When you get a little perspective, you may feel insignificant, but that very improbability makes your life all the more significant. Have a happy new year!via Starts with a B...
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Thursday, 29 December 2011
Bacteria, and the fact that we have to use antibiotics against them every now and then to combat powerful diseases, may conjure up nasty and scary feelings for many people, but let's not be too quick to come up with sweeping generalizations, since you yourself are more bacteria than human :)The following video, from The Open University, illustrates some of the awesome ways bacteria have exerted an incredible influence in the world for as long...
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
One of my favorite aspects about science is that since it's an attempt to discover how the world works, we can't assume that our a prioris and preconceived notions and expectations will be confirmed by new discoveries, or even that we could easily foresee whether and how some discoveries might turn out to be relevant to us.Take a pretty basic and interesting question: what's up with fireflies? Why do they glow? Well, it turns out that when scientists...
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
For those of you who noticed and were concerned with a very personal post a few days ago, thank you for your posthumous words of kindness, but everything is all right. That was an entry I created a while ago to be automatically posted on Christmas, should something happen to me before that date (you never know when you might get run over by a car, when the bridge that you drive to work on might collapse, when your heart might decide to call it quits, or when Jesus decides to rapture your ass). It seemed like a nice way of getting to say a little...
Friday, 23 December 2011
If you need to entertain your holiday guests, especially those with a competitive streak, and you have a couple of old phone books laying around, Stephen Fry and his QI guests are here to teach you a simple and inexpensive party trick you can use on them while simultaneously teaching them a simple lesson on the physics of friction.I cannot be held responsible for any objects that get broken in the process...
Thursday, 22 December 2011
There are many things to like about this Oscar Wilde classic (adapted and animated below), what with the witty aphorisms and one-liners, but if there's something that can only be described as haunting about this tale, it's not the supernatural nature of the portrait nor the exchange of one's soul for the promise of everlasting physical beauty, but the question of whether one can bear to see one's reflection.Can you look fairly at the choices you've...
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Beauty is one of those tricky concepts to define because although most of us have an intuitive sense of instances of beauty, and can usually recognize it when we see it, we can't come up with an overarching theory about why all the things we consider to be beautiful are considered beautiful while other things are not.Still, one thing about which many people agree is that science and philosophy strip the world of beauty by reducing it to a bunch of...
Friday, 16 December 2011
I've just learned that the prolific essayist and inimitable public intellectual and agitator Christopher Hitchens has succumbed to the cancer he's been battling over the past year.Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Hitchens was a force to be reckoned with. Whatever the subject, at the very least he always had something interesting and thought-provoking to say.In the following excerpt, Hitchens argues for the motion that...
With the semester coming to an end, I'm buried neck-deep in student term papers, final exams and class projects, so I won't have time to go into some rant today... and probably next week too. I need to save all my mental energy to accurately assess my students' workInstead, I thought I'd try to invoke the aesthetic of the sublime and stimulate the senses with the following spectacular time lapse video of the Milky Way on some stormy nightsAnd if...
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Far more often than we would normally like to admit, our beliefs and behavior are driven by forces that are completely irrational and that, if we just gave them a moment's thought, we'd realize we ought to stop, like, yesterday.Whatever the subject matter, these beliefs and behavior are usually based on an unquestioning acceptance of traditions passed down through the generations. The problem, of course, is that tradition by itself is no criterion...
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
The rise of computers in the 20th century, and especially their exponentially increasing computational capacity and speed, has gotten many curious minds to speculate as to whether it is possible at some point to create computers that can think. Those who believe in things like the computational singularity, such as David Chalmers, think it's just a matter of time before we have to bow down to our new mechanized overlords.Here is a Philosophy Bites...
Monday, 12 December 2011
Their loud and guttural roars can send chills up and down your spine, even from great distances. If they're running for you, and you're not protected by some sort of fence, you're dinner. If giraffes, crocodiles, zebras, wildebeests and elephants all succumb to these cats' strong jaws and sharp teeth and claws, you don't stand a chance.Lions and tigers are the largest felines in the world, and becoming top predators has required the development of...
Sunday, 11 December 2011
You may have seen, and been shocked by, the recent Rick Perry ad in which he came out (get it?) and made his religious lunacy and homophobia explicit on national television. Many people originally thought this had to be some sort of joke: no sane person would ever be dumb enough to publicly announce the basis of his candidacy on the outright intolerant bigotry inherited from a bunch of barely literate goat herders. Then again, Perry is not sane,...
Friday, 9 December 2011
If for some reason you ever get to visit Hamburg, you'll definitely want to reserve some time to visit Miniatur Wunderland, the world's largest model railway in the world. You've probably seen the traditional model railway before, but you've never seen one quite like this. Sure, there are moving trains and nice landscapes, but it also includes computerized action sequences that take place in the miniature equivalent of various actual cities and tourist...
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
When Thanksgiving rolls around, there are a few things I don't want to look forward to, even though deep down inside I know are inevitable: bad Christmas music (virtually all of it), the commercialization of yet another holiday, and the self-victimization of Conservatives who refuse to acknowledge that we live in a pluralistic society. This is the so-called War on Christmas (about which we've reported before with the comedic genius of Jon Stewart...
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
You've no doubt heard the claim that some of the greatest musicians of all time had an intuitive sense for mathematical proportion and harmony. It's no coincidence, for instance, that the musical scale was invented by that most eccentric of mathematicians, Pythagoras.And if you're familiar with your Leibniz, you might remember that he once claimed that "music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is...
Monday, 5 December 2011
It's been well understood by philosophers for the past 2,500 years, thanks to Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, that there is ultimately no real connection between God or religion and an objectively binding morality: the latter can exist without the former, and the former only gets to be considered good in virtue of the independence of the latter (otherwise we just have a viciously circular argument).Nevertheless, the idea that morality depends on God...
Friday, 2 December 2011
So what do you get when you mix up a smart comedian (like Stephen Colbert) and a fun and eloquent popularizer of science (like Neil deGrasse Tyson)?Answer: one and a half hour of thought-provoking and funny awesomeness.Enjoy your weekend.I would have still included a philosopher to help Tyson through some of those tough Colbert questions regarding the value of knowledge, but that's just ...
Thursday, 1 December 2011
As you probably already know from this blog, TEDTalks are awesome: bring in some of the greatest minds in the world, working on the greatest and most interesting questions, with the best and most creative ideas, give them 18 minutes, and they will awe and wow you.Well, when they brought in philosopher Damon Horowitz, he only needed about three minutes to inspire a standing ovation and blow everyone out of the water in what can only be described as...
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