Ancient Aliens Debunked

Posted on October 11, 2012 by RichardPrins

Ancient Aliens Debunked is a 3 hour refutation of the theories proposed on the History Channel series Ancient Aliens. It is essentially a point by point critique of the “ancient astronaut theory” which has been proposed by people like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin as well as many others.

The film covers topics like ancient building sites: Puma Punku, The Pyramids, Baalbek, Incan sites, And Easter Island.

Ancient artifacts: Pacal’s rocket, the Nazca lines, the Tolima “fighter jets”, the Egyptian “light bulb”, Ufo’s in ancient art, and the crystal skulls.

Ancient text issues: Ezekiel’s wheel, Ancient nuclear warfare, Vimana’s, the Anunnaki, and the Nephilim.

All the claims are sourced at the website. It was produced by Chris White and includes commentary from Dr. Michael Hesier.

It is distributed for free on the internet and is a completely non-profit project. Viewers are encouraged to share, and burn copies to DVD, as long as they do not profit from its distribution.

Thoroughly referenced and worth watching, even though it’s three hours long. Hat tip to Skeptic.com for pointing out its existence.

David Lyon on The Culture of Surveillance

Posted on April 16, 2012 by RichardPrins

Via ABC’s Big Ideas:

This is an analysis of ‘the culture of surveillance’ by the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Canada, Dr David Lyon. He’s very good on the strength of what he describes as the cooperation between surveillance and the surveilled!

There’s a grudging but inevitable acceptance of what happens now in surveillance through government, policing, intelligence and commerce but it’s also now hardwired into streets, smart phones and the internet. And we’re absolutely complicit with our huge uptake of social media. Lyon describes this as the “democratisation of surveillance”.

He speaks here at the University of Sydney.

Length: 48 minutes 56 seconds.

Spiritualized – Hey Jane

Posted on April 10, 2012 by RichardPrins

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.

On Spiritualized’s seventh album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (out April 17), Pierce sounds more inspired than ever by his own looming mortality. This, after all, is a guy who nearly died of double-pneumonia in 2005, and who spent months mixing this new record while taking chemotherapy for degenerative liver disease. For all the brooding rock ‘n’ roll swagger of “I Am What I Am,” and for all the chugging grandiosity of the nine-minute single “Hey Jane,” the most indelible moments on Sweet Heart Sweet Light are those in which Pierce lays his soul bare and pleads for something beyond his reach.

Jason Pierce (a.k.a. J. Spaceman)

George Dyson – Turing’s Cathedral

Posted on April 7, 2012 by RichardPrins

YouTube frame

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.

How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

The Superior Human?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by RichardPrins

The other day Psychology Today‘s Marc Bekoff pointed out a fascinating documentary on speciesism called The Superior Human?

Speciesism, as defined by Wikipedia, is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. It’s a behaviour or ideology which, in all probability, is used only by the human animal, both versus other species of organisms as well as with (undesirable) members within its own species.

Speakers featured in the documentary are Dr. Bernard Rollin, Gary Yourofsky, Dr. Richard Ryder and Dr. Steven Best. It is narrated by Dr. Nick Gylaw.

Length: 73 minutes.

Astor Piazzolla – Milonga del Angel

Posted on March 26, 2012 by RichardPrins

Milonga del Angel by Astor Piazzolla y su Quinteto Tango Nuevo. Concert in Utrecht, Netherlands, 1985.

The Edge Annual Question 2012

Posted on January 17, 2012 by RichardPrins

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick’s double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it “was so beautiful it had to be true.”

Since this question is about explanation, answers may embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, including other fields of inquiry such as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, political theory, literary theory, or the human spirit. The only requirement is that some simple and non-obvious idea explain some diverse and complicated set of phenomena.

Read the 192 responses totaling 128500 words…