If 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) [ted id=98] Watch Richard Dawkins’ talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find […]
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 […]