Empire or Humanity?

Historian Howard Zinn, best known for his monumental A People's History of the United States, has often recognized the fact that, despite their moving rhetoric and party affiliation, the interest of those in power are not the same interests as those of the people who elect them. In the following animation of his essay Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire, narrated by Viggo Mortensen, Zinn describes the gradual process through which he came to recognize that despite the high talk of politicians, the United States has been involved in an imperialistic campaign since World War II.

We have been involved in an attempt to dominate the planet. Isn't it time, Zinn ends, that we finally spread a global campaign of humanity and compassion?




Check out a hilarious animated history of our love with weapons, or just check out more of Howard Zinn's brilliance.
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The Brain

Pinky and the Brain taught you the different parts of the brain before. Now it's time to learn a little bit about how the neurons in your brain work and how they connect to each other.



Isn't it odd? Completely unaware individual neurons somehow produce conscious awareness. Makes me wonder whether we will ever come up with a satisfying theory of how this happens...

Is consciousness an unpredictably emergent stochastic phenomenon? Are we doomed to ignorance? Was Nietzsche right, beyond his own foresight, when he said that we are necessarily unknown to ourselves?
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Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness - Schopenhauer on Love

People tend to think that love is one of the most direct ways to achieve happiness. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in an account that has a striking resemblance to modern evolutionary theory, believed that the love/happiness relationship is an illusion created by the veil of Maya, i.e. Mother Nature, in its attempt to get us to reproduce and perpetuate the species. Of course, Schopenhauer might have a bit of a hard time explaining the picture on the side, but I'm sure he would enjoy it :)

Although Schopenhauer's account is teleological, whereas evolutionary theory isn't, the underlying idea in both cases is that we are fooled and deceived, whether by nature as Schopenhauer believed, or by our genes as someone like Dawkins could argue, into viscerally believing that having children is good for us. A moment of sober reflection shows that it is not, to be sure, but we now know that our brains and bodies are flooded with hormones and endorphins, most notably oxytocin, that turn the object of our affection, whatever character traits he or she might actually possess, into a beautiful, fascinating, charming, unique individual, just long enough to produce offspring and reallocate that love and affection unto the next generation.

In the end, the goal is not our happiness but the perpetuation of the species. The prospect of our happiness is simply the temporary trap nature employs in order to fool us into creating those who will eventually replace us :)



Alain de Botton is not wasting any time, is he?

Click here to watch all the other episodes of this nice documentary series.

The Orangutan

In this clip, Sir David Attenborough explains the intelligence and social lives of orangutans.



I'm always amazed how most communication in the animal world takes place without spoken language... makes you wonder what goes on in their minds, doesn't it?

Bottom-up processes rule, but they can be unintuitive as hell!
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Slow Motion Session

Some of the mesmerizing things that happen in the fraction of a second...



Now you have an awesome new screen saver (just view it in full-screen mode and turn up the volume).

And check out more slow motion awesomeness here and here, as well as the incredible invisible world.
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Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Last September, after having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, Professor Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University, delivered a sensational 'last lecture' that has become a viral sensation in YouTube.

In this inspiring and funny lecture, Pausch talks about the important lessons he has learned in life, the struggles he has had to overcome to achieve his personal dreams, and how you can achieve your own dreams and help others achieve theirs. This is a lecture you simply cannot miss.



Sadly, Professor Pausch passed away today.
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Mystery of Auroras Solved?

Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, are a beautiful and stunning sight to behold, but they are potentially dangerous to communication systems, space flights, electric equipment and compasses. Essentially, these lights are the result of the interaction of solar wind particles with the Earth's magnetic field, and scientists seem to have finally figured out the 30 year-old mystery of what triggers the space explosions that result in these beautiful lights, as demonstrated in this nice animation from National Geographic.



And if you want to learn more about the sun, including the most powerful sun storm ever recorded and the amazing insights to which it led, check out this episode of the wonderful Naked Scientists (fast forward to 26:31 for the fascinating and terrifying story on that storm), or go directly to that interview.











I just love how scientists figure things out!
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A War on Science

Science is under attack by pseudo-intellectuals who, in their attempt to rescue their religious beliefs from overwhelming and growing empirical evidence to the contrary, manipulate ordinary people's gullibility and lack of critical thinking abilities by creating the illusion that there is a controversy among the scientific community regarding the theory of evolution when, in fact, there is no such thing.

These charlatans and pharisees, understanding their lack of scientific evidence and credentials, have sought to fight this battle outside of the scientific jurisdiction and bring it to the court of popular opinion, which they distract with platitudes and superficially persuasive rhetoric. More troubling still are their successful attempts to gain political power by manipulating high-ranking officials in the Vatican and even the president of the most powerful nation in the world.



To watch more videos about this troubling issue, check out the creationism tag.
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Physical Theories As Women

Scientific theories are full of personality. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not simply cold, detached, materialistic abstractions thought up by brilliant people. To help you understand the varied typology of personalities in the physics world, for instance, Simon Dedeo aptly compares them to women:

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

1. Electrodynamics is your college girlfriend. Pretty complex, you probably won't date long enough to really understand her.

2. Special relativity is the girl you meet at the dorm party while you're dating electrodynamics. You make out. It's not really cheating because it's not like you call her back. But you have a sneaking suspicion she knows electrodynamics and told her everything.

3. Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.

4. General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.

5. Quantum field theory is from overseas, but she doesn't really have an accent. You fall deeply in love, but she treats you horribly. You are pretty sure she's fooling around with half of your friends, but you don't care. You know it will end badly.

6. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.

7. Analytical classical mechanics is a bit older, and knows stuff you don't.

8. String theory is off in her own little world. She is either profound or insane. If you start dating, you never see your friends anymore. It's just string theory, 24/7.
It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

And come on, are you really surprised that general relativity hates quantum mechanics? You should have seen that coming from a mile away...

Reposted from McSweeney's
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Run, Little Chimp!

After having realized it was tired of being caged, Ichiro, a 42 year-old chimp from Ishikawa Zoo, decided to break out from his pen. Guards tried to use a tranquilizer rifle on him, but he showed them who's boss...



How did they eventually get him down? They lured him with a banana :)
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Darwin, Wallace & Plate Tectonics

There are two virtues of scientific inquiry I admire most. First, good scientific theories usually receive independent, measurable confirmation from seemingly unrelated disciplines. Second, good scientific theories sometimes entail predictive consequences for other disciplines, and in exceptional cases can even become the bedrock of new scientific areas of research. This combination of independent confirmation and feedback allows scientists to produce a growing and ever more coherent network of hypotheses and general principles that aid in our understanding of the universe.

In a way, this is exactly how the biological theory of evolution provided some of the very early support for the geological theory that would eventually come to be known as plate tectonics, and Alfred Russell Wallace, to his credit, was one of the first men to boldly realize that his empirical experience of evolution and natural selection implied the necessity for questioning the previously unquestioned permanence of the very ground we stand upon.



Amazing, isn't it?
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Inherit the Wind

Today marks another anniversary of the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a 1925 legal case that tested a law that forbid the teaching of man's evolution from a lower order of animals, as well as any other attempt to contradict the creationist story found in the Bible.

The case received a lot of publicity, as two of the most famous legal minds of the time fought against each other, one on the prosecution side and the other on the defense. The teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution, John T. Scopes, was found guilty and fined $100.

Eventually, in 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that such bans are unconstitutional, since they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, due to their obvious religious purpose.

In any case, the famous case was made infamous by its fictionalized account in the play Inherit the Wind, which was eventually made into the movie you can watch below.



And if you are interested in the evolution of creationism, make sure you watch this great NOVA documentary that focuses in the 2005 Dover case against so-called Intelligent Design.
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Natural Battles: Leopard vs. Crocodile

You have seen other amazing natural battles before (bees vs hornets, octopus vs sharks, badgers vs rattlesnakes, оr just check out the Animals tag for endless animal fun), and here is the latest, a leopard that goes to town on a crocodile:









Via Telegraph.
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Saturn: Lord of the Rings

Seeing the planets through a telescope for the first time is probably one of those life experiences one never forgets. For me, seeing Saturn, surrounded by its rings, was a very surreal experience, and the one that sticks in my mind most intensely to this day.

In this quick video, Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) explains how Saturn's moons have helped shape these beautiful rings.



To learn about Titan, Saturn's most fascinating moon, check out this amazing documentary.
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Funny TV Freudian Slips

Ah, the things people say... Wouldn't you love to be a reporter or anchor person just for the chance to publicly broadcast your private perverted thoughts before you realized you did?


Oh, he's got nothing to fear... we'll just keep his secret between us... shhh...
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100 Greatest Discoveries - Origin and Evolution of Life

For the past few centuries, and although it is still a rather young discipline, science has produced some of the greatest discoveries about the world around and within us. In today's episode of this documentary series, we explore, in no particular order, ten of the most dramatic discoveries related to the origin and evolution of life: the K-T asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction, the discovery of the first dinosaur fossils, Stanley Miller's experiments creating the potential for life, thriving flora and fauna around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, the Burgess Shale that led to the discovery of Cambrian diversity, Linnaeus' system for classification of species, Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, the discovery of Australopithecus Afarensis ("Lucy"), the Laetoli footprints, and the Toumai skull.


Yes, a few details seem to be outdated by now, but rather than concentrating on the errors, I prefer to admire the self-correcting mechanisms built into the scientific method, which allows better theories to replace more deficient ones, however wonderful and beautiful they may have been when first proposed.

Click here to check out more episodes of this series (when I get to post them).

Planet Earth: Caves

Call in sick, take the day off, quit your job if you have to... Today, Sir David Attenborough takes us through a fascinating journey, exploring the last great frontier on Earth: Caves.

Filled with unbelievable footage, and to the sound of a beautiful musical score, this episode will acquaint you with a world full of exotic life forms and amazing geological formations, including the world's greatest concentration of crystals. Some of these caves are so large that not only could jumbo planes fly through them, they could easily engulf the Empire State Building!

Watch out for the amazing optical illusions that form when fresh water meets with salt water; it's truly mesmerizing...


Hungry for more? Check out the rest of the Planet Earth episodes.
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Time for Some Campaignin'

After the campaigning for the party nomination, it's time for... that's right, more campaigning!


The end of this insanity can't come soon enough...
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To Be a Liberal

American political discourse seems to be dominated by the bifurcation of absolutist, paternalistic conservatives and by bleeding heart, relativistic liberals. In today's video, Roy Zimmerman makes fun of the latter in a hilarious song, showing how hard and exhausting it must be to be a liberal.


Click here to find more of Roy's best tunes (according to me).
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Journey Through the Center of the Earth

You've thought about it: what would happen if we made a hole through the center of the Earth, all the way to the other side? For starters, if you do this in the USA, the other side of the hole would end up in the southern Atlantic Ocean, not in China!

But what if you were to jump into this hole? Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains the sequence of events.


There is still something that bothers me about this hypothetical scenario. I'm not actually sure why you would 'fall' in the first place? Anyone can help me here?

On a related note, the other day I also heard on my local NPR station that if you were to send an object into orbit from the place you started your journey through the center of the earth at the same time you started falling, you would both reach the other side at exactly the same time, and back again, ad infinitum. Doesn't that tickle your mind?
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Proving the Pythagorean Theorem

I was reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy on the train the other day, and that got me thinking about how universal claims, like in mathematics, can be made and justified. Though the relationship is a bit tenuous, I started thinking about how theory, the application of general principles and rules to particular instances, started with the Greeks, culminating with the genius of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes.

No matter what your level of math literacy, you know the Pythagorean theorem, the idea that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of its legs, but do you know how to prove it?

Drawing on historical analysis, late mathematician Jacob Bronowski helps you understand how the theorem can be proven, and some of its theoretical and practical significance. This is how mathematics should be taught in schools...


There are numerous ways of proving this theorem. The following is as water-tight a proof as they get :)


You will be seeing a lot more of Bronowski in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, your assignment is to figure out different ways to prove the Pythagorean Theorem. Let me know what you can come up with, and no cheating!
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Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief - The Final Hour

In this final installment (click here for the entire series), Jonathan Miller continues his investigation of atheism and disbelief, devoting the beginning to explore Thomas Paine's influence not only on the American revolution but on the revolution against oppressive religious doctrines and institutions. Although he wasn't an atheist, you might want to read Paine's The Age of Reason. It's just as powerful as his Common Sense.

This intellectual revolution would later receive empirical support in the 19th century from the geological studies of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. In the 20th century, Sigmund Freud would make the first systematic attempt to understand religious beliefs, classifying them as thought disorders, symptomatic of childhood parental obsessions.

Finally, Miller explores some of the existential concerns concerning religion and disbelief, as he ponders on our mortality and the religious fanaticism of the early 21st century.

)

I had read about Jeremy Bentham's will to have his body preserved, but this is certainly the first time I see him...

Although the documentary series is over, in the weeks to come, I will be posting the fascinating full interviews Jonathan Miller conducted, but which could not make it into the final cut, with influential people like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, philosopher Colin McGinn, playwright Arthur Miller, author Gore Vidal, physicist Steven Weinberg and anthropologist Pascal Boyer. You won't want to miss that...

The New Era of Architecture

Bigger is no longer the standard. Architecture is moving in the direction of the interesting and the sustainable. The buildings shown below are made up of independently moving floors, generating their own electricity, and introducing a new dimension to design and architecture: time.


Good luck trying to use the stairs or the elevator...
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Our Time Is Up

In this amusing short movie, a therapist learns he only has six weeks to live and changes his approach to life, dishing out brutal honesty and unwittingly becoming a kinder person in the process.


What would you do?
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The Ghost in Your Genes

The conventional understanding of genetics is that you are born with a set of unchanging genes, some of which you pass on to your children before some cop catches you unintentionally making a baby in the back seat of your car. Whatever else you may do in life has no genetic effect on your children. In a way, this now conventional view is a recapitulation of Darwin's victory over Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarck thought that life experiences, such as a giraffe stretching its neck to reach the high leaves on a tree, would be inherited by an organism's offspring in the next generation. Ridiculous.

... or so we thought. There seems to be growing evidence that environmental factors can actually trigger genes to switch on or off, and that this can cause heritable genetic differences in future generations. In other words, what you do with your own body can affect your future children and grandchildren at the genetic level. Talk about responsibility!

These phenomena, known as epigenetic effects, are explored and explained in today's fascinating documentary. Because we do not yet know the mechanism responsible for the transmission of epigenetic information, you will have to forgive the euphemistic attribution of purpose, memory and intentional states to genes in the language of the narrative.


It's interesting that once the correlation between epigenetic effects and the production of sperm and egg cells is revealed, everything suddenly makes a whole lot of sense, isn't it?
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Penn & Teller on Patriotism

As we celebrate another anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought it might be appropriate to also acknowledge a document Thomas Jefferson considered even more essential for the survival of liberty in an enlightened nation: the Bill of Rights.

And who could make such a celebration of patriotism more fun and symbolic than Penn & Teller?


Click here to watch Morgan Freeman reflect on the meaning and promise of the Declaration of Independence, followed by a reading of this document by Kevin Spacey, Ed Norton, Michael Douglas, Benicio del Toro and others.
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Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Due to the worst natural disaster our country has ever seen, the devastating and costly consequences of which actually seem to increase with time, president Bush has been making the rounds, attempting to sympathize with the unfortunate victims of his corrupt and inefficient administration.


Of course he would appeal to the prayerful: pretending to do something is so much easier than actually doing something...
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Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Is the world as it appears to be, or is there some further reality beyond appearance? Plato's allegory of the cave, from The Republic, is one of the most famous and beautiful expositions of the difference between appearance and reality. Using Socrates as his mouthpiece, Plato argues that empirical knowledge amounts to no more than knowledge of appearances. In fact, he claims, our perceptual knowledge is at least thrice removed: it is merely knowledge of the shadows of illusions of reality.

For Plato, philosophy is the pursuit of real, objective, unchanging knowledge: not of beautiful things, as ordinary people do, but of Beauty itself, not of good things but of the Good, not of true things but of the unchanging Form of Truth. As the animated video below shows, popular dissent, if it disagrees with the real, is of no consequence.



And below you can listen to philosopher Simon Blackburn talk about the significance of Plato's allegory of the cave in an episode of Philosophy Bites.


Of course, one of the implications of Plato's allegory is that, from the point of view of a lay person, there is no discernible difference between a madman and a philosopher, is there? ;)
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Darwin's Legacy

150 years ago today, a joint paper written by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace was read to the Linnean Society. This was the first time the theory of evolution by natural selection first became public. The influence of this scientific theory has been ubiquitous, creating controversy wherever it's gone.

Today's documentary summarizes the impact that the theory of evolution has had, both in its misapplication by social darwinists and eugenecists, and in its attempt to scientifically explain increasingly complex biological phenomena, such as altruism and human psychology.

Among those talked about and interviewed are Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Robert Trivers and E.O. Wilson.



Click here to watch an excellent biographical reenactment of Darwin's life and intellectual struggle to articulate the conceptual foundations of his theory.
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The Girl Who Silenced the World for Six Minutes

Sometimes it takes a child to wake us up to our complacency and remind us to use a bit of common sense and stop playing the artificial roles of nationalistic, capitalistic, profit-driven, competitive corporate whores, as if our actions don't have consequences that affect everyone.

In this video, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, a young girl addressing the United Nations delivers a very powerful speech, not simply pleading that we behave in more socially responsible ways, but demanding that we stop fucking things up...

If you don't know how to fix it, please, stop breaking it!
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