The Zen of skydiving

Experience Human Flight from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

Internet and the kindness of strangers

Why Internet, i.e. the Internet actually functioning, might actually more be a social phenomenon than a technical one

Meta confirmation bias

How educating yourself makes you even more biased.

The story our probes tell about us

Beautiful photo collage from the many, many picture Spirit has taken:



And here a vivacious, yes even spiritual presentation about the sub-polar rover missions on Mars:
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Flapp flapp

I am currently re-reading Taleb's Black Swan and besides it still being a real treat, I have to admit that I actually not only start grasping finer details during this 2nd read, but that I actually had gotten his central thesis slightly wrong the first time around. So, good books are definitely worth reading twice, especially in case your comprehension of the world is rather slow, like mine.

I wish I could carry such a beautiful conversation ...

... and if you do not agree with me you'll get one of your geek credits revoked. ;-)

Finding out about our hidden biases ...

... and why role models are so important.

Cool to see my hunch about this topic being corroborated by scientific findings.

Why small-pox vaccination was considered a sin ...

... and why this fact totally eluded you.

A great summariser of history

Yes, this is how I spend my days off. ;-)

The dazzle of moral relativism

A master example for why I have fundamental issues with moral relativism (here: meta-ethical relativism). Prinz dazzles the listeners with an impressively wide array of seemingly disjoint moral belief systems. Then he claims that there cannot be an underlying model with intrinsic parameters that could describe this wealth of moral systems. I agree that we do not currently have a verified (!) model that explains this dazzling range of moral belief systems, however, there is exists a rich body of discussion on this topic (see, e.g. Wright's "Nonzero" and Harris's "The Moral Landscape"). I find Prinz's exclusion of opposing models sloppy at best. Thinking about it, I actually find it disingenuous, since he is aware of evolutionary and anthropological research into human invariants (of which the trolley example, which he uses to suggest the opposite with, actually is one example!), but he simply chooses to ignore them.  Talking about framing ...
Grade: C-

Interesting, provides ancontrasting narrative to my experiences in the USA

Chris Hedges in Madison 3/23/2011 from John Quinlan on Vimeo.

Evidence of simple fun

Reminds me a lot of "Let's go"

A very nice overview of our progress in gene therapy

Also, yet another token for why we need publicly funded television.

I admit, I am a sucker for this kind of discourse

I especially like the question about "ought from an is" (22' 30''). Also, while I do not agree with Plato, that the conversation about what constitutes a good life is the only one worth having, it is certainly one that enchants me. I am happy to live in a time when we finally turn our scientific inquiry to ourselves with full force. Yet another undiscovered country.

How well do you score on this list of simple truths?

Unfortunately, parts of the video (i.e. the frame) are cut in this embedded version. For an uncut version go to YouTube