Hans Rosling discusses the effect religion has upon birth rates.
Here’s a hint. Very little.
How do games enrich our culture? They help us learn about them.
A TEDTalk given by Brenda Brathwaite. She is a game designer whose has designed games that focus on teaching hard to understand issues.
A TEDTalk discussing happiness and how most of us have it backwards. I’m going to try the journaling three things I’m grateful for stuff and see how well it works.
Regenerative medicine has been slowly popping up more and more on my science blogs and not just on my transhumanist blogs. This is making me happy. I think it is a brilliant idea. Everything I’ve seen suggests that it is well within our grasp as long as we devote the time and money to finding and achieving it. And as long as we don’t let our fears keeps us from it. We’ve improved our lives through technology for nearly two centuries now and we’re at at a tipping point in certain fields, like medicine, where we can’t just rest and relax. We need to push if our future is going to be as good as it was for the people before us.
Where did all the dinosaurs go?
So you may have heard that the Triceratops no longer exists. That is both true and false. You won’t go finding a dinosaur if you go looking for one, except for maybe in museums. Unfortunately even if go to a museum and find a dinosaur, you might not actually be finding a dinosaur. Let Jack Horner, dinosaur bone cutter, explain:
So basically we had a bunch of bad science back in the dinosaur gathering age. People who collected dinosaur bones for museums weren’t looking hard enough, and found different dinosaurs everywhere they looked, rather than determining that the dinosaurs they were looking at were actually different, or just juvenile versions of ones already discovered.
The good news is that, despite what the news may have told you, the triceratops still exists. It is its older, more adult form, Torosaurus, which no longer exists, since it was found after the more juvenile triceratops. Suddenly all those cartoons with dinosaurs wearing shades doesn’t seem so crazy anymore, huh?
10 Minute TEDTalk by Drew Berry, showing us visualizations of biology we have never seen before. I recently studied the parts of a cell and being able to see these visualizations is amazing.
Need a pick me up? Need a longer perspective than the last few years. The above 15 minute video gives will help you out with this. Peter Diamandis offers an optimistic outlook on humanity’s progress, given it’s progress over the last few decades.
Video: TEDTalk: Storytelling
This one is only four minutes long and it is well worth watching.
I do wish he had manage to work in comics but there are plenty of other storytelling formats he glossed over so I can’t claim discrimination. I can point out that when he uses the word book here, he is talking about the physical medium, a set of bound pages, and not necessarily a novel, or story. What I love is the multimedia approach to his particular story. The presentation wasn’t about an iPad. It was about how stories can be so much more than words, or performances, or images, or sound, etc. It can be all of those things. This is the kind of story I can’t wait for. In the mean time I’d settle for eBook readers which allow me to organize the text the way I want (including replicating a book if I want).
SOPA/PIPA and the Media Industry
I know you’re likely getting tired of hearing this but I have one more thing to share with you. The TEDTalk outlining the modern history of copying, copyright, and how SOPA and PIPA came to be, and what is to come. It is thirteen minutes long and very much worth your time. Please watch.
A time will be coming when technology will make defunct the industries of today. It has happened before and it will happen again. We can’t let industries limit us, limit what we can do, just for their own bottom lines. For a US Citizen, your weapon against them is the laws of our government and tools to create those laws is your senator and congressmen. Email them. Call them. Snail Mail them. Go visit their offices. Make it known that you are not to be censored or controlled by big media. Let them know that if they want to survive, they need to rely upon quality and quantity, just like the rest of us, now by making it illegal for you to do what you want to do naturally: Share.
