To find videos from Films from the Future on YouTube that cover specific technologies, topics or films, simply use the search box below:
After several weeks of recording, the complete Films from the Future is now freely available on YouTube!
You can watch/listen to all 114 videos on the Films from the Future YouTube channel. But by far the easiest way to listen is to browse the book chapters and sections over on the Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future page here.
I’ve had a few people ask why this isn’t a podcast, pointing out that it’s much harder to listen to content like this on YouTube.
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Risk Bites goes Black Glass
One of the consequences of working from home during the coronavirus lockdown has been the installation of a spanking new black glass dry erase board in my home office (aka the spare bedroom).
As someone who can’t think without a dry erase board, it was only a matter of time before I cracked and put one in. And just to be different, I thought why not go for a fancy glass one, and a bunch of fluorescent gel pens to boot.
Here’s an odd thing:
For the past few months, a 2014 Risk Bites video on nanoscale silver has been getting hundreds of views a day — up from 30 – 50 views per day pre-coronavirus. Yet between May 7 – May 9, views from YouTube searches dropped from over 200 per day to zero.
Has the video somehow been blacklisted by YouTube?
Back in the late 1990’s, a close colleague and friend Dr. Paul Baron developed the “Aerosol Calculator” — an Excel spreadsheet that contained pretty much every equation imaginable (at the time) related to airborne particle behavior.
The Aerosol Calculator became legend, and an essential tool for anyone working in aerosol science. It contained over 100 equations for calculating aerosol behavior, drawing from the books Aerosol Measurement (edited by Baron and Willeke, and later Kulkarni, Baron and Willeke), and the equally legendary Aerosol Technology by Bill Hinds.
As part of the ongoing project to publicly read Films from the Future aloud, cover to cover, I thought I’d post this recent video from chapter 1 on responsible innovation:
It’s pretty short — in part because ideas associated with responsible innovation threads through the whole book — but it is hopefully a helpful framing of the field and the ideas.
As I posted a week or so ago, I’m involved in a project this summer where I’m recording myself reading from Films from the Future: The technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies, and posting the readings up on my personal YouTube channel.
Given the success of the project, it’s been moved to its very own YouTube Channel: The Films from the Future project.
Chapters 1 and 2 are already up, and over the next few weeks the following chapters will be posted.
To keep abreast of the latest uploads, you can subscribe to the channel here.
As I point out in the introductory video, I’m not a voice actor, and so these recordings are far from perfect. Yet despite this, there’s a nuance and insight you get from listening to an author read their own work — whether it’s from the phrasing and cadence, to what’s emphasized and what is not — that you don’t get from someone else reading the work.
Plus — and this is a large part of why I’m doing this — the videos make the book and the ideas and information it contains accessible to anyone with an internet connection (and YouTube access — sorry China!). And ultimately, this is why I wrote it.
If you find the videos useful, please let me know — and spread the word!
Those nano-geeks amongst you with long memories may remember that, back in 2009, I played around with a couple of visualizations of the relationship between particle number, surface area, and mass. Those of you with even longer memories may recall that the origins of these visualizations goes all the way back to 2002.
As I was digging through some old files this morning, I came across my original work here, and was caught off-guard by a wave of nostalgia.
Back in the early 2000’s I was working on ways of measuring the surface area of collections of nanoparticles, and giving an increasing number of talks about how particle surface area, number and mass are related.
The challenge was that, at the time, the standard way of assessing health impact from exposure to airborne particles was to measure the mass concentration of material depositing in the lungs. Yet research was beginning to show that, for fine particles, health impact was potentially associated with the surface area, or even the number, of inhaled particles.
This was a problem, as at the nanoscale, this would potentially lead to mass concentration measurements dangerously underestimating the risks of airborne nanomaterials.
At the time, I was using the platform Mathematica for a lot of my modeling work, and decided to play around with it to see if I could come up with a simple visualization of the relationship between particle number, surface area and mass.
Here, I should say that Mathematica — at least at the time — was a powerful but gnarly math platform that no sane person would use to create complex animations. But that didn’t stop me relishing the challenge, and so I started to play around.
The first iteration — from March 2002 according to my archives – was a video visualization of a cube being progressively split four times:
This was a good start, but it lacked any quantitative information. So the next iteration was to add information on the number, surface area and mass of the cubes:
(Update: despite the awesomeness of this course, there was so little interest amongst students that we’re putting it on hold … we’ll see what we can do though to do something cool in this space though. Stay tuned!)
This is really exciting — this summer I’ll be teaching an online undergraduate course at ASU with my colleague Anna Muldoon on infectious diseases and movies.
Of course, this is a direct response to COVID. But it also builds on three years of experience using sci-fi movies to explore the relationship between science, technology, society and the future, in ASU’s popular Moviegoer’s Guide To the Future course.
Well, despite thinking numerous times that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, I’ve reached the half-way point in my quest to record myself reading Films from the Future cover to cover…
Update May 22, 2020 – this project has now moved over to The Films from The Future Project on YouTube. New chapters will be posted over the coming weeks.