Why Are Termites So Rich in Protein?

If you are familiar with body-builders or just meat-heads in general, then you know that they are obsessed with protein (and probably human growth hormone and anabolic steroids and a bunch of other supplements). But if these folks are really serious about efficiency, then maybe they ought to consider what might be perhaps the best source of protein anywhere: termites :)

But why are they so rich in protein if their diet consists of woody material that has barely any nutritional value at all? The answer, as you are about to find out, is fascinating:

So at least two things are amazing about this video. First, the fact that these mechanisms have evolved. Second, the fact that scientists have figured them out :)

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If Fifty Shades of Grey Is Not Dirty Enough for Your Taste, Try The Bible, But Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

When I was a little boy, the Bible was one of my favorite books. No, it's not because I was a goodie-two-shoes... it was because I loved the story of Sampson and how he would kick major ass and cause havoc wherever he went. I also liked the apocalyptic stuff... now I'm starting to wonder how I ended up so well-adjusted :)

And now that psychopathic and experienced men taking advantage of, abusing and humiliating inexperienced young girls are all the rage, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is just not extreme enough. For sadomasochistic and bondage connoisseurs, almost nothing gets filthier than the Bible...

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Earth Time Lapse from the International Space Station

Over the past few years, we have featured some incredible time lapse photography on this blog, and it truly has been phenomenal. Technology continues to get ever more awesome, and people find more and new creative ways to fill us with awe and inspiration.

But regular individuals don't have access to certain viewpoints from where to shoot their incredible videos, like out space, for instance... but the International Space Station does:

And if you thought that was great, just watch what happens when they start adding effects and taking a few creative risks:

May your day be blessed with inspiration :)

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According to conservatives, the aftermath of a massive shooting spree is NOT the time to talk about guns?

I get that we in America have a constitutional right to bear arms and own weapons, but since we also love our Declaration of Independence, we also believe that we have a right to life. Now, these don't have to be mutually exclusive, so you'd think that adult conservatives would be willing to try to enter the discussion regarding how to adequately balance individual rights with a collective interest in societal peace and safety.

Gun fundamentalists, however, bifurcate the issue into a black and white dichotomy that's just not appropriate for adults: gun control does not have to mean that our weapons are going to be banned, taken away and burnt or given to our sworn enemies. It just means that, as reasonable adults, we believe that while our right to own arms is important and should be respected, maybe it's a good idea to draw some sort of line about just how far we can take that right. Should we be allowed to own atomic bombs? Probably not. What about fully loaded fighter jets? How about rocket launchers?  Fully automated rifles? We don't have to agree about where the line should be drawn to be able to see that a line somewhere does make sense, and that it does not amount to a full-on ban on weapons.

After Travon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman, Fox News thought that maybe we ought to ban those dangerous hoodies because guns don't kill people, hoodies kill people. And now that we are experiencing the aftermath of that horrible "Batman" shooting last week, and thinking about the impact of giving people unfettered access to weapons of mass destruction that they can unleash on unsuspecting populations, the folks at Fox News think that this is not the time to talk about guns... but it is time to ask whether we ought to ban costumes from movie theatres...

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Sometimes I wonder if this is just a horrible dream...

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Long-lost Moon landing tape: We are on the fucking moon!

If your life has consisted of anything other than just being a vegetable since 1969, then you know that, notwithstanding what conspiracy theorists might say, and regardless of the plausibility of their denials (this one almost convinces me, for instance), we have made it to the moon!

Countless future generations will be familiar with Neil Armstrong's famous first words upon touching down on the moon and being the first human being ever to set foot on our natural satellite: "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

But of course, that's just the family-friendly version that was officially broadcast all over the world, and the transmission contained more communication between the Apollo 11 astronauts and ground control in Houston that was never released to the public... until now! And as it turns out, it's not quite as apple-pie American as you might have expected, but it is full of awesome :)

Ok, so the question to ask at this point is how long it took you to suspect that this might not be real, if the question even came up at all? Regardless, I would have preferred this to be the real version of events... Leave it to the good folks at The Onion to turn fake news into a more believable version of what really happened :)

And for the true story of the Apollo program, you might be interested in watching the documentary film For All Mankind.

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Three Minute Philosophy - Empedocles

The pre-Socratic philosophers are a strange bunch. On the one hand, their ideas about the nature of reality must strike most of us as just plain weird. Everything is made of air or water? The fundamental constituents of the universe are love and strife? No, it's number? What?

On the other hand, what else can you expect from really smart people who didn't have the benefit of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of almost three millennia that they were the first to contribute to?

But there are a few cases, like Empedocles, in which, while he was still wrong, he came so tantalizingly close to the right answer (or to what the right answer would sort of look like), that even though he threw himself into a scorching volcano to prove he was a god, I can't help but take off my hat to him and introduce you to his thinking in a fun little three minute philosophy episode:

If you want to learn a bit more about the pre-socratic philosophers, maybe you'd be okay with Carl Sagan giving you a short history lesson? I'm sure you wouldn't mind that, right? :)

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Philosophy of Time

Sorry about the sparse entries lately. My mind has been busy with a bunch of personal stuff.

So today is the release of the last installment of The Dark Knight series, so I figured you're probably looking for some sort of light-minded stimulation to deal with the inevitable boredom, and I thought to myself, why not have a little introduction to the philosophy of time? It's precisely the kind of subject that makes a summer Friday go by all the more quickly :p

Obviously, this is a bit old, and just barely scratches the surface of this topic, but I hope you can see that time presents all sorts of interesting and paradoxical questions for which we don't yet have a fully satisfactory understanding. That opens up the possibility that maybe you'll be the person to figure it all out one day, so get to work! :)

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The Word - On the Straight & Narrow-Minded

Despite the horrible traffic, the humidity, the bad smells, the crowded subways, and so on, sometimes I'm actually glad I live in NYC and not in, say, Texas. Why, you ask?

For one thing, because Texas is ruled by Republicans, conservative culture, religion, racism, homophobia and narrow-minded gun-toting hillbillies. Case in point, the folks from the Texas GOP believe that the impressionable minds of young people are being poisoned by knowledge and the basic critical thinking skills that allow them to reach conclusions based on reason and evidence, and not just on the narrow-minded traditions with which they were raised... and so they're moving to ban the teaching of critical thinking!!!

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Even the Young Turks had something to say about this embarrassment:

Well, now I know... if I ever move to Texas, I can expect to be unemployed...

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Electric Vocabulary

Why do we call electricity "electricity"? Why do we talk about its "charge"? Or talk about whether that charge is "positive" or "negative"? And why do we refer to a device to store electricity as a "battery"?

One great way to find out about the fascinating history of this strange phenomenon, and the one I would recommend, is to watch the excellent documentary series Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity, narrated by Jim Al-Khalili.

But if you don't have the time to watch that right now, here's a simple and short introduction to get you started with at least the etymology of these words:

But seriously, go watch Shock and Awe...

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Mitt Romney's Bain Damage

Questions about Mitt Romney's time as CEO of Bain Capital have people concerned. On the one hand, he is running for president on the platform of his business experience. Of course, that business experience includes buying American companies, driving them to the ground, forcing all their employees to lose their jobs (either through the company's bankrupcy or through outsourcing those jobs to foreign nations), all while making obscene profits for Romney and his cronies, and laughing at those he screwed. On the other hand, when those business practices are questioned, he quickly claims that he was not involved in such business decisions... in which case he no longer has a business platform upon which to  base his presidential candidacy... wait, what?

Anyway, Jon Stewart is wondering whether this dark picture of Romney is purposefully designed to coincide with the timing of the latest of Batman's villains...

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And then there's the question of the difference between not breaking the law (because of all sorts of contorted loopholes and legal maneuvers) while being a total douchebag completely out of touch with the plight of regular people, and being perfectly happy to get all kinds of tax breaks and government subsidies for the rich while telling poor people that they cannot expect their government to help them with their healthcare costs and education the way it does with his luxurious tax write-offs, like sending his horse to the prom...

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Sean Carroll - The Case for Naturalism

If you follow current events in the world of public intellectualism, you probably know that over the past few decades, and increasingly over the past couple of years, some prominent physicists (Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and Lawrence Krauss, for instance) have been taking jabs at philosophy. The usual charge is that philosophy doesn't help us make scientific progress, which, for the most part, is kind of true. But, of course, who ever said that the job of philosophy is to make scientific progress? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what science is supposed to do?

You probably wouldn't criticize a sculptor for not hitting a home run, for not breaking a 100-meter dash world record, for not building the LHC, or for not discovering the Higgs Boson, etc. Why? Because that's not what sculpture is about! So for those physicists, all of whom I love but who don't know what the hell philosophy is or even what it's supposed to do, please stop talking about things over which you have no expertise. You kind of sound as ignorant as religious fundamentalists when they talk about science...

One of the physicists who does understand the ways in which philosophy and science can make great allies and help each other in their respective disciplines, however, is Sean Carroll. He's a great thinker, with a gift for precision, clarity and profundity. The following video has nothing to do with the physics/philosophy stuff I mentioned above, but it is a nice example of just how great he is at breaking down complex ideas into an accessible and nicely organized format without sounding the least bit condescending:

I'll check out the rest of this apparent debate later on, and if it's good, I'll post it in its entirety in the weeks to follow.

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Search Crews Continue To Look For Obviously Dead Hikers

Because of all their awkwardness and social ineptitude, and due to their literalist interpretation of things, autistic people may often seem to be blind to a reality that's obvious to the rest of us. But sometimes that's a two-way street because they can often see as obvious what the rest of us may be blissfully unaware of or willfully blind to...

And almost no one can strike that perfect balance between making you feel uncomfortable about your own views and making you laugh hysterically the way The Onion can:

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Marco Tempest - The Electric Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla

Today is the birthday of one of history's greatest genius: Nikola Tesla. It probably wouldn't be much of an overstatement to claim that the modern world wouldn't exist without him. He did invent, after all, things like the remote control, wireless communication, alternating current transmission, a death ray and a few other hundreds of things.

To learn about the man and his work, you should watch the documentary Nikola Tesla: Master of Lightning, but for the short version, Marco Tempest has a fascinating visual introduction to get you started:

Check out more TEDTalks.

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Drunk History - Oney Judge

If you like to have fun, to learn and to laugh, next time you have a dinner party, may I suggest you get the smartest or most educated person in the room wasted and then ask him/her to explain something related to their field of expertise?

If you're kind of skeptical, the following video shows the hilarity of what happened when comedian Jen Kirkman drank a bottle and a half of wine and tried to talk about a historical event related to the founding of our nation...

Kudos to Sterling!

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The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence

Last week in America we got to celebrate the 4th of July. To many people, this is a nice excuse to have a day off, spend it with family or friends, eat some hot dogs, drink some beer and watch some awesome fireworks. Nothing wrong with that.

It is important to remember, however (and hence why I've delayed this entry), why we celebrate that day, and what the Declaration of Independence, that document penned by the inimitable style and genius of Thomas Jefferson and consigned to eternity by the force of its rhetoric and the universality of its message, ultimately represents: ideals that although no nation has yet fully embodied, even the nation that originally proposed them, nevertheless establish an ideal toward which all nations ought to strive and against which they can measure their moral and political progress.

And check out this interesting and short article on the morality/immorality of patriotism.

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The Two Towers of Dubai Time Lapse

I am by no means a fan of the materialistic extravagance of places like Dubai, or the fact that its wealth comes from the exploitation of people all over the world and from the depletion and pollution of natural ecosystems everywhere... and when I think Two Towers, my mind immediately tends to go to The Lord of the Rings and the evil associated with Sauron, which is fitting, but damn it if the following time lapse video isn't totally awesome...

Check out more videos like this one in our time lapse tag.

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Test Your Awareness : Whodunnit? And Look Out for Bikers!

Summer is here, and those of us who are sick of driving and public transportation, or just environmentally or health conscious, are ditching conventional means of commuting and resorting to biking instead.

And as the number of bikers is increasing, tension between drivers, pedestrians and bikers seems to be on the rise, so the first thing I would recommend is that we all chill down a little and become more considerate of all our fellow commuters, no matter how they commute.

And especially for those who drive cars (aka, metal death machines), please be aware that, as human beings, you have physical and cognitive blind spots, and that no matter how good a driver you are, any sudden maneuver may result in a collision that may seriously hurt (or possibly even kill) those of us who are trying to reduce our CO2 footprint by riding bikes.

Don't believe that you might miss something that's right in front of your eyes? Well, you could always check out the invisible gorilla test to see how fallible human attention is, or you could try to solve the crime below, and see how your own observational skills stack up:

Did you pass with flying colors? I didn't think so. So, please, drive with caution, respect traffic rules, be courteous and remember that getting to your destination a minute later is totally worth not living with the guilt of having killed someone because you got impatient and rushed into a thoughtless decision.

In other words, I'm concerned for my life. Don't run me over!!! :)

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Pearls Before Swine on Natural Selection

Well, naturally... it's survival of the fittest :)

Via Pearls Before Swine

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Olber's Paradox - Why Is the Sky Dark at Night?

I know that may seem like a silly question at first glance, but there is a long history of seemingly silly questions that end up producing some mind-blowing and really counter-intuitive results that really get us to question our most basic presuppositions about the nature of reality, and in many cases redefine our understanding of the universe. This case is no exception.

So back to the question, sure, the sun is hiding on the other side of the planet, but there are stars in literally every possible direction, so photons are hitting us all the time from every possible direction. But if this is the case, shouldn't the night sky look bright from all these stars?

Well, as the following simple animation brilliantly demonstrates, the sky really is bright from all those stars... we just can't see all that light, not with our eyes anyway, but it is there, and what that tells us about cosmology and the universe is absolutely fascinating!

Bet you didn't see that coming, huh? No pun intended, actually. I was just blown away by the connections. This stuff is awesome :)

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The Birth of Calculus - Newton and Leibniz

Before you run away in fear of having seen the word calculus, let me preface this entry by saying that you don't have to understand how it works, or even be able to do it, to understand and appreciate why it's important and why calculus represents one of the greatest intellectual achievements of human history: the modern world would not exist without it. You may choose to turn a blind eye to it, but that doesn't make it go away, so why not embrace it?

And while you probably know that it was invented, that's right... invented, by two geniuses, Newton and Leibniz, working (mainly) independently of each other, do you know the differences in their approaches? If you've never quite had an appreciation for the beauty and elegance of math, the following short documentary, should be able to change that:

And if you don't know anything about the priority dispute between these two men, here is a short introduction to that regrettable nightmare:

Did you know both Newton and Leibniz were first-borns? From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, it makes a lot of sense why their priority dispute got so heated and cantankerous. Now Wallace and Darwin, on the other hand, were way later-borns, and look how that turned out :)

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