| Defining Knowledge |
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"This I Believe"
"Based on the 1950s radio program of the same name, Americans from all walks of life share the personal philosophies and core values that guide their daily lives." National Public Radio. |
"Why People Believe Strange Things"
"Why do people see the Virgin Mary on a cheese sandwich or hear demonic lyrics in 'Stairway to Heaven'? Using video and music, skeptic Michael Shermer shows how we convince ourselves to believe -- and overlook the facts." TED. |
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| Assessing Methods |
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"Diagnosis"
"Humans love to solve problems. In this day and age, we have astonishing technology available as tools to help us---chemicals and computers and machines that can pinpoint things imperceptible to humans. But humans aren't quite obsolete. Intuition and creativity still lead the way both in discovering that nature of the problem, and in dealing with that knowledge." RadioLab. |
"Using Tiny Particles to Answer Giant Questions"
"It all started with the Big Bang, but then what? In a special broadcast from the Origins Symposium at Arizona State University, cosmologists discuss the origin of the universe, how the Large Hadron Collider research fits in and what particle physics can explain about how the universe began." Talk of the Nation / Science Friday (National Public Radio). |
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| Constructing Arguments |
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"The Proof: Fermat's Last Theorem"
The story of Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles' solution of Fermat's last theorem. Originally broadcast on Nova (PBS). See also: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/wiles.html |
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| Telling Stories |
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"Playing the History of Jazz"
Can abstract art really tell a story? Find out in this interview with (and performance by) contemporary jazz pianist Marcus Roberts. Says Roberts: "It is a music that is not concerned with just the aristocratic values, or the 'lower-end attitudes,' " he says. "It's really about the coming together of seemingly opposing things. So that tension that syncopation in rhythm, and melody and blues timbre creates is really the essence of our whole culture struggle. It's the reconciliation of differences." All Things Considered (National Public Radio). |
Excerpt from "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind"
The Neo-Futurists are a collective of directors, producers, and performers who "create theatre that is a mixture of poetry, sport, and living-newspaper." Here you'll find excerpts from their ever-changing show, "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," that is performed weekly in Chicago. Download podcast 1.5. Scroll to time index 11:00. The piece we're especially interested in starts with a male actor saying, "Statement." It's just a couple minutes long. The Neo-Futurists. |
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| Finding Purposes |
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"Morality"
"We’ll explore where our sense of right and wrong come from. We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade." RadioLab. |
"Why We Are Happy, Why Aren't We Happy"
"Dan Gilbert, author of 'Stumbling on Happiness,' challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our 'psychological immune system' lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned." TED. |
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| Exploring Paradigms |
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"A Brief History of Evolutionary Spiritualty"
"Three centuries of progressive thinkers reveal that evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept." By Tom Huston (Enlightenment Now). |
"The Biology of Spirit"
"Former surgeon Sherwin Nuland speaks about his sense of wonder at the body's capacity to sustain life and support our pursuits of order and meaning, and why he believes the human spirit is an evolutionary accomplishment of the brain. The three-pound human brain, he says, is the most complex structure that has ever existed on this planet." On Speaking of Faith. |
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