science & technology

“When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small, the Universe is big — but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity — that’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on and activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.”
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Christopher Eric Hitchens, nicknamed “Hitch”, (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, World Affairs, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world’s fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. read the rest of this entry »

i dedicate my 500th blog post to an inspirational discussion about nothing!

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. read the rest of this entry »

here’s the famous footage of the apollo 15 astronaut that dropped a hammer & feather on the moon to prove galileo’s theory that in the absence of atmosphere, objects will fall at the same rate regardless of mass. there has been much debate over the years on whether this footage is real, or was faked in a studio.

a biography by galileo’s pupil vincenzo viviani stated that galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the leaning tower of pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass. this was contrary to what aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. while this story has been retold in popular accounts, there is no account by galileo himself of such an experiment, and it is generally accepted by historians that it was at most a thought experiment which did not actually take place. read the rest of this entry »

steve jobs and bill gates together, being interviewed at the d5 conference.