The Universe in One Year

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 Bang

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Seven Wonders of the Microbe World

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 as we have historical records.

You like your beer, for instance? Next time have a toast for our fellow unicellular organisms because without them, your beer would just be some nasty, bitter juice that tastes like piss :)

Oh, did I mention they also write some awesome romantic poetry? :)

And for more, check out how viruses invade your body. It's scary, but a testament to the blind ingenuity of evolution.

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Meet the Lampyridae (or firefly)

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 try to answer that seemingly simple question, they end up coming up with applications that could literally save your life one day, as the following animation shows:

I totally want a glowing hamster now :)

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Still kicking, sorry about the confusion

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 something to my family without their expecting it.

With the hectic nature of the end of the semester and the then-approaching holiday season, it slipped my mind to reset the automated post for another year, and I didn't realize it got posted until about two days after the fact, by which point a number of you were worried. I am very grateful for the kind messages and concern I received, though.

The good thing about this mishap? This blog is just not popular enough to create a major frenzy :)

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Friction - A Christmas Party Trick

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 :)

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

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 made, including those that have affected and hurt others, and still like and respect the person that looks back at you?

Find other classics and thought-provoking stories in the literature tag.

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The Richard Feynman Series - Beauty

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 cold, abstract theories and equations. But as the late Richard Feynman makes clear in the following stunning video (which is itself an excerpt from the documentary The Pleasure of Finding Things Out), that prejudice is based on a embarrassing mischaracterization of the nature and the motivation behind serious investigation.

I know exactly what you're thinking... tell me I'm wrong :)

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Christopher Hitchens - We'd Be Better Off Without Religion

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 "We'd be better off without religion." Now that he's gone, we can think of these ideas and realize that while he was with us, the world was a better place because of his eloquence, his courage, and his wit.

And because it would be totally appropriate on this occasion, I'm stealing the following picture from The Friendly Atheist to make a humble toast to Hitch:

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Tempest Milky Way Time Lapse

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' work

Instead, 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 nights

And if you want more, you can always visit the time lapse tag, but be careful, it can be addicting :)

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Death to Pennies!

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 of reasonableness.

When I was in high school, two of the things that could get me going on a rant were the uselessness and irrationality of pennies and the fact that we don't include sales taxes in our prices. Apparently, others are starting to speak out too:

And if you're worried that this would be "unpatriotic," suck it, it's been done before:

Now, before you go rid the world of pennies, be careful where you try to dispose of them:

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The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

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 interview with Chalmers on just such a question:

Others, like philosopher John Searle, however, think that, given everything we know about computation, it is impossible, even in principle, for computers ever to think, no matter their computational capacity. To prove this point, Searle came up with what has come to be regarded, by supporters and detractors alike, as a classic thought experiment: the Chinese room, which you get to learn about in the following 60 seconds.

For more on questions of mind, consciousness, personal identity, etc., visit the Brainspotting tag.

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Inside Nature's Giants - The Big Cats

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 some impressive adaptations.

Continuing with the Inside Nature's Giants series, the team dissects a lion and a tiger to understand the details of the anatomy and physiology of the hunt, starting with a dissection of the larynx (which produces those frightening roars), and making their way to understand their retractable claws, their muscular bodies and their powerful jaws and sharp teeth.

And while dissecting a tiger is basically enough to get a decent understanding of their evolutionary success, lions are a different story, particularly because their survival depends upon social cohesion and cooperation, since it is not unusual for them to have to take down some massive pray that no single lion could do on his/her own. But their strict social hierarchies also have some disturbing consequences...

Watching these documentaries helps me realize that I would not survive in the wild...

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Rick Perry - Swrong

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, or smart (here's proof of his idiocy).

Of course, his latent and repressed homosexuality was betrayed by his fashion statement, as he was wearing--and you just can't make shit up like this: a jacket almost identical to one of the gay characters from Brokeback Mountain, which was just fabulous :)

Anyway, here's the now infamous ad that became a meme machine:

Those statements about faith are just what you would expect from the same idiot who decided, when his state was confronted with a massive drought, to pray for rain. That's what he did. I kid you not, and how well did that work out? Oh, right...

Anyway, maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Here he is engaging in a little thoughtful introspection and self-reflection:

And yes, while the message seems to be all backwards, maybe you missed the more subtle points. Pay attention again and see if you can find the subliminal message this time:

Regardless of his real position, pretending to represent Christianity kind of doesn't work when Jesus can speak for himself:

And if we really want to generalize as to who's responsible for the real problems, well, you're probably not going to like the truth, you god-fearing vagina penetrators...

And talking about disenfranchised groups, who's standing up for dinosaurs? This guy:

There may be a lot of stupidity on the internet, but thankfully there's also great opportunity for individuals to stand up and make fun of the retarded ideas of a guy who wants access to 21st century state-of-the-art weaponry while having backward stone-age beliefs...

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Miniatur Wunderland

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 attractions around the world. Just check out the video, I guarantee you'll be impressed.

Any of you, dear readers, live close to the Hamburg area and have an extra couch I could crash in if I ever manage to make my way over there? :)

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The "War on Christmas" Begins Again...

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 and Stephen Colbert respectively).

The latest set of lame arguments tries to go the patriotic route by claiming that Christmas has been, even before the inception of this nation, an American tradition.

Well, these idiots are about to get schooled :)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Of course, the worst part of it all is that it's all just a big distraction from the real problems we fail to acknowledge and confront. Makes me mad :(

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Bach Visualized Through Math

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 counting."

Well, the following animation beautifully illustrates this abstract claim in as concrete a way as it is possible to do...

And if you need the sound of a more familiar rendition, we aim to please:

And why stop at music? Take a look at the the fibonacci sequence throughout nature.

May your day be blessed with beauty... and math :)

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Shelly Kagan vs William Lane Craig - Is God Necessary for Morality?

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 is still just as popular as ever, and it is even held by some otherwise intelligent people, one of whom is William Lane Craig, who, in the following debate against philosopher Shelly Kagan, articulates better than most this seemingly obvious but ultimately self-defeating position.

The interesting thing to notice in this debate is how easily Kagan sweeps the floor with Craig's black and white thinking, appeals to consequences, arguments from personal incredulity, and other fallacious presuppositions. It's an intellectual bloodbath well worth watching...

For a different take on this issue, you can also watch William Lane Craig debate philosopher Louise Antony. Craig's arguments are, if I remember correctly, exactly the same, but Antony's take is different from Kagan's, and brings in a different way to counter Craig's wild assertions.

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Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tysoon

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 me.

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Damon Horowitz - Philosophy in Prison

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 one of the best TEDTalks of all time...

But you don't have to be in prison to study philosophy and be free. There are plenty of other practical reasons for deciding to study this mother of all intellectual disciplines.

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