Jimmy Kimmel at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

After just having slow-jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon the other night, President Obama gave the opening address at the White House annual Correspondents' Dinner this weekend, warming up the room for Jimmy Kimmel's roast of politicians, the media and celebrities.

We all know that corruption, hypocrisy, dishonesty, back-alley deals and ineptitude are bipartisan traits, whatever differences of degree there may be between the two parties, so it is especially refreshing when EVERYONE gets roasted, starting with the President himself:

And if you want your opponents to get what's coming to them, you'll want to watch Jimmy Kimmel release what must be built-up frustration, but warning, you will also experience some major cognitive dissonance :)

Thank you for that brutal honesty, Kimmel!

And don't forget to catch last year's event, with Seth Meyers.

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Scientists Discover Delicious New Species

Scientifically approved yumminess, thanks to The Onion!

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Obama Slow Jams the News

If we elected George W. Bush because we thought he was the candidate we'd rather have a beer with instead of his opponents, Stiff Romney is going to have his work cut out for him when he has to compete with Obama, who just decided to slow jam the news with Jimmy Fallon. This is awesome! And yeah, it's about student loans and education or some such stuff...

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Neil deGrasse Tyson - Space as Culture

Recently, with his characteristic passion and erudite informality, Neil deGrasse Tyson delivered the keynote speech at the National Space Symposium, and continued to make the case, as he has recently, that we ought to increase funding for NASA and space exploration.

While most arguments tend to rely on economic and practical, palpable benefits that such exploration and research can produce, this speech makes a bolder claim: that our very national identity and the greatness of our our country (intellectual, cultural, scientific) depends upon the inspiration that NASA produces in the minds of future inventors, discoverers and thinkers. The economic benefits which such greatness almost inevitably produces are simply a nice side benefit that we get for free when we educate and inspire our children, and teach them to shoot for the stars.

When he hasn't had his coffee yet, he's kind of grouchy, isn't he? :)

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Just How Small Is an Atom?

When it comes to the world beyond our direct, ordinary experience, we just don't have what it takes to understand the differences in scale. If you are given a model Earth and Moon made to scale, for instance, and you're asked to estimate how far apart they would have to be from each other to represent their true distance, most people fail this test miserably. Same thing if you ask people to describe the relationships between the constituent parts making up an atom. So, to help with that problem, here's a quick little lesson on understanding just how small an atom is, and a few other fun facts:

They made things for difficult for themselves than they really had to with that density scenario, didn't they?

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Banksy on Advertising

And if you want some of his irreverent and thought-provoking humor, check out what he did with the intro to The Simpsons.

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Tribute to Christopher Hitchens

Widely considered to be one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, Christopher Hitchens is an intellectual hero to many agnostics, skeptics and nonbelievers. I greatly admire the man's intelligence, erudition, candor, humor and eloquence, but I have to admit that I don't find his arguments against the existence of God to be very persuasive.

Hitchens, in my estimation, suffers from exactly the same kind of logical flaw that many believers do: his nonbelief seems to be based more on his desire for God not to exist (because God is, in his opinion, the ultimate arbitrary dictator who can violate our innermost privacy and convict us of thought-crimes) than on sound ontological or epistemic arguments. Believers, of course, make the same mistake of concluding that because they want God to exist, he actually does. But wishful thinking says more about the wisher than the wish, either way.

Where I do think Hitchens has made substantial contributions is on his critique of religion, religious morality and the religious instinct. It's his moral and historical arguments, and not any ontological claims, where I think he has a lot of interesting things to say. And if nothing else, he has that rare gift of helping us to think about many ideas, that we tend to take for granted, from refreshingly and interesting new angles, as the following excerpts show:

Cheers, Hitch!

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Strange Charm: A Song about Quarks

Unless you're a physicist or a physics enthusiast, you probably have a hard time remembering the difference between subatomic particles such as quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, leptons, gluons, hadrons, positrons, bosons and morons. Ok, fine, maybe you definitely know a moron when you see one, but you get my point.

So, if you want to learn how to remember the difference between all these particles, the following totally geeky but catchy song should be just what you've been looking for:

And for more funny and educational songs, check out the funny songs tag.

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Autistic Reporter: Train Thankfully Unharmed In Crash That Killed One Man

Because of its Westinghouse something something propulsion system, a commuter train in California, which requires a minimum stopping distance of 625 feet, ran over three trash bags, a piece of gum, a snickers wrap, a man and a glove before coming to a complete stop. Luckily, as autistic reporter Michael Falk reports, the accident left no structural damage to the train, which should continue regular service once the human remains of blood and brains are hosed off...

Yes, this is what I end up doing sometimes when I'm awake at four in the morning... and not drinking...

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Doodling in Math - Spirals, Fibonacci and Plants - 3

Ok, so now that you've learned how the beauty and elegance of the golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence are instantiated all over the natural world (parts 1 and 2), you're probably wowing all your friends and thinking this is the coolest thing ever...

Are you ready to get your mind blown?

What about those instances in which the golden spiral does not become instantiated, and we have instead all kinds of seemingly random angles? As it turns out, this provides an even more impressive opportunity for Vi Hart to drop some knowledge and make a beautiful and powerful connection between math and science, and a point about how the apparent teleology of the natural world is simply an appearance caused by what might turn out to be mathematical inevitability...

And if you want to see an incredible animation of a meristem doing its mathematical magic, you know what to do.

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The Battle for the War on Women

When you claim that Mitt Romney's wife, a mother of five children, has never worked a day in her life... that's going to upset virtually any sane and compassionate person. Sure, Ann Romney most likely had all kinds of maids, babysitters, nannies and tutors for her kids, but still... being a mom is going to be tough on anyone.

But here is where things get interesting: Conservatives are outraged at this "war on conservative women," while being completely unaware of, or willfully ignoring and actively denying, the fact that they themselves, through massive and numerous pieces of legislation regarding invasive procedures on women's bodies, against their will and without regard for their privacy, have declared what any reasonable person could conclude is a real declaration of war on ALL women, conservative and liberal alike.

And what do such pieces of legislation seek? Well, among other things, to force women to prove to their employers that their birth control is used for medical reasons (not family planning), criminalizing abortion as murder (I wonder if these pro-lifers are asking for the death penalty in such cases), making the use of those lovely, invasive transvaginal ultrasounds mandatory before abortions can be performed, criminalizing single-parenting as child abuse, and even making domestic abuse legal (thanks, Topeka, Kansas!)... oy vay...

But to get to the good part, first we need a little bit of context:

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Oh, but what have Mitt and Ann Romney been saying lately? Wait for it...

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But there is no real war on women. Clearly, that's just a liberal exaggeration. The real war is on Christmas!... and Easter, Halloween, fossil fuels, salt, chocolate milk, sugary drinks, and potatoes!

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Well, and now you know where to go if you want to beat your wife... wow...

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T-Rex - Warrior or Wimp?

For the last hundred years since its discovery, Tyrannosaurus Rex has ruled the public imagination as the greatest and most ferocious predator to ever live on our planet. While we all love dinosaur movies, or to visit museums and stare endlessly at their impressive skeletal structures, no one (except perhaps for a few adrenaline addicted junkies) would want to be in the vicinity of a real hungry T-Rex...

But was this even a predator? Could it have been no more than a mere scavenging vulture? What does the scientific evidence actually suggest? Well, because the data is limited and our access indirect and sometimes more circumstantial than definitive, there is a lot of speculation that has to go into these conjectures, so there are no conclusive answers just yet, but at least a few aspects of the evidence do raise some very interesting questions, as the following documentary shows:

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A Geological Timescale for Young-Earth Creationists

So how would the geological record look like if we assumed that young Earth creationism were true? Just click the picture below to get a better look:

Well, as the picture itself mentions, since Jesus lived in the Pre-Cambrian, he could not have ridden a Velociraptor into Jerusalem, so there goes that...

But it turns out that unicellular life started more than three hundred years after Socrates was executed; St. Thomas Aquinas was writing his Summa Theologica during the early Cambrian; Christopher Columbus made his trip to America during the early Devonian; David Hume drove the church mad in the Triassic (I wonder if he was riding a T-Rex...); Darwin was born during the Jurassic; Nietzsche declared the death of God during the early Cretaceous; Einstein's theory of General Relativity was vindicated before the end of the Mesozoic; and I was born during the Oligocene... yep, makes perfect sense :)


Via: Minerology Database

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Colbert and the Dirt Bike Badass in the Lincoln Tunnel

Let's face it, no one likes to commute... I don't know how I would survive my commute to work, or at least retain my sanity, if it weren't for books and an ipod full of books and podcasts. But among all the repetitive daily drudgery of traveling to and back from work, there are rare occasions in which exceptional things happen, and chances are that they will happen to someone famous, like Stephen Colbert... Your life will still suck :)

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Bro-Choice

Whenever pro-lifers want to interfere with a woman's autonomy over her own body, they do it, presumably, because of their moral principles regarding the sanctity of human life, and they think the ethical principle trumps a woman's convenience every time. The question of a woman's liberty is not even very important...

So, guess what happened when a bill was introduced to outlaw the waste of any semen (because after all, it is human life, which means that every sperm is sacred, as Monty Python famously parodied), and a man's inalienable right to masturbate was at stake!: of course, all of a sudden pro-life conservatives, completely oblivious to the irony and the double standard, started coming up with the most hilarious and twisted arguments you could ever imagine.. Al Madrigal reports:

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Of course, philosophers mostly agree that the question of personhood is actually kind of irrelevant. Mainly, it's just an emotional distraction that does no ethical explanatory work, only emotional work...

And in case you're not following the Monty Python reference, here you go:

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Billy Collins - Everyday Moments Caught in Time

I've had a weird relationship with the poetry of Billy Collins since I was a freshman in college: I found some of it to be great, interesting, eloquent, disciplined, musical writing, and some of it not even to merit the appellation of poetry at all. And don't get me started on his Marginalia and the stupid egg salad... but I digress.

I don't know whether he really deserved to be the American Poet Laureate or whether we couldn't find anyone else at the time (can you tell I'm bitter?), but if there is at least one good thing I can say about the man is that he promotes poetry and writing wherever he goes, and so it is time that he finally made it to the TED stage and shared some of his writings, which are accompanied by some beautiful and artistic animation. Oh, and the last poem, the one that's not animated, is probably one that all of you parents are going to love :)

And if you need some lullabies or bedtime stories, maybe Samuel Jackson and Tim Minchin are what you've been looking for :)

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Faith/Off - Easter vs Passover

And so it was that three days after his crucifixion, Jesus sent the Easter bunny to lay some chocolate eggs for kids to find, get high on sugary sweets, and eventually get tooth decay that would drive stock prices up for the Tooth Fairy's corporate business. Of course, if Jesus and the Tooth Fairy conspired together, that would constitute insider trading. Maybe that's why the Romans decided to crucify him to begin with?

I don't know, but it looks like Christians and Jews, while both celebrating Spring holidays, might have some differences as to how to stay relevant and popular in modern-day America...

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Not to worry. Jon Stewart has some advise for his Jewish brethren:

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But the threats, Stephen Colbert informs us, are coming from other directions too, like Down Under:

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

This famous phrase, made famous by Sir Isaac Newton, and celebrated ever since, may have been a public attempt at modesty and historical gratitude that was sure to endear him to, and inspire, subsequent generations of natural philosophers, but it may also have been a little bit of an underhanded insult to Robert Hooke, just the kind of thing Newton would do when his gigantic and fragile ego was wounded if anyone dared to question some of his ideas...

Still, the phrase has taken on a life of its own, and it is now used to describe the incredible scientific and technological progress that has taken humanity to the unique position of being able to question its own origin and place in the universe, and to actually start to answer those questions, change its environment, make its dreams more ambitious and then make those dreams come true. The following captivating video is a beautiful celebration of the cumulative knowledge and insight we've gained about ourselves and the universe in only a few centuries, and the amazing feats we've accomplished as a result, by standing on the shoulders of giants:

Hope you're inspired!

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To Infinity and Beyond

Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through numbers: take any number, and you'll soon realize that there is no such thing as the biggest number because you can always add 1. No, a googol won't do it, nor even a googolplex or Graham's number. Yes, these numbers contain more zeros than there are atoms in the observable universe, but they still fall short, infinitely short, in fact, of infinity.

But the strangeness doesn't end there because infinity may not only be a mathematical conceptual idea: infinity raises all kinds of interesting scientific and philosophical questions and paradoxes (what Immanuel Kant called antinomies of reason) about the physical universe that even modern cosmology doesn't quite know what to do with: is space infinite? If not, what's beyond its edge? Infinite empty space? What about time? If it is, and the amount of matter in the universe is finite, then everything that could logically happen has happened, and will continue to happen, an infinite number of times... And hey, are there an infinite amount of universes? And as you'll see in this fascinating documentary, this is just the beginning of the weirdness:

For a fascinating treatment of the problems of infinity, check out the documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

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Adam Savage - How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries

We live in a world in which we presuppose as a given that great scientific discoveries require the existence of great, expensive technological equipment: lasers, the Large Hadron Collider, microscopes, computers, the Hubble and Kepler telescopes, synchrotrons, super-duper cameras, you name it...

But more than great technology, the real secret to discovery is creativity, because creativity helps you make good use of whatever tools are actually available to you, even if they happen to be, as in the case of Eratosthenes, two sticks on the ground. In the following TEDTalk animated presentation, Myth Buster Adam Savage recounts a few examples (starting with Richard Feynman, moving on to Eratosthenes,  Galileo, and Armand Fizeau's toothed wheel to measure the speed of light,) about how small ideas can give rise to mind-blowing ideas and revolutionary discoveries.

And if Carl Sagan is more your style, you might be interested in his take on Eratosthenes.

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Tucson Bans Ethnic Studies Program

Oh irony of ironies... just as Rick Santorum is lying about the fact that several California universities don't teach American History, Arizona's governor has just signed a bill actually banning ethnic studies from the curriculum of public schools, and the Tucson School Board of Education has taken advantage of this opportunity and decided to ban their Mexican-American Studies program because, get this... it makes white men look bad by teaching kids the historical fact that the land that used to belong to their ancestors was taken over by the white man...

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That bitch, Rosa Clark... And hey, If they weren't brainwashing these kids with burritos, then why am I thinking "yo quiero Taco Bell"?

Ok, but for a more serious treatment of this issue, and of what race theory actually entails, you might want to read this article from the New York Times' philosophy column The Stone.

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Rick Santorum's Insane Conspiracy Theories

Where do the Republicans find these inept, ignoramus candidates? Did someone lose a bet? First it was Sarah Palin, then they came up with Michelle Bachmann, then Rick Perry and Herman Cain... and now the new kid in town seems to be education-phobe Rick Santorum, who's claiming that a number of universities in California don't even teach American History...

When these people make up easily verifiable falsehoods, is it mere ignorance and extremist ideology that drives them? Do they really believe the things that come out of their mouths? Or do they simply not believe they're going to get caught? And why oh why do people continue to support them?!?

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The Fabric of the Cosmos - The Illusion of Time

In the first episode of the Fabric of the Cosmos series, we learned a little bit about the weirdness of space, so hopefully that massaged your brain enough for something even weirder: time.

Philosophers and scientists have been trying to understand what time is since antiquity, and one thing that they have found is that it's incredibly difficult to say anything about time without already presupposing it in some sort of viciously circular argument. Nevertheless, curiosity drives us to ask questions that we then have to test by conceptual analysis and by empirical means, and we often find out that these come in conflict with each other in ways that elude simple solutions.

There are philosophical accounts of time (and I'll provide a short introduction soon), as well as scientific accounts, most of which are based to various extents on some of the incredible insights to come out of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity.

So fasten your seat-belts as Brian Greene takes us on a tour to understand some of the deepest of mysteries: What is time? Does the past exist? Does the future? Can we change the future? Can we travel back in time? If so, can we change the course of history? And hey, if you can go back in time and meet your former self, which one is really you? That last one is more of a philosophical question, just to show you how badass we are :)

If your head isn't spinning by now, then you might want to get yourself checked into a hospital :)

And if you want to watch the original from NOVA, here it is:

Watch The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time on PBS. See more from NOVA.

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Schrödinger’s Cat... in 60 Seconds

We've seen in previous episodes of this 60-second Adventures in Thought series, all sorts of philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific paradoxes and all-around weirdness. To remind you, we've seen Zeno's paradox concerning motion, the grandfather paradox concerning backward travel through time, John Searle's chinese room thought experiment concerning thought and computation, Hilbert's infinite hotel concerning different size infinities, Einstein's twin paradox concerning special relativity.

And finally, today we have Schrödinger’s Cat, that poor kitty whose bivalent fate rests upon the superposition of subatomic particles...

For a more serious treatment of Schrödinger’s Cat, check out Jim Al-Khalili's documentary Atoms: The Illusion of Reality.

And for more on infinities, you'll do your brain a favor by watching the excellent documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

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The GOP - Join the Party!

If you didn't know that I sort of despise the Republican Party and their heartless and shallow philosophies of religious conservatism and greedy libertarianism, then I guess the secret is out now...

It's one thing that they hold on to values and beliefs that are antithetical to my own worldview. I can understand that, and I don't blame them for being wrong :)

But what's really unforgivable is the fact that their beliefs contradict their own beliefs all over the place! And you've got to be pretty stubborn and/or dumb not to realize/admit that something must be wrong somewhere along the line...

Jesus would hate these conservatives...

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Inside Nature's Giants - The Camel

I've never thought much of camels, what with their lenky legs, their weird humps and simultaneously pretentious and dumb-looking ruminant mouths, I never thought these were interesting animals, but watching this documentary about them absolutely blew my mind!

As the team prepares to dissect one specimen, the main question guiding the exploration concerns how it is that these large animals have evolved to put up with the scorching heat of the desert, as well as with its scarcity of water. And when conditions are tough, that's exactly when evolution reveals itself to be that wise blind watchmaker capable of seemingly miraculous solutions that go way beyond anything you could have ever expected.

So join the team to explore the camel's anatomy and physiology, as well as its incredible evolution, as they travel to one of the most camel densely populated regions in the world: Australia. Say what???

Want more? Check out the entire Inside Nature's Giants series.

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