“Wade Davis illuminates the need to embrace and celebrate the cultural and intellectual diversity that constitutes the totality of human experience, especially when considering fundamental questions of how we are to relate to our environment.”
“With stunning photos and stories, National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world’s indigenous cultures, which are disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate.”
“Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance.”
An interesting episode that delves into the meaning of words and what gives them power. Who gets to decide what a word means? What determines whether a word is insulting?
A thought provoking episode but there is a lot of foul language. The episode makes its point in the way that South Park usually does. If you can tolerate obscenity and offensive language, you might find this interesting.
https://www.cc.com/video/prdntl/south-park-south-park-1312-the-f-word-act-1
“Rock-star physicist” Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.”
This is just an amazing lecture with some great visuals to help explain some complex ideas. Absolutely worth watching. Some interesting questions that get raised: Why bother engaging in research that is so far removed from any seeming relevance to our every day lives? Should we spend billions of dollars to fund research that may never provide any practical outcomes or make our lives materially any better? Is the quest for knowledge and understanding a valuable enough goal to justify these costs?
This lecture was filmed before the supercollider went online in 2008. It has since gone online and done some important work already and the particle he talks about, the Higgs Boson, has since been detected by the super collider as documented in the amazing documentary Particle Fever
Dr. Gupta interviews Joel Osteen.
He started by telling the story of his own mother, Dodie Osteen, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer back in 1981. She was told “there was no treatment that could be given to her.”
It was liver cancer, and she was just 48 years old. Osteen told me, “She prayed, she believed, and she quoted scripture. Thirty-something years later, she’s alive.”
Osteen is describing a sort of faith healing or at least the power of prayer, and it is an issue that deeply divides the medical community.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/21/health/gupta-religion-medicine/
“Remember that guy from 300? What was his name? ARG!!! It turns out our brains make and recall memories in different ways. In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank talks about the way we do it, what damaging that process can do to us, and that guy… with the face and six pack… ”
“In this REALLY IMPORTANT EPISODE of Crash Course Psychology, Hank talks about how we remember and forget things, why our memories are fallible, and the dangers that can pose.”
“Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting — linguistically, culturally — than it seems, and it’s all good news.”
“Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of “social technology” that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.”
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