Writer Scott Topper provides a commentary on the power of films on the minds of film-goers.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Renowned British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris believes human-like intelligence was the inevitable outcome of the appearance of life on earth.
The process of data sonification is exactly what it sounds like: the translation of data points into various sounds, each with unique characteristics that can change over time. So instead of turning your spreadsheets into charts and graphs, they can now be turned into a kind of music. Matt Kenney demonstrates how it's done.
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
Here is our Executive Producer Steve Paulson's list of books that have blown his mind recently, with hopes that some of them will expand yours in 2015, if they haven't already.
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette spent a year confronting her math phobia straight on. She taught herself calculus. It helped her win at Vegas, get a good mortgage, and might just save her from a zombie apocalypse.
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