I imagine this list will evolve over time I discover and remember. The media that follow have been selected for being inspiring, wondrous and/or awesome (in no particular order).
The greatest show on earth, especially paired with Planet Earth 1 and 2, is just awesome! Nature is just so wonderful, the splendor and diversity! The earth must have been an amazing place before we came along…
The vital question explains the likely origins of life in far more details that I could have imagined; the sequence of proteins as they built up, the order of mutations, … We know that life requires an energy gradient and that it builds incrementally, but only if the (small) increments give an advantage. Given these constraints, we can narrow down likely evolutionary paths.
Playground is a cool web-app that lets you get some intuition for what a neural network is doing. I love the idea that research can simply be tinkering around with this sort of tool, making predictions and carefully observing.
Before I read The better angels of our nature I had been quite pessimistic about humans and the world around us. This book really helped me look at the bigger picture and see the progress that is being made.
3brown1blue’s channel on youtube is wondrous. He really focuses on the intuition behind the math, which is the most important part. Anyone can follow rules and calculate, but the key to doing math is knowing where to look and how to look. I learned more in hours than previous years of university.
Living a selfish life means helping people (if you care about the long term), this is also known as egoistic altruism. The idea is that: the more people that are well off, the better my life is. The more people who are educated, the more doctors to cure my diseases. I love the idea of humanity collaborating to build a better world for all.
The truth of fact and the truth of feeling is a great nuanced view of the compromise between what is good and what is right, and how our memory is influenced by our beliefs of what is good/right.
Noether’s theorem is beautiful. It is quite surprising that simple symmetries can explain so much of the complexity we see around us. That translational symmetry gives rise to the conservation of momentum, which we experience a million different ways every day.
Time well spent is a great movement trying to help people understand how technology is addictive, and the difference between what you will watch and what you want to watch. This panda is dancing is an eye-widening intro to their work.
Tadashi’s talk at ICM shows mathematics at its best: playing with simple models of complex phenomena to allow deep interrogation of fundamental puzzles. The main focus is singularity, which is explored through simple table-top experiments.
Tim Minchin’s Storm does a brilliant job of advocating for skepticism, evidence, science and pointing out illogical it is to believe in homeopathy, or mediums, or … My favourite line is probably, “Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.”
Alice Roberts and Aoife McLysaght give the Royal Institution’s 2018 Christmas lectures. They are full of entertaining examples, intriguing puzzles and most importantly, science. Lectures can be fun! I just love how they manage to convey complex ideas in a simple yet meaningful and wondrous way; our evolution from bacteria, our relationship to our closest genetic cousins, genetic determinism… If I had or knew kids, they would not have a choice in whether they watched these lectures.
What Makes People Vote Republican? It’s a genuine attempt, by Jonathan Hadit, to understand conservatism, and the type of person who might vote for it. It covers disgust, culture and morality, but it’s mostly about empathy.
More to come.