I have to say, this is a good week not to be back in Colorado.

It looks like bystanders are getting herded up, too.
And what’s up with the storm trooper look?

Decades long defender of digital rights, Stanford Law School professor, Larry Lessig, has released a presentation in support of Barack Obama.

The remarkable thing about this clip isn’t that some guy on TV was so mind-bogglingly ignorant. It’s the advice given by the audience.

At PR’s request, here are a couple videos of Australia’s new Prime Minister speaking Chinese. This first one is a CCTV interview (part 1 of 3), in which we get to hear him speak at length in Chinese.

This second video is bit harder to make any sense of. It’s a comedian making fun [...]

This, from the BBC:

Mr Rudd will focus on education, environment and the economy
Australia’s Prime Minister-elect, Kevin Rudd, has announced the make-up of his new Labor government.
He appointed Julia Gillard as deputy PM and education minister, and a former rock star, Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett, as environment minister.
Penny Wong becomes the country’s first Asian-born minister, [...]

The votes from Friday’s Simple Probability Puzzle are in. Here was the question:
Imagine there’s a completely random event with two outcomes, say flipping a coin. Each flip has an equal probability of landing heads or tails. Now imagine that we’re interested in seeing how long it takes to get a certain sequence of outcomes.
Pattern [...]

This is the second part of The Enemies of Reason, in which Professor Dawkins interviewed various practitioners of pseudo-science. In this video, Dawkins focuses on the booming alternative health business:
It’s the hottest alternative health fad. It boasts and impressively vast and well-stocked medical cabinet; it’s endorsed by royalty and the stars, and is [...]

I’ve long been a fan of Richard Dawkins’ books. I read the Selfish Gene as a teenager and found it absolutely fascinating. Not only was that book the foundation of sociobiology, but it also coined the term “meme”. Little did I know that a few years later, millions of people would be [...]

Last week, I saw Stephen Petranek give an interesting talk in the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences. It was from a presentation he gave in 2002, titled 10 ways the world could end. He takes a rational, scientific look at ten of the most underestimated threats humanity faces and proposes solutions for each.

One thing [...]

This is fascinating video about Daniel Tammet, a twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities. He’s capable of calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and he can acquire functional fluency in a foreign language in a single week. Most interesting is that unlike the vast majority of savants, he can communicate with and [...]