Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

in Current Affairs | February 7th, 2008

We cov­ered the Sec­ond Amend­ment a cou­ple of weeks ago. (Does it con­fer the right to bear arms?) So why not touch on the First Amend­ment this week and point you to an engag­ing inter­view (MP3 — iTunes — Feed) with the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author Antho­ny Lewis, who has just released the new book: Free­dom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biog­ra­phy of the First Amend­ment.

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How to Extend the Life Of Your iPod Battery

in Apple, Podcasts | February 6th, 2008

For those who use their iPod to take advan­tage of our copi­ous pod­cast col­lec­tions:

via Life­hack­er

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Don’t Forget to Vote

in Politics, Video - Politics/Society, YouTube | February 4th, 2008

If you’re a res­i­dent of a Super Tues­day state, we hope you can find some time to pull the lever tomor­row. Also, we hope you’ll for­give (at least) one more polit­i­cal post before Super Tues­day. What­ev­er your polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions, the video below is a com­pelling exam­ple of new media at work. Accord­ing to the New York Times’ polit­i­cal blog, the lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas round­ed up 30 or so celebri­ties and put togeth­er this video set to the sound­track of Barack Oba­ma’s con­ces­sion speech in New Hamp­shire. Because the group worked for free and edit­ed the video on their own, they turned the project around in two days. The effect is pow­er­ful (and the video is added to our YouTube Playlist). You can see Oba­ma’s orig­i­nal speech here.

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Philosopher Attack Ads: Kant and Nietzsche Go Negative in ’08

in Current Affairs, Philosophy | February 4th, 2008

On the eve of Super Tues­day, things are get­ting ugly. Immanuel Kant has gone neg­a­tive on Friedrich Niet­zsche (see below), and the Niet­zsche cam­paign has wast­ed no time respond­ing. These enlight­ened attacks ads have been added to our YouTube Playlist.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

• Enlight­en­ment on iTunes: The Phi­los­o­phy of Immanuel Kant
• Ideas and Cul­ture Pod­casts
• Oth­er Phi­los­o­phy Arti­cles

NASA to Beam Beatles’ Song into Space

in Music | February 2nd, 2008

“Across the Uni­verse” was writ­ten by John Lennon in 1969. On Mon­day, NASA will beam “Across the Uni­verse” lit­er­al­ly across the uni­verse, straight to Polaris, the North Star. Accord­ing to Wired Mag­a­zine, the song trav­el­ing at the speed of light will take 431 years to reach its final des­ti­na­tion, which is a mere 2.5 quadrillion miles away. Lennon must be smil­ing some­where.

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From Our “Inner Chimp” to our “Inner Fish”

in Science | February 1st, 2008

Ear­li­er this week, we high­light­ed a great con­ver­sa­tion about whether we inher­it­ed moral­i­ty from our pri­mate ances­tors. It raised the ques­tion whether our “inner chimp” tells us what is right or wrong.

Now, to switch gears just a bit, we bring you an inter­view with Neil Shu­bin that delves into your “inner fish” (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Shu­bin is the author of Your Inner Fish: A Jour­ney into the 3.5‑Billion-Year His­to­ry of the Human Body, and here he talks about how var­i­ous parts of the human body (our hands and head, for exam­ple) evolved from the anato­my of ancient fish and oth­er long extinct crea­tures. What this goes to show is that “our human­i­ty, … which makes us so unique … is real­ly built by bits and pieces shared with every­thing we call worms, jel­ly­fish, sponges, and so forth.” “The utter­ly unique and beau­ti­ful can be made from some­thing very com­mon.” And there’s some­thing aes­thet­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful about that.

Shu­bin, I should men­tion, made head­lines in 2006 when he and a team of sci­en­tists revealed the dis­cov­ery of Tik­taa­lik roseae, a 375 mil­lion year old fos­sil that cap­tures the moment when sea crea­tures made their tran­si­tion to land. Good stuff.

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Political Satire on the Tube

in Current Affairs | February 1st, 2008

On the lighter side .…

Yes­ter­day, I got a chance to attend Lar­ry Lessig’s last lec­ture ever on “Free Cul­ture.” (More on Lessig here.) It was a pre­sen­ta­tion wor­thy of Steve Jobs, and I’ll have more to say about it lat­er.

For now, I’ll leave you with an exam­ple of cre­ative “remix­ing” cit­ed dur­ing his talk. It’s polit­i­cal satire. Not the kind that your father grew up with. But the kind that’s grown out of the new dig­i­tal land­scape.

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10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube (Smart Video Collections)

in Uncategorized | January 30th, 2008

It’s been a con­stant lament that YouTube offers its users scant lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al con­tent. And that con­tent is itself hard to find. Just vis­it YouTube’s so-called Edu­ca­tion Sec­tion, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any­thing actu­al­ly edu­ca­tion­al. But the good news is that we’re see­ing some recent signs of intel­li­gent life at YouTube. The video ser­vice hosts an increas­ing num­ber of intel­lec­tu­al­ly redeemable video col­lec­tions. And so we fig­ured why not do some heavy lift­ing and bring a few your way. If YouTube won’t make them easy to find, then we will. (By the way, I first post­ed this right between Christ­mas and New Years, when every­one was tuned out. So it seemed worth post­ing again.)

1.) UC Berke­ley: We have men­tioned this col­lec­tion before, but we might as well men­tion it again. UC Berke­ley launched in Octo­ber a YouTube chan­nel that con­tains over 300 hours of aca­d­e­m­ic pro­gram­ming. And, most notably, you’ll find here a series of uni­ver­si­ty cours­es that can be watched in their entire­ty (for free). It’s a deep col­lec­tion worth start­ing with.

2.) @GoogleTalks: Many big names end up speak­ing at Google. That includes polit­i­cal fig­ures and cul­tur­al fig­ures such as Paul Krug­man, Steven Pinker, Joseph Stieglitz, Jonathan Lethem and more. Since Google owns YouTube, it’s good to see that they’re mak­ing an effort to record these talks and raise the intel­lec­tu­al bar on GooTube just a bit. Have a look.

3.) The Nobel Prize: TheNo­bel­Prize chan­nel presents cur­rent and past Nobel Lau­re­ates — cour­tesy of Nobelprize.org, the offi­cial web site of the Nobel Foun­da­tion. The col­lec­tion fea­tures offi­cial Nobel Prize Lec­tures and also more casu­al pre­sen­ta­tions. It looks like talks by the 2007 win­ners are being added slow­ly.

4.) TED Talks: Every year, a thou­sand “thought-lead­ers, movers and shak­ers” get togeth­er at a four-day con­fer­ence called TED (which is short for Tech­nol­o­gy, Enter­tain­ment and Design). In recent years, the list of speak­ers has ranged from Sergey Brin and Lar­ry Page to Bill Gates, to Her­bie Han­cock and Peter Gabriel, to Frank Gehry, to Al Gore and Bill Clin­ton. In this col­lec­tion, you’ll find var­i­ous talks pre­sent­ed at the con­fer­ence. They usu­al­ly run about 20 min­utes.

5.) FORA.tv: In case you don’t know about it, FORA.tv is a web ser­vice that hosts videos fea­tur­ing impor­tant thinkers grap­pling with con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al, social and polit­i­cal ques­tions. It’s like YouTube, but always intel­li­gent. You can find extend­ed videos on FORA’s site, and a decent sam­pling of their con­tent on YouTube.

6.) Philoso­phers and The­o­rists: The Euro­pean Grad­u­ate School (or EGS) hosts a video col­lec­tion on YouTube that includes talks by some very impor­tant theorists/philosophers of the past gen­er­a­tion — for exam­ple, Jacques Der­ri­da and Jean Bau­drillard. There are also some film­mak­ers mixed in — take for exam­ple, Peter Green­away and John Waters.

7.) Pulitzer Cen­ter on Cri­sis Report­ing: This chan­nel pro­motes cov­er­age of inter­na­tion­al affairs, “focus­ing on top­ics that have been under-report­ed, mis-report­ed — or not report­ed at all.” Most of these videos were fea­tured on the pub­lic tele­vi­sion pro­gram “For­eign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.”

8.) BBC World­wide: The lead­ing British broad­cast­er is now live on YouTube, and there’s some good con­tent in the mix, although it won’t leap off of the home­page. The trick is to look at their playlist where you will find more edu­ca­tion­al pieces of video: doc­u­men­taries, sci­ence, dra­ma, trav­el, and more. The notable down­side is that the videos typ­i­cal­ly fall with­in YouTube’s cus­tom­ary 10 minute video lim­it. (Many oth­ers cit­ed here run longer.) Too bad more could­n’t have been done with this oppor­tu­ni­ty.

Oth­er smart media prop­er­ties that have opt­ed for the sound­bite strat­e­gy here include Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and PBS.

9.) UChan­nel: For­mer­ly called the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel, this video ser­vice presents talks on international/political affairs from aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions all over the world. It’s spear­head­ed by Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, and you can find an even more exten­sive video col­lec­tion on their web site.

10.) Oth­er Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nels on YouTube: UC Berke­ley launched the biggest chan­nel on YouTube, but there are some oth­ers out there. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, find­ing them is some­thing of a crap­shoot. We’ve man­aged, how­ev­er, to pull togeth­er a good list of ten. See 10 Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lec­tions on YouTube

Bonus: We cob­bled togeth­er our own playlist of smart YouTube videos that will grow over time. Have a look.

In putting togeth­er this list, one thing became clear: YouTube has enough qual­i­ty con­tent to keep you busy, and there’s clear­ly more that I don’t know about (again, because they don’t make it easy to find). If you want to add oth­er good YouTube col­lec­tions to our list, please list them in the com­ments and I can add them selec­tive­ly to the list.

Want more smart media? Check out our big list of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es avail­able via pod­cast.

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14 Easy Ways You Can Be An Everyday Environmentalist

in Current Affairs | January 30th, 2008

The Nature Con­ser­van­cy asked its staff and lead­ing envi­ron­ment blog­gers how you can make “per­son­al, sci­ence-based choic­es to help save the plan­et.” Here are their 14 sug­ges­tions.

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Is Morality Hardwired in Us?

in Science | January 29th, 2008

Is moral­i­ty a sixth sense that’s in all of us, and is it per­haps a prod­uct of our bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion? Writ­ing recent­ly in The New York Times Mag­a­zine, Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Steven Pinker sug­gests that moral­i­ty may well be hard­wired. And he points to fas­ci­nat­ing new research that backs up this belief. Pinker’s arti­cle cov­ers pret­ty much the same ground as does this engag­ing Radio Lab pod­cast (MP3 — iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Tak­ing an hour-long look at the “sci­ence of moral­i­ty,” the pro­gram gets into some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. It gets into the great Trol­ley moral dilem­ma, into what brain scans (MRI’s) reveal when human brains grap­ple with moral ques­tions, and into how sci­en­tists think that we inher­it­ed moral instincts from our pri­mate ances­tors. You’ll learn all about how moral­i­ty is our “inner chimp.” If this is not enough, you can also lis­ten to Pinker’s inter­view yes­ter­day on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Get it here.

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