This is what you’d call efficient. In two minutes, we watch our planet take form. 600 million years of geological history whizzes by in a snap. Then we see what the next 100 million years may have in store for us. If you don’t have the patience to watch 700 million years unfold in 180 seconds (seriously?), then we’ll give you this spoiler: Coastal real estate is not a long-term buy…
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Random? Yes. Handy? Double yes. The ultimate culinary lifehack from SAVEUR magazine’s Executive Food Editor, Todd Coleman…
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In July, the Edge.orgheld its annual “Master Class” in Napa, California and brought together some influential thinkers to talk about “The Science of Human Nature.” The highlights included:
Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.
The Edge.org has now started making videos from the class available online, including, this week, Steven Pinker’s talk on the history of violence. You can watch Pinker’s full 86 minute talk here (sorry, we couldn’t embed it on our site.) Or, if you want the quick gist of Pinker’s thinking, then watch the short clip above. In five minutes, Pinker tells you why violence is steadily trending down, and why some things are actually going right in our momentarily/monetarily troubled world.
Then let’s also add Salvador Dali to the list. In 1958, Wallace tried to demystify “the enigma that is Salvador Dali,” and it didn’t go terribly well. It turns out that surrealist painters give surreal answers to conventional interview questions too. Pretty quickly, Wallace capitulates and says, “I must confess, you lost me halfway through.” Happily for us, the video makes for some good viewing more than 50 years later.
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We’re tackling another big question today with the help of Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson. And the question goes like this: Why has the West created so much prosperity and stability over the past several centuries, when the rest of the world did not? For Ferguson, the “great divergence” can be explained by six big ideas, or what he calls killer apps for the benefit of his technophile TED audience:
1. Competition
2. The Scientific Revolution
3. Property Rights
4. Modern Medicine
5. The Consumer Society
6. Work Ethic
These apps, it turns out, are open source. Anyone can download and use them. And that’s precisely what Asia has done. The great divergence is over (baby blue)…
In 2009, Richard Dawkins invited Lawrence Krauss, an internationally-known theoretical physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, to talk about some big enchilada questions. What is our current picture of the universe? When did the universe begin? What came before it? How could something come from nothing? And what will happen to the universe in the future?
Krauss takes us back to the foundational work of Einstein and Hubble, then moves us through important breakthroughs in modern theoretical physics, ones that have helped us unravel some of these big questions. Give Professor Krauss 53 minutes, and he’ll give you the universe … and a few jokes along the way.
Late last week, Stephen King treated an audience at George Mason University to a 10-minute reading from his upcoming book Dr. Sleep . It’s not just any other book. It’s the sequel to The Shining, his 1977 thriller that Stanley Kubrick fammously adapted to film. (Don’t miss Making the Shining here.)
King first started talking about a sequel in 2009, and now we’re getting our first taste of what’s to come. At long last, you will know what happened to Danny Torrance.
John Hodgman, your favorite quirky, mustachioed humorist, made an appearance at the Maker Faire festival in NYC earlier this month. And, in the DIY spirit of the event, he gave a 30+ minute comic riff on material appearing in his upcoming book That is All — a compendium of “complete world knowledge” that can help you survive an apocalypse. The better part of the talk focuses, quite naturally, on the magic of magic tricks — something we all need to know more about…
Get ready for it. This week, Knopf will release Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, Aleph. And we’re taking bets on three questions. How many copies will be legally sold? (The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies.) How many copies will be pirated and given away? And to what extent will the circulation of illegal copies actually benefit legit sales?
In recent years, Coelho has become something of a willing conspirator in the pirating of his own work. Sometimes he links on his own blog to pirated copies floating around the web. Other times he makes the texts available (in multiple languages) in a nice shareable widget.
Coelho explains how his adventures in self-pirating got underway in a Q&A appearing in yesterday’s New York Times.
Q. You’ve also had success distributing your work free. You’re famous for posting pirated version of your books online, a very unorthodox move for an author.
A. I saw the first pirated edition of one of my books, so I said I’m going to post it online. There was a difficult moment in Russia; they didn’t have much paper. I put this first copy online and I sold, in the first year, 10,000 copies there. And in the second year it jumped to 100,000 copies. So I said, “It is working.” Then I started putting other books online, knowing that if people read a little bit and they like it, they are going to buy the book. My sales were growing and growing, and one day I was at a high-tech conference, and I made it public.
Q. Weren’t you afraid of making your publisher angry?
A. I was afraid, of course. But it was too late. When I returned to my place, the first phone call was from my publisher in the U.S. She said, “We have a problem.”
Q. You’re referring to Jane Friedman, who was then the very powerful chief executive of HarperCollins?
A. Yes, Jane. She’s tough. So I got this call from her, and I said, “Jane, what do you want me to do?” So she said, let’s do it officially, deliberately. Thanks to her my life in the U.S. changed.
The rest of the interview continues here. And, in the meantime, you can find several Coelho books catalogued in our collection of Free eBooks.
Thanks to Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, you can now fire up your browser and start taking a good, close look at The Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient biblical texts found between 1947 and 1956, right on the shores of the Dead Sea. The Scrolls were originally written between the third and first centuries BCE, and they constitute the oldest known pieces of the Hebrew Bible. Since 1965, they have been on display in Jerusalem. But no matter where you live, you can view five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls, each photographed at a resolution of 1,200 megapixels. That’s roughly 200 times greater than your average camera.
Back in 1970, three psychology professors pulled off a hoax that doubled as medical research. They brought Dr. Myron L. Fox, “an authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior,” to a conference near Lake Tahoe and let him talk about “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” Little did the audience know that Fox wasn’t actually a researcher or scholar. He was actually an actor who had played parts in Hogan’s Heroes and Batman. And he was given a gibberish-filled script to learn only the day before. Nonetheless, the educators in the crowd ate up his meaningless talk, and it allowed the researchers to draw the conclusion that “style was more influential than content in providing learner satisfaction.” A nice way of saying that jargon and cant can sometimes take you a long way in the academy — in the humanities and sciences alike. More backstory here. H/T Metafilter
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