Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, pursuant to our distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposia, on Friday night this week because I feel like it, here for your delectation is Steven Henry Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, presenting his talk on How Things in Nature Tend to Sync Up (23:13). Steven is known for his contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his work in mathematical biology, engineering, and complex network theory, including his Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos textbook.

In tonight’s show, Steven asks, demonstrates, and answers the question: “Does existence need life to achieve synchronization?”. And of course the answer is no, yet the mechanism you may find to be more fascinating than you would have thought it to be had you not watched this SDA LNR DLDIS show, not having realized that when the metronomes are placed on the coupled rollers, they then have and do utilize that mechanism for the exchange of information. Without life. Like stars and leptons. Which reminds me of the first two shows in this series (what, you didn’t expect me to link it back up?).

One of my favourite quotes from Steven in this video starts at 5:49:

Keep in mind that although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate, what’s really going on is a kind of selfish Darwinian behaviour; each is scattering away at random, to try to save its [self]. That is, out of the desire to save itself, each creature is following these [four simple] rules, and that leads to something that’s safe for all of them.

Even though it looks like they’re thinking as a group: they’re not.

That’s so cool. Has it ever occurred to you that it may be the case that the only thing that fundamentally exists, metaphysically, is information, and that things like matter, energy, and force are just taxonomical categorizations that we apply to manifestations of certain classes of metaphysical information, in order that we may use them as epistemological tools? It may be all well and good that a planet has to orbit a star according to Kepler’s laws, but how does that planet know that star is there? The answer, of course, may be that gravity is nothing more than a kind of information.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Thursday night wild-card show, here is the famous story of Lake Peigneur (9:53): a good reminder to everyone to always be careful where you dig, obviously in the concrete, but also, I would postulate, in the abstract.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday night edition of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight we sail east through the Strait of Gibraltar, almost run aground on Tunis — apparently the captain values retsina more than the lives of his passengers — and land on the Greek island of Kalymnos, where we look back to Florida to pay tribute to the tsabouna, a shepherd’s instrument that has been played on the Greek Islands for over 2,000 years.
To play the tsabouna one must blow hard into a carefully selected part of a dead goat until the entire goat is inflated, squeeze with all your might until the goat begins to sing, and then use your fingers to serially choose, in rapid succession, from the six available note-holes drilled conveniently in one of it’s hooves.
Difficult to play but easy to listen to, the sound of a well-played tsabouna is irresistible, as you’ll see around the 1 minute 30 second mark of the video. So here then, without further ado, Nikitas Tsimouris plays the old chestnut the tsabouna.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.