To commemorate International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey’s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.
If you have around ten hours to spare, you might enjoy the course from Harvard by Michael Sandel on justice within the framework of political philosophy.
If you’ve got around twenty hours of free time, you might enjoy this YouTube playlist of 10 lectures from Stanford University on Charles Darwin’s legacy (Stanford Continuing Studies course). Each video is around two hours and features an introduction, a presentation/lecture, and concludes with a panel discussion and a Q&A.
Recognizing logical fallacies is not only an indispensable tool in the skeptic’s toolset, but it is also very useful in day-to-day discussions/debates for recognizing faulty arguments
One index [of US decline] is vetoes at the United Nations. Until the mid-’60s the world was so much under US control that the US didn’t veto a single resolution at the Security Council. Since the mid-’60s the United States is far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions. Britain, which is a client state, is second. Nobody else is close. That’s a reflection of the decline in capacity and power, meaning ability to influence and control.
Dr David Lyon, the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Canada, offers an analysis of ‘the culture of surveillance’
The video for Hey Jane, the first single from the new album by Spiritualized which is called Sweet Heart Sweet Light. For a limited time NPR offers the chance to listen to the full album online.
Time travel makes great science fiction, but can it really be done? Travel into the future is already a reality, but visiting the past is a much tougher proposition, and may require fantastic resources such as a wormhole in space. Nevertheless, if going back in time is allowed, even in principle, then what about all those paradoxes that make time travel stories so intriguing?
Dyson’s account of the origins of modern computing, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.
The Superior Human? is the first documentary to systematically challenge the common human belief that humans are superior to other life forms. The documentary reveals the absurdity of this belief while exploding human bias.