Experience the magic of Richard Dawkins’ realityIf living in Richard Dawkins’ world is to live without an omnipotent creator, to explain life’s most wondrous mysteries with scientific fact, is it also to live in a world devoid of beauty and magic? No, says Dawkins, in his newest book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, which makes its […]
Via Boing Boing via The First Post, we learn that Richard Dawkins‘ foundation is funding a summer camp to teach children reason, skepticism and science. From the article: Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution. […]
Updated 10/29/08: Oxford announced yesterday the appointment of Professor Marcus du Sautoy to the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. Du Sautoy is a mathematician and a dedicated popularizer of math and science. To get to know him, you might start with today’s installment of his London Times column “Sexy Maths.” From […]
Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves, passing from brain to brain like a physical virus. At TED2008, Blackmore makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new category of meme, the “teme,” which spreads itself via technology — and invents brand-new ways to keep itself alive. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. […]
Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals — with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy‘s […]
Many TEDTalks speakers have answered the 2008 Edge Foundation question: What have you changed your mind about? Why? Among the more than 160 essays from leading thinkers — scientists, philosophers, artists — look for Wired’s Chris Anderson, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Juan Enriquez, Helen Fisher, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel […]
Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for “thinking the improbable” by looking at how the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe. (Filmed at TEDGlobal 2005, July 2005 in Oxford, UK. 22:00) Watch Richard Dawkins’ talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks […]
Here’s a quirky line-up of "the world’s top 20 public intellectuals" published by a couple of magazines after a widely-promoted internet vote. 1 Noam Chomsky 2 Umberto Eco 3 Richard Dawkins 4 Václav Havel 5 Christopher Hitchens 6 Paul Krugman 7 Jürgen Habermas 8 Amartya Sen 9 Jared Diamond 10 Salman Rushdie 11 Naomi Klein […]
At TEDGlobal this summer, Richard Dawkins outlined the limitations of the human mind. We live, he explained, in a middle-sized world, and have difficulty understanding anything very large — like solar systems — or very small, like atoms. So when Dartmouth researchers created the world’s smallest mobile robot, which measures a hundredth of an inch […]
