An ongoing list of interesting internet stuff
This is going to become a list of cool, interesting stuff which I discover on the internet daily (although, I will be much slower until I get a steady flow of traffic to the site). For some time, I have shared these kinds of things with people at websites such as Reddit and Newsvine... however, I would prefer to give them to folks on my own website. I hope you find them as delicious as I have. Please note that the article links are in the black text below and to the left of each block. The large brown title text will lead you to a page where you can comment on the article, if you feel led to do that.
It would be a doozy if it were to happen (watch a bbc docudrama) - think hundreds of times what the eruption of mount st helens was.
If you’d rather have a textual assessment, rather than a video, here’s a good few paragraphs by Cecil Adams about the scientific assessment of the yellowstone caldera.
And here’s a bunch of nice graphs and stuff about what would happen in the event of a supervolcanic eruption at yellowstone.
There is a wonderful resource called reddit.com which has filled a need in my internet routines. Naturally, we will always have google - which allows a “pull internet;” Google is great if you have in mind exactly what you want to find. But it’s nice to also have services which offer a “push internet” - where you can just go and find whatever is coming your way that day - and read up on hundreds of fascinating topics that you wouldn’t have known about before. Reddit is just this sort of a service. And while the front page will often be full of crass jokes and absurdities and misguided passions - if you look through the list of smaller link sharing groups there, you can find some gems. This is a current list of my favorite groups there.
Africa
AnimalRights
Art
Attenborough
Buddhism
Design
FineArt
Freethought
Frugal
Green
IntellectualReddit
Intellectualmaterial
Kucinich
MacleansMagazine
MensRights
Parenting
PhilosophyCorner
Quebec
Shortfilms
Survival
WorldHistory
artistic
bicycling
blackculture
canada
culture
energy
gnu
greenfatigue
history
india
language
lifehacks
lifestyle
mises
musicians
painting
parsoc
philosophy
photography
science
science2
smart
snobs
taoism
tedtalks
transit
travel
writing
Someone has collected these classic television programs at this website.
I found a great blog about physics today, written by David Berenstein and Moshe Rozali
I have been researching different college programs around the country today… and I have been paying particular attention to which schools would have good philosophy programs. I admire the ancient academics. They sought to help people to learn critical thought - how to reason… and it’s very different than today’s colleges which are basically a collection of different trade schools. One really intriguing institution I discovered was St. John’s college which has a campus in Annapolis, Maryland, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The videos which they have, really impress me that it is a college which does a lot more to nurture students’ intellect than other colleges and universities do. I just finished listening, however, to this hour long lecture which is currently available on their website. And it strikes me that the study of the works of the ancient philosophers is really a lesson in elaborate folklore, more than anything else. This gentleman who spoke here - Tony Long - I think of as being very foolish in how he speaks and thinks about his perception of philosophy. The whole hour was a lobby for his own personal conviction about deism, and intelligent design. It seems to me that he has missed the point of the object lesson which we have for us, in looking at the history of these high-minded scholars. The object lesson we have, is that reason is a journey from error into less error and hopefully finally into truth. Plato, in his deism, was clearly in error. He had found a logical frame of reference to justify the perceptions of folklorists throughout the ages. Listening to Plato’s reasoning, you can certainly forgive his error. And this is the key thing that this section of the history of academia has to teach us - that those who use logic can err very grievously. And yet, as they think further, they can discard old models and develop new ones which are more accurate. For Tony Long to miss that lesson is quite ironic. If Tony was speaking about his own reasoning for deism, I could certainly accept that. That would be honourable. But to try to mask his own reasoning, by putting forth the reasoning of a gentleman who lived over 2000 years ago is disingenuous.
- Listen to Tony Long’s lecture (mp3) - it’s great to listen someone explain the models of the ancient philosophers, so you can have some perspective, if you ever want to sit down and read their works.
Margaret Atwood is a fairly well known essayist and writer in Canada. And this is a great interview with her about her new book which explores the nature of debt. It’s always nice to hear from those who have studied history in the way Atwood has.
Just a personal note: I was fascinated with one anecdote she had to tell about a studies with monkeys. Even animals without formal language have a very distinct idea about debt and fairness. For example, monkeys who help another, and then don’t receive help when they are in need get very angry. There was a study with monkeys who were taught to trade pebbles for a slice of cucumber, and when one of them got a grape in exchange for the pebble instead of a cucumber… all the other monkeys got angry and 80% of them stopped trading. It dawned on me that the “bailout” which Paulson and Bush wanted to push through this autumn of 2008 may have actually caused the stock traders to lose confidence and pull out of the market. Doesn’t it make sense? All of a sudden, the table is titled, folks are talking about collapse, and what’s any of it worth, if the bankers who own bad derivatives are given unequal preferential treatment?
This was an amazing thing to see tonight. The focus of canadian politicians is very precise, and very earnest.
This is a wmv film which runs 2 hours
