Seth Lloyd - Quantum Hanky Panky

You've probably heard Depak Chopra and other new-age quacks talk about 'quantum healing' and other similarly pseudo-scientific sounding phrases, so you might be feeling skeptical when you hear the words 'quantum hanky panky' and you see the picture of the pretty girl on the right of this entry, but this ain't Depak Chopra... this is Seth Lloyd, an MIT engineering professor who specializes in quantum mechanics (and especially quantum computing).In...

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Newt Gingrich - Atheist Islamist Takeover

In Plato's classic dialogue The Apology, Socrates is impeached on charges of impiety. The prosecutor, Meletus, argues that Socrates is an atheist, and that Socrates believes in gods not approved by the state. How could Socrates believe in gods and be an atheist at the same time, you ask? He couldn't... that's logically impossible, you might say.Well, Newt Gingrich is worried that if Athens was threatened by the impiety of one Socrates, imagine how...

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Winter Time Lapse

If you thought winter was over a few weeks ago when the temperatures were starting to rise, you must have found the past week or so incredibly disappointing and frustrating... I know I did.But however cold it's been, none of it compares to what Randy Halverson must have endured putting together the following magnificent video documenting the winter in South Dakota during sub-zero degree weather and -25F windchills... all for your viewing delight:And...

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Robert Sapolsky - Are Humans Just Another Primate?

Every time scientists have tried to come up with a set of defining characteristics of what it means to be human, subsequent observation has revealed that there are other species who share those features previously thought to be unique to us...We are faced with a puzzle: on the one hand, given our shared evolutionary history, we should expect to be quite similar to our evolutionary cousins; on the other hand, given our close genetic relatedness to...

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A Brief Introduction to Genetics

One of the things Darwin never understood was the mechanism responsible for the inheritance of the traits upon which natural selection would work. Of course, he knew the fact of inheritance, and even realized at some point that it must have a digital basis (else the end result would be a blending of traits upon which natural selection could not possibly work).It would be Gregor Mendel who would first come to understand and document this process when...

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Hans Rosling - The Magic Washing Machine

I don't know about you, but when Hans Rosling speaks, I listen. It's like this adorable man is incapable of being uninteresting :)In this TEDTalk presentation, he argues that the greatest invention of the industrial revolution is the washing machine. Of course, with population growth and the ever-expanding energy and pollution problems, the tree-hugger in you might want to object to such an irresponsible claim... but you forget this is Hans Rosling...

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Isabel Behncke - Evolution's Gift of Play, from Bonobos to Humans

When you compare the regular chimpanzee and the bonobo, one of the most striking differences is the presence of sometimes incredible violence in the former and the complete absence of it in the latter (at least as far as we have been able to observe over the past 50 years). Both species are wicked smart, and are fascinating in their own ways, but when it comes to getting along with others and being gregarious, there's probably no species on the planet,...

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Martin Luther King, Jr. - Letter from Birmingham Jail

We all know Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great orator. And of course, when you throw in a bunch of amens and hallelujahs, and when you talk about the promised land to a highly religious nation, it's a lot easier to incite their passion and support.Call me a cynic if you want, but while I endorse the message of civil rights, I've always had some problem with his speeches. What I've always been impressed with, however, was the letter he wrote when...

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Bill Maher - Catholics Come Home Spoof

Once the most powerful institution in the world, the Catholic Church has been experiencing the number of its faithful dwindle over the past few decades. I won't speculate as to why this is the case, but the point is that this real estate power house is in some trouble, which is why they decided to put together a series of commercials with high production value to invite back those people who consider themselves Catholics. Place your mouse over this...

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Tsumanis 101

Sometimes when it rains, it pours. Japan has been recently devastated by the accumulation of horrendous circumstances due to the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. Lives have been lost, families have been broken, property has been destroyed, and infrastructure has been compromised. The most dangerous threat, the release of nuclear radiation, is still looming in the horizon of possibilities...Obviously, there are plenty of things to be concerned...

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David Brooks - The Social Animal

Our mastery over the physical world over the past few centuries has been based on our newly acquired ability to understand the structural intricacies of that world. Understanding that world has required that we make certain reductive assumptions about how it works, and although they have been incredibly fertile, many of these assumptions, especially when applied to our understanding of human nature itself, have turned out to be rather simplistic,...

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Fashionable Chameleon

No matter how many chicks you banged when you were the quarterback of your local football team, or how many keg-stands you could do you in college, or how well you can impersonate Lady Gaga just because you have an Adam's apple, you'll never be as cool as this little guy :)All we can do is be jealous ...

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Powerful Quake/Tsunami Hits Japan

As you're probably all aware by now, Japan has been hit by a powerful earthquake/tsunami combination, the likes of which has caused massive amounts of destruction. My thoughts are with the victims of this natural disaster.And here are some pictures from The Big Picture showing some of the devastation:While the number of dead is in the hundreds, which is horrible enough, I do have to agree with a comment made on Twitter by Dave Ewing:The headlines...

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Colbert Celebrates Lent by Giving Up Catholicism

A couple of days ago you may have seen a bunch of people walking around with dirt on their foreheads: they were Catholics and the dirt was really ash in the shape of a cross pressed against their foreheads by someone who's probably implicated, or about to be, in some case of child abuse. Oh yeah, he's also wearing a large dress... Don't say I didn't warn you :)Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the season of preparation for the resurrection...

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Salman Khan - Using Video to Reinvent Education

If you're an investment broker or an analyst at a hedge fund, there are probably a few things that are almost certainly true about you: you have craploads of money and the idea of doing something with real social value (and for free) is foreign to you :)Fortunately, one such man, Salman Khan, decided that he'd rather make a meaningful contribution to the world instead of just rolling in dough, and created in the process Khan Academy, a non-profit...

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Brian Cox - The Forces of Nature

Philosophically, the idea of forces is kind of shady. While we don't want to outright deny the notion, we also don't want to ignore the danger of possibly believing in what could turn out to be the scientific equivalent of leprechauns. The first problem is that 'forces' are not things experienced directly; rather, they are inferences produced on the basis of other experiences, and as inferences, these could turn out to be misinterpretations of what...

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The Cell - The Hidden Kingdom

We take it for granted today, but there was a time when not only did humanity not understand the nature of cells, we didn't even know they existed. That would all start to change when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a draper and tradesman, would peek into a drop of water through his superior microscope (not to say anything of what would happen when he peeked into a drop of semen) and discovered a world hitherto unknown, full of microscopic life. The baton...

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Jury Selection Proving Difficult in Trial of "The Jury Killer"

You may have concocted some strategy at some point to get out of jury duty, and if you've ever been prosecuted for some crime you (allegedly) committed, your lawyer may have had some say in the jury selection process, but only The Onion can come up with a plan to guarantee that no jury ever dares mess with you :)Genius... ...

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Tim Minchin - Thank You God

Plenty of religious believers believe in God because they've had some personal experience of a 'miracle'; that is to say, they've been confronted with something that (in their own minds at least) could not have happened by any natural means, and so they take this 'mystery' as evidence for a transcendent explanation. That's what I call water-tight logic :)As we all know, it is impossible for anyone to win the lottery, for a football team to win the...

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The President's Speech

I'm of the opinion, right or not, that anything said with a British accent automatically sounds more intelligent by virtue of that fact alone. Now, if the erudite King George VI of England, confronted by one of the most challenging circumstances of all time, had a really difficult time with public speaking, can you really blame our former hillbilly president for not being able to put two sentences together?The King had Lionel Logue's unorthodox methods...

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Peter Singer - Evolution vs. Ethics

From its very inception, the theory of evolution by natural selection has been misinterpreted by social reformers of all kinds. Opponents argue that it endorses a psychopathic 'nature red in tooth and claw' approach to social problems. Proponents argue the same (they just prefer to use Herbert Spencer's dictum of 'survival of the fittest').The problem with these interpretations, of course, is that they are both instances of the naturalistic fallacy:...

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Lord Robert Winston - How Science Changed Our World

It is just not possible to deny the ubiquitous impact that science has had in all of our lives. The very fact that you're reading these lines on a computer or mobile phone (and are probably addicted to both) attests to the incredible power and influence that scientific innovation exerts on all of us, especially considering that much of the technology simply didn't exist until quite recently.And while scientific blunders are inevitable, and controversies...

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