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...

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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...

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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...

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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 Simpso...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 :)The Colbert...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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,...

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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...

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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,...

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