TV, is the reason God invented YouTube.

In movies like Superbad (2007), and 2008’s trifecta ofTropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Hader grew into a kind of comedic “Hey, that guy!” He was recognizable as he delivered a message or a memorable punch line, but then duly departed. As his fame grew, so too did his opportunities and his impact on the films in which he appeared—his Andy Warhol in Men in Black 3(2012), for example, gets our entirely unbiased thumbs up. And in this month’s he-said-she-said romance The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Hader takes a turn for the seriocomic, co-starring with dramatic heavyweights James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain. In The Skeleton Twins, also out this month, Hader and fellow SNLite Kristen Wiig play fraternal twins who reunite after a long estrangement—yet another stoner comedy, it’s not. But, as Hader tells his pal and fellow Hot Rod (2007), Tropic Thunder, and Pineapple Express co-star, Danny McBride, he’s just trying to mix it up.

Read the full interview here

The Rosetta Mission

August 25, 2014 - Reading List, Top Stories

Astronomers have been scrutinising high-definition photos of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko sent back by the Rosetta spacecraft.

And now a shortlist of five possible sites that could become the location for the first-ever landing on a comet, have been drawn up by the European Space Agency (Esa).

In mid-November, Esa intends to send down a robot laboratory named Philae, which will harpoon itself to the comet’s surface and carry out a battery of scientific tests, the results of which astronomers hope will help them work out how planets formed.

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk

Are you baffled by technology? Ask a six-year-old: They know more than 45-year-olds

August 7, 2014 - Reading List

Ofcom study finds teens of 14 and 15 are most confident with technology More than 60 per cent of adults over 55 admitted they struggle with gadgets Under-eights have never known a world without social networks | Updated: 18:13 EST, 6 August 2014 Experts: Children as young as six have a better understanding of modern technology than most 45-year-olds, a study has found Children as young as six have a better understanding of modern technology than most 45-year-olds, a study has found.

Click here to view original article Are you baffled by technology? Ask a six-year-old: They know more than 45-year-olds

It’s August. Here Is Your Beach Reading.

August 2, 2014 - Reading List, The News From Around The World

My first time at the ocean was in the summer of 1953, when I was 14 months old. My parents rented a house in Beach Haven, N.J., on Long Beach Island, long before the Garden State Parkway was finished. My father drove the “old road” so that we could vacation there. He wanted me to love it as much as he did.

Click here to view original article It’s August. Here Is Your Beach Reading.

The David Feldman Show