The topics:

• Our glitch was early this week! Stephen introed the show.

• Stephen played an excerpt from our first show from May of 2005. It was 100% scripted. Phil and Stephen didn't trust themselves to go off-the-cuff back then. Obviously the show is much different today.

• Stephen thinks one of the highlights from this last year was the Robert Zubrin. Show notes here. Audio here (scroll down to the Dec 9 show).

  Phil and Stephen agreed that they need to get Zubrin back on the show. They need to talk to him about his ideas on going to Mars on the cheap. They'd also like to hear about how he invented 3-person chess when he was 20 years old:

  

• Phil thought the interview with Ben Goertzel was fascinating. Ben argues that the best way to "invent" an AGI is not to try to reverse engineer the human brain, but to let it evolve as we did. Show notes here. Audio here (scroll down to the March 9 show).

• Last week Yves Rossy leapt from a plane and into the record books crossing the English Channel on a homemade jet-propelled wing.

  This is yet more proof that "in the future we will all be Batman."

• Looking to the future - we hope to have Ray Kurzweil on the show soon to promote his film "The Singularity is Near."

• P.J. Manney joined us.

  P.J. mentioned the New Scientist article "Eleven things the next president should do for science."

• Phil mentioned the show with Jim Elvidge. His theory - we're living in a simulation and paranormal events are the easter eggs in the software. Show notes here. Audio here.

  We told P.J. about our Presidential coffee mug competition. Yes, we hope they will talk about Speculist subjects in the campaign, but if they dress as a sci-fi character for Halloween... well, we'd probably give them the mug for that too. Here's the obvious character choice for McCain:

  

• Stephen would like to see a G.I. Bill-like program to encourage students to major in math and science. Phil pointed to a Better All The Time story that showed an encouraging increase in math and science students.

• Sunday was a big day at The Speculist. We had our first anniversary FastForward Radio, and Phil published the 37th edition of Better All The Time.

  On FastForward Radio Phil brought up one of the BATT stories, "Happier All The Time." Probably the most underreported story ever: by objective measures the world is getting happier all the time.

• P.J. Manney quoted the Dalai Lama during the show. Here's the exact quote:

  If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

• Matt Duing called in and reported the latest news on carbon nanotubes - "Commercially Viable Process for Making Carbon Nanotube-Based Materials Developed."

  Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the sheets are produced at up to seven meters per minute. Unlike previous sheet fabrication methods - using dispersions of nanotubes in liquids - this dry-state process produces materials made from the ultra-long nanotubes required to optimise their unique set of properties.

  "Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialisation seems possible, and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application demonstrations", says Dr Ray H. Baughman of the NanoTech Institute.

  "Synergistic aspects of our nanotube sheet and twisted yarn fabrication technologies will likely help accelerate the commercialisation of both technologies, and UTD and CSIRO are working together with companies and government laboratories to bring both technologies to the marketplace."

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Josh Charles. The song is "Love Work and Money."

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