Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #4

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it'll be a bit more challenging

for this robot to score.

RoboCup this year we have

not let in a single goal,

although we scored 48 goals

in total against our opponents.

So you are world champion?

We are.

We came first this year

in the RoboCup international competition.

The blue robots need to

have an indirect free kick

so they're figuring out how they

should pass between themselves.

Could this team eventually

beat the real Brazilian football team?

That is the goal of RoboCup.

That is, by 2050 to have a team

of soccer playing robots

which can defeat the FIFA world champions.

And we'll see it happen.

I'm very hopeful that we'll

actually get a team of robots

which are competent enough

and smart and intelligent enough

to actually beat the

world champions in 2050.

Better than Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar?

It sounds difficult but we can get there.

We can get there.

We have a certain reverence for robot 8.

I mean, to us, saying robot 8 is equivalent

to someone saying Messi

or Ronaldo or something...

it's the same.

This here is robot 8.

It's very identifiable because

its pattern includes four

green dots on top and it's...

one of our favorites, actually.

Beautiful.

- Do you love it?

- Yes, we do.

We do love robot 8.

The day Nikki passed away

we were scheduled to see a psychiatrist.

She'd had some...

psychotic issues where she had

a brain tumor when she was very young

and it was time to do some research on her.

I think she was feeling nervous

that if she were to go to this appointment

she might get stuck in the hospital

because that had happened before.

And at some point

a couple hours before her appointment,

she left the house.

She took Christos' Porsche and drove away.

I saw all the police

and I started to walk down

the on-ramp and they stopped me

and they said I wasn't allowed down there.

And I asked if it was

my daughter in the car,

what car it was, and they

wouldn't give me any information.

And then a crane lifted up the car

and once it lifted up the car,

I realized it was the Porsche.

Adding to the tragedy,

the first responder took photos

of the nearly decapitated head of the girl

and emailed it to some friends.

Almost instantly the pictures

were out on the internet,

and hundreds of thousands,

possibly millions, clicked on them.

Hoping to avoid a new

wave of sick curiosity,

we are here not even showing

a picture of Nikki alive,

only a place in the house she liked.

Up until I saw the pictures on the internet

I had an image of Nikki...

as a perfect...

as a perfect face, perfect, uh...

condition.

The coroner told us,

the only thing the coroner told us

is that a portion of her thumb

had been severed in the accident

and that she had head trauma,

but they never gave us any detail.

So I always focused on the thumb.

I received emails with

the pictures attached

and it was a short time after the accident.

Um...

It was disguised. I didn't know

who the email came from,

and I opened it up.

And the bad ones were very, um... hateful,

very hateful... towards me,

towards Nikki, towards our family.

It said "Dead girl walking.

Woo hoo, daddy, I'm still alive".

- Woo hoo?

- Woo hoo.

Do you still feel the pain

when you received this?

Yes.

And it's never gonna leave you?

Never.

Some of the hate mail was

so unspeakably horrifying

that we cannot repeat it here.

We were told there was

nothing that could be done

because... there's no law in place for...

pictures of deceased people

because when they pass away,

their privacy rights go with them.

I didn't know such

depravity existed in humans,

and I think dogs treat their kind

better than humans treat their kind.

It's just... there is no dignity

or respect on the internet

because we're not held accountable.

Nobody's there to tell us not to.

I have always believed that the internet

is a manifestation of the antichrist,

of evil itself.

It is the spirit of evil.

And I feel like it's running through...

everybody on earth and it's...

claiming its victories

in those people that are also evil.

West Virginia,

the small town of Green Bank in Appalachia.

What you're seeing behind me

is a very large telescope,

a hundred meters in diameter,

but instead of picking up the light

as normal telescopes do,

it picks up the radio waves that

are coming from the universe,

from objects out there

as close as the planets

but as far as actually the Big Bang.

The telescope discovered the black hole

in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

In the Visitor Center

you can roll your coins into a funnel,

which resembles a black hole.

Your coins indeed disappear irretrievably.

If there was a civilization like ours

on a nearby planet, we could

almost certainly pick up

some of their television stations perhaps,

some of their radar... who knows what.

This collecting area is

several acres in size

and it can pick up enormous signals

from an enormous distance,

but they've traveled so far

that they are so faint that

typically they contain a lot less energy

than the energy of a falling

snowflake settling on the ground.

The enemy of radio astronomy

is the natural radio signals

that we make on earth

either deliberately or accidentally.

Things like microwave

ovens can emit radiation

which can blind us to the signals

that are coming from the stars.

Cell phones are billions

of billions of times stronger

than the faint signals we're looking for.

Satellites, they beam straight down on us.

- Music stations?

- Music stations, yes.

- Playing Elvis?

- Playing Elvis.

We've managed to keep

cell phone transmissions out.

Your smart phones are dumb here;

they just do not work.

We really try to keep

wireless transmissions

of any kind suppressed

within about ten miles of the observatory.

For a long time we had a fleet

of Checker diesels

and these were the standard

New York City cabs

and they were precious to us

because they were the perfect

vehicle for radio astronomers.

These do not have spark plugs,

they don't make noise.

In the forest near the telescope

we met a modern day hermit.

So, see, I've finally gone high tech.

I've got a faucet installed.

It really makes a

difference, I have to say.

I became very ill

from radiation sickness in 1996

and I lost 50 pounds.

I nearly died three times

and I became reactive

to all the wireless radiation signals

when all the cell phones went up.

They went up in massive numbers in 1996

and I tried to do all kind of treatment,

I moved, I'd lost my career.

I was working as an architect in Honolulu.

I had to be separated

from my family and children

and finally I heard about this in 2011

and... as soon as I heard there was

a place with no cell towers,

I was here in 48 hours.

Sometimes if I have really bad

reactions to radiation,

I actually will sleep on the ground.

I feel better on the ground.

And there may be a science to this.

They say the ground emits 7.83 hertz

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