Remember how people can mess with you when you are not capable of thinking for yourself? Apart from Doubting Thomas, who has been vilified for centuries for demanding a little bit of evidence instead of being driven by blind faith, there are virtually no accounts of any of the disciples asking tough questions and demanding a bit of logical consistency. Imagine what might have happened if one of them did...
Today's video is the opening scene of Kevin Smith's film Dogma. In this scene, the angel Loki (played by Matt Damon) beautifully proselytizes a catholic nun into atheism through a persuasive reading of Lewis Carroll's poem The Walrus and the Carpenter as an indictment on organized religion and its corruption.
Creation stories have been around as long as we have had stories. It's just one of those things that we can't seem to avoid asking ourselves almost in the same breath that we come up with an apocryphal answer. Most of these stories, as we know, are folklore tales made up by different peoples in order to make sense of their particular way of life.
There was a time, not too long ago, when it was thought that two of the distinguishing features that separated human beings from the rest of the animal world were our ability to use tools and create culture. Starting with Jane Goodall's work in the forests of Africa some thirty years ago, that myth has been consistently undermined. Here is an example of some of the technological feats that capuchin monkeys are capable of, played to a very familiar and appropriate score.
In this fascinating and hilarious conversation with Robert Krulwich, Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson relates the story of how he fell in love with science as a young boy. Irreverent and funny, Wilson shows that the study of science can go beyond satisfying one's curiosity: if you are ingenious enough, you can mess with nature to get the fascinating results that can confirm your hypotheses in hilarious ways.
From social primates that live fearlessly in precipitous slopes three miles high to the unprecedented footage of a ferocious snow leopard chasing prey at vertiginous speeds down an almost vertical slope, Sir David Attenborough takes you on a journey through the mountain ranges surrounding the planet in today's installment of the documentary series Planet Earth, displaying the wide diversity of our planet in habitats that might otherwise look uninhabitable.
If you remember the documentary about The Secrets of the Sun from a few weeks ago, you learned that the massive gravitational force of our only neighborhood star is responsible for the massive scale on which physical and chemical events take place there.
When it comes to sex and breeding in the animal world, humans are one boring species, what with long periods of courtship and long-term monogamous relationships that ultimately result in drawn out and painful divorces half the time, showing our utter inability to even know what the hell we want (see how philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer explains this interesting contradiction).
Withdrawing is a delicate skill that any dude must master. You don't want to do it so early that you end up having to play with yourself forever, but if you wait too long, devastating consequences and permanent responsibilities may follow. Of course, there's also always that chance that you are caught by surprise and then it's too late...
If you are like most people, you probably see work as a necessary evil, spending all day hoping 5pm arrives as quickly as possible so that you can go home. Unfortunately, once home, the TV gets turned on and a deluge of commercials aimed at chipping away at your personal insecurities guarantee that you will go out and buy crap you don't need to feel better about the emptiness of your existence.
When I kick the proverbial bucket, I don't want to follow the tradition of being cremated and having my ashes dispersed to the wind. Obviously, I won't care what happens to my body once I no longer exist, but if I could have a choice while I'm still alive, I'd like to be buried and leave a good fossil :)
When it comes to literature, I abhor the wanton use of needless adjectives. Next time I read a book in which the author tells me something utterly obvious with a long list of adjectives, I'm going to strangle that author and describe to him/her the experience as suffocating and breath-taking, the kind of stuff that takes your breath away and turns your skin blue...
If you have ever asked yourself what white people like (other than making coffee their lifeline, getting divorced, going to therapy, buying organic food, becoming involved in awareness campaigns, and actively emulating the living conditions of the poor and people of other races), then you should watch this amusing lecture.
The Large Hadron Collider is all over the news this week. It is the largest scientific piece of equipment ever built, and the hope is that, by recreating the conditions immediately after the Big Bang through the acceleration and collision of protons traveling close to the speed of light, we should be able to answer some fundamental questions about physics and the nature of matter.
When you look at the great variety of animals on Earth, the first thing that might strike you is how unbelievably different every species is from each other. There is plenty of diversity to go around...
Understanding the nature and properties of cold temperature has required the valiant effort of some of the greatest minds of the scientific world, as you have seen in this fascinating documentary. Once a sufficiently robust understanding of cold emerged, as well as its ultimate limit: absolute zero, a frantic and challenging race began to see who would get there first (or come as close as possible, since it is a theoretical impossibility).
Good news for those of you who enjoy heavy rock. Disturbed has just come out with a new album entitled Indestructible. As with most things Disturbed, and as we have come to expect from them, the whole album totally rocks...
The following is the original introduction by Alan Saunders to this fascinating talk (as I heard it on Big Ideas):You might know that one of my jobs involves philosophy and today's speaker drops enough philosophers' names and philosophical concepts certainly to have attracted my attention. Clive Hamilton says it's all Jean Paul Sartre's fault, but what exactly? The state of the modern, or if you like, the postmodern world. A place in which we are promised unending freedom to choose the shape and direction of our lives without restraint or coercion; where despots, racists, sexists, and meddlesome priests have been put in their place, and new connective technology has been a force for liberation. But is it really like that?Clive Hamilton has called his new book The Freedom Paradox. In it he asks why we are so discontented, despite all the wealth and freedom we appear to enjoy. And in the process he cites the work of Sartre, Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Leibniz, Erasmus, Mill, Hayek, Descartes and Derrida, among others. Well, he's got me in.
What is this paradox? And what role do these philosophers play? In essence, Hamilton understands our predicament to be one of being free not to be free. That is, using all those hard-won gains of the second half of the 20th century to deliver ourselves to the marketers, who understand us as only cogs in the soulless machinery of consumerism. And postmodernist thinkers have provided the ideas to make the whole operation smooth and seamless. Clive Hamilton's arguments have met with much disagreement, most notably from those associated with the sexual and civil liberation movements of late last century. So, is it a campaign against the delights of the modern world, or a disquieting inquisition into a dehuminizing set of processes coming together in a perfect storm in the 21st century? And can we really blame philosophers for anything?
You may refuse to believe it because you're used to thinking that matter and hard reality always ultimately overcome minds and mental dispositions, but sometimes the power of ideas, even those coming from feeble-bodied fatalist and existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre, can stop professional quarterbacks and running backs right on their tracks.
The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the first thinkers to take seriously the idea of instinctual drives working below the level of conscious awareness, deriving from this subtle insight a vast wealth of philosophical positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, psychology and many others. As it turns out, and when combined with evolutionary theory, this general idea of subconscious drives has proven to be extremely successful, opening up major realms of research into the workings of the human mind.
Who wouldn't want to be a true polymath?I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
And tell you ev'ry detail of Caractacus' uniform:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin",
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat",
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery—
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy—
You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a-gee.For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
1859 was an explosive year for science and philosophy. Not only did Charles Darwin publish The Origin of Species and John Stuart Mill publish the classic On Liberty, one of the largest solar flares on record hit the Earth and wreaked havoc all over the place, creating a revolution of its own. You may take it for granted, but the sun, that fiery ball of light and heat up in the sky, is by far the greatest center of activity in our solar system; that's kind of why it's called the solar system... Today's documentary explores the science of the sun, and lays out the current understanding of this celestial powerhouse where everything that happens takes place at unbelievably large scales.
