The Collective Intelligence: 6 Famous Thought Experiments Explained in 1 Minute Each Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” The ... Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” The Open University, an online educational institute, took this seriously. Believe it or not, questions of infinity, defining a twin paradox, and other mind-bogglers, are succinctly and clearly explained in one minute for each idea. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. By Ingrid Longauerová, Epoch Times SOURCE
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed — How to Foolproof Your Mind, Part I Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Magenta Ain't A Colour A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. You should have seen a green afterimage, but why is this significant? The afterimage always shows the colour that is complementary to the colour of the image. It is a common misconception that red is complementary to green. All the colours in the light spectrum have complements that exist within the spectrum – except green. The light spectrum consists of a range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. When our eyes see colours, they are actually detecting the different wavelengths of the light hitting the retina. If the eye receives light of more than one wavelength, the colour generated in the brain is formed from the sum of the input responses on the retina. You can find out more about Liz on her Nullpage. -Biotele A note from Biotele:
Think Outside the Box A Mathematical Proof That The Universe Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing — The Physics arXiv Blog One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a Big Bang. This is not just an idea but a scientific theory backed up by numerous lines of evidence. For a start, there is the cosmic microwave background, which is a kind of echo of the big bang; then there is the ongoing expansion of the cosmos, which when imagined backwards, hints at a Big Bang-type origin; and the abundance of the primordial elements, such as helium-4, helium-3, deuterium and so on, can all be calculated using the theory. But that still leaves a huge puzzle. What caused the Big Bang itself? That’s plausible, given what we know about quantum mechanics. Today they get their wish thanks to the work of Dongshan He and buddies at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China. The new proof is based on a special set of solutions to a mathematical entity known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. At the heart of their thinking is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
100 Incredible Lectures from the World's Top Scientists Posted on Thursday June 18, 2009 by Staff Writers By Sarah Russel Unless you’re enrolled at one of the best online colleges or are an elite member of the science and engineering inner circle, you’re probably left out of most of the exciting research explored by the world’s greatest scientists. But thanks to the Internet and the generosity of many universities and online colleges, you’ve now got access to the cutting edge theories and projects that are changing the world in this list below. If you’re looking for even more amazing lectures, check out our updated list for 2012 with more talks from great minds. General Let the world’s top scientists explain exactly how they do their job when you listen to these lectures. Science and Engineering From materials science to the study of thermodynamics, learn more about the science of engineering here. WTC Lecture – collapse of WTC Buildings: Steven E. Biology and Medicine Chemistry Physics and Astronomy Earth and Environment Technology Science and Business
How To Lucid Dream Tonight How To Lucid Dream Lucid Dreaming is the ability to be aware of your dreams, and control them. I know, I know: You want to know how to lucid dream right now, easily, don’t you? Lots of people do. You’re not alone! Before we go any further, this is going to be a fairly long post, so feel free to bookmark it if you want to come back to it later. To get more of a background on it, read our introduction. Now that that’s out of the way, we can start talking about the easy way to lucid dream tonight. So it’s about having one tonight, with as little practice as possible, for the people who want results fast. Will this be your first Lucid Dream? Something to consider before we dive in is whether this is your first lucid dream or not. If you’re looking for a way to lucid dream tonight and it’s your very first one, (how exciting!) It’s no more dangerous than just going to sleep normally, but emotionally, you may experience things you aren’t prepared for. How To Have a Lucid Dream Tonight guaranteed* *Almost.
The most popular 20 TED Talks, as of now UPDATED: To see all these talks at one click, check out our updated Playlist: The 20 Most Popular Talks of All Time. As 2013 draws to a close, TED is deeply humbled to have posted 1600+ talks, each representing an idea worth spreading. So which ideas have had the most widespread impact? Below, a look at the 20 most-watched talks as of December 2013. Some fascinating things to notice on this list, if you’d like to compare and contrast it to the most popular talks in 2012, and to the list we shared back in 2011: Amy Cuddy, Susan Cain, David Blaine and Pamela Meyer are all newcomers to the list, with Cuddy’s talk storming to spot #5 thanks to you sharing it. But what really makes this list so incredible is the fact that it spans so many areas of interest, from education to happiness, statistics to creativity, tech demos to illusions.
Ten things you don't know about black holes Well, they’re black, and they’re like bottomless holes. What would you call them? -Me, when a friend asked me why they’re named what they are Ah, black holes. But then, that’s why I’m here. So below I present ten facts about black holes — the third in my series of Ten Things You Don’t Know (the first was on the Milky Way; the second about the Earth). 1) It’s not their mass, it’s their size that makes them so strong. OK, first, a really quick primer on black holes. The most common way for a black hole to form is in the core of a massive star. As the core collapses, its gravity increases. The region around the black hole itself where the escape velocity equals the speed of light is called the event horizon. OK, so now you know what one is, and how they form. So there you go. 2) They’re not infinitely small. So OK, they’re small, but how small are they? What happens to the core? Out here, we’ll never know for sure. It will continue to collapse, and the gravity increases. 3) They’re spheres.
Nikola Tesla Page, Tesla Coil (Bill Beaty's Homepage) T-SHIRTS! Hey, some people (not me) are selling Tesla t-shirts: CS Coil Tesla's Hair Tesla Co (purple plates) Cafe Press Classroom Tesla Coil $200, or a Handheld Tesla coil, $149.95, also a Micro Tesla Coil $4.95 OLD LINKS GONE BAD? Try "The Wayback Machine" It offers billions of old websites and even some of the graphics. But it's not searchable. You have to know the URL of the old site. Created and maintained by Bill Beaty. NVIDIA GPU & Physically Based Lighting Show “Moon Landing Was Real” As NVIDIA launched its new Geforce GTX 970 and GeForce GTX 980 graphics processors (GPUs), its “Demo team” has taken a stab at solving one of the big controversial stories of the century: was the lunar landing real or fake? There is ample literature on the subject and there is no shortage of reasons why some people think that the lunar landing and mission was shot in a studio. One of the main arguments of conspiracy theorists was that the lighting seemed wrong in the scene where Buzz Aldrin comes out of the lunar module. It was suggested that there was a light next to the camera, which would mean that it was shot in a studio, since no such equipment was brought to the moon. To shed some context, Physically-based lighting is the notion of measuring how light reacts to different types of materials and use this data for real-time rendering. In the past, the industry has used arbitrary values that were more “art-based” than “physics-based”.