Clues to one of the most devastating plane crashes in Guatemalan history have been safely preserved by Banana, the in-flight recording parrot.
The recent publication of over 91,000 classified documents concerning questionable military activities taking place in Afghanistan over the past few years has created a national debate.
The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras is famous among other things for arguing that "man is the measure of all things." According to Plato's interpretation, this is the philosophical birth of relativism, the idea that there is no universally objective and mind-independent truth: everything depends on one's point of view.
The recent financial crisis has affected just about everyone, and the question of why it arose in the first place is one that comes naturally to mind. Answers, of course, abound, and most of them do have some merit, but there is something which most schools of thought tacitly agree on and presuppose: capitalism is an engine for progress, economic and social.
After discovering Cheesium, and while the Large Hadron Collider continues to seach for the Higgs Boson, scientists at M.I.T. have managed to split what was hitherto thought to be the smallest unit of matter: the smithereen :)
Even after his premature death a couple of years ago, Alex is arguably the most famous parrot in the world. The insights he provided into the nature of intelligence, cognition, language development, conceptual abstraction and other fields have revolutionized the ways in which we think about these ideas in particular and animals in general.
After exploring the birth of the scientific revolution in England, today's episode explores five more men whose curiosity not only led to fascinating new discoveries like their predecessors, but would actually change the world.
David Attenborough celebrates Joseph Banks, the naturalist who would sail across the globe in search of new animal and plant species, and would eventually establish the beautiful Botanical Gardens at Kew. Meanwhile, James Dyson recounts the story of how James Watt's design for the steam engine would fuel the industrial revolution. Thanks to the two, Britain would become the wealthiest nation in the world.
Stephen Hawking and Jim Al-Khalili tell the story of Henry Cavendish's discovery of hydrogen and Joseph Priestley's discovery of oxygen, and how their mutual collaboration revealed water to be a compound and not a basic element, as had been justifiably believed, though mistakenly, for millennia.
In the first episode of this fascinating documentary series, Professor Jim Al-Khalili traced the history of chemical element discovery, from its origins in ancient Greece to medieval alchemy and finally to modern chemistry. With a lot of ingenuity, scientists were figuring out how to reveal the basic constituents of the universe. Once enough elements had been discovered, the question arose as to whether there is some sort of system according to which all the elements could be classified.
The problem, of course, was solving that intellectual puzzle. Different men of science adopted different criteria to solve this question. Some focused on atomic weight, others on the inherent properties of individual elements, and yet others focused on the periodicity with which certain similar properties were repeated. Unfortunately, because no single system could account for all known chemical properties, no consensus could be made.
If you're at all familiar with architecture, then you probably know that Frank Lloyd Wright is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential architects of all time, particularly due to the organic nature of his designs.
As you've seen before many times, our choices are usually determined by external factors that we are not aware of. Derren Brown, if you recall, showed us a particularly poignant example with subliminal advertising.
I don't know whether it was done deliberately, but have you noticed that Evian (the bottled water brand) is Naive spelled backwards? It's as if the bottled water industry wanted to insult its own customer base, probably because it really would take a naive sort of person to get in a car and go buy at quite exuberant prices what is a publicly available resource already directly delivered to the convenience of your home, without you having to do anything other than turn the faucet.
The answer to that question, believe it or not, might depend on whether you are a man or a woman. One sex, it turns out, is significantly and consistently better than the other when it comes to paying attention. Can you guess which?
The poet/philosopher Lucretius once remarked about the irony that many of the people who desperately wish for an eternal afterlife are usually the very same people who are constantly bored and wasting their lives. Go figure...
Some people get introduced to the overwhelming feeling of existential despair and the dichotomy of being and nothingness when reading philosophical works like Heidegger's What is Metaphysics?, or other equally depressing but profound works. One could also read Leibniz or Avicenna to get introduced to a little modal logic.
I don’t know whether you enjoyed celebrating our day of independence this past weekend to the sound of Thomas Jefferson on vocals and violin while Benjamin Franklin rocked out the electric guitar, but if that poppish sound doesn’t quite do it for you because rap is more your thing, perhaps the next video of the Founding Fathers kicking it old-school Beastie-Boys style will be more to your liking :)
Do you like Wagner's music? Do you know who else did? Hitler! Of course, he was also a vegetarian and was opposed to animal cruelty, so maybe we need to disentangle some ideas before we draw any premature conclusions about Wagner.
In other words, one could appreciate the value of the art and ignore what a horrible little man the artist was. The problem with Wagner, however, is that to a large extent his passion and artistic inspiration was fueled by the very same feelings of rancor, hatred and resentment that drove Hitler to be an anti-semite himself, and his music is the offspring of that abhorrent inspiration.
Few artists in the history of art have been quite as revolutionary, ambitious and controversial as Richard Wagner, and fewer still have been as arrogant and megalomaniacal, but it's difficult to call someone arrogant when he's got the talent and the musical goods to back it up. Maybe he was just really honest about how awesome he was :)
If the latest additions to the Star Spangled Banner weren't enough for your patriotic thirst, here is a modern version of the Declaration of Independence as you've never heard it, with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin rocking the violin and the electric guitar respectively :)
As we prepare to get patriotic this weekend to celebrate another anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it may also be worth reflecting on the history of the Star Spangled Banner.
Though I am perfectly willing to admit my palate is not quite as refined as that of a mediocre connoisseur, I also tend to be skeptical of foodies, as well as coffee, wine and cigar snobs. Most of these people live under the delusion that their powers of discernment and the quality of their taste leaves the more ordinary of us in the dust. More often than they'd like to admit, however, human tastes and preferences are filtered through our cognitive expectations. This is precisely what's going on behind phenomena like the placebo effect.
