The lecture "Our Place in the Cosmos" explains how we (and, for that matter, all complex life forms) are connected to the Universe around us. This connection relies on the fact that our Milky Way and other galaxies like it play host to cosmic recycling processes that involve the formation of stars and their planetary systems inside nebulae (dense gas/dust clouds), nuclear fusion reactions that occur within stars, and the death of massive stars in explosions known as supernovae.

What is science? Are science and rationality the same thing? If science was something new, what sort of a new thing was science? I will discuss different ways of knowing, focusing on the differences between the analytic method of the enlightenment and the synthetic method of romanticism (and scholarship classically). These methods should be used together, but in fact their practitioners have been at war since Marx and Rousseau, leading to a schism in Western intellectual history with disastrous consequences.

Mindfulness meditation, one type of meditation technique, has been shown to enhance emotional awareness and psychological flexibility as well as induce

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people's intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring.

Perception for robotics is growing as a field. What was once a specialized area utilizing expensive sensors and using situational information unavailable to more general computer vision problems, is merging into the mainstream. Cheap sensors such as the Kinect provide 3D data to the masses, video is readily available online, and cell phones and cameras with GPS provide situational awareness. Robotics problems are now more general issues. In this talk, we will discuss a variety of perception projects for indoor personal robots currently underway at Willow Garage, Inc.