On Water

Produced by the Surfrider Foundation

Their Mission Statement:

A little over 25 years ago three people in Malibu, California found out that their favorite wave was about to be destroyed. Think about that for a second.

Think about something you love... something that gives you enjoyment. Taken away.

First Point, pictured to the right, the quintessential perfect, California wave was about to be destroyed. Those three people organized and worked with the local municipalities until they were satisfied that their efforts to preserve that iconic wave would be successful.

This was the genesis of Surfrider Foundation.

Today, we are doing this same thing in about 15 countries around the world.

Our mission is the protection and enjoyment of oceans, waves and beaches through a powerful activist network.

You can think about that as three concepts. "Protection and enjoyment", we don't want to put a velvet rope around a beach and tell people to keep off. We're surfers, we're beach goers, we're watermen... we enjoy the coasts. We're a user group. Next up is "oceans, waves and beaches." Think coastlines, we're engaged with environmental issues that affect our coastlines. "Powerful activist network" speaks to how we go about this mission. We are a grassroots organization. We're local in many coastal regions.

We're moms, we're surfers, we're kids and teens... we're you. We're engaged to protect what we love; oceans, waves and beaches.

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

Photo by Ted Streshinsky

Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and the Long Now Foundation, writer, editor and game designer, Stewart Brand has helped to define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world we live in now.

Since the 1960s, he has maintained that -- given access to the information we need -- humanity can make the world a better place. One of his early accomplishments: helping to persuade NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space. The iconic Big Blue Marble became the cover for his Whole Earth Catalog, a massive compendium of resources and facts he thought people might like to know. And we did: the 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies. In 1987, he wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; in 1994, How Buildings Learn.

Currently Brand is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of spinoff projects, including the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world's languages, and the Long Bets website. He's also busy with the Global Business Network (part of the Monitor Group), helping businesses plan for the near and way-far future. (bio taken here)

Entitled Opinions: A conversation with Thomas Sheehan, Stanford Professor of Religious Studies, about Heidegger's Being and Time.

Heidegger 1968

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford and specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), National Endowment for the Humanities (1980), Fritz Thyssen Foundation (1979-80), and a Mellon Foundation Grant. His books include: Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth (trans., 2007); Becoming Heidegger (2007); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981). (bio taken here)

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Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy

Local politics -- schools, zoning, council elections -- hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies the 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

RadioLab - The Good Show

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

C. K. Williams on Whitman’s Music: Whose Words These Are

C.K. Williams has won nearly every major poetry award. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the National Book Award in 2003. In 2005, he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Since 1996, he has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and he divides his time between Princeton and France. (bio taken here)

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