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POPS15 Quotes by Famous Atheists Bertrand Russell: “You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”
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POPSSeeing in four dimensions The videos are all available free at www.dimensions-math.org. The videos go on to show how we can visualize imaginary numbers geometrically, how fractal patterns emerge in the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets, and how beautiful and complex shapes can be built up from circles.
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POPSHow Advertising Manipulates Our “Caveman” Brains (& How to Resist) Fortunately, there are ways to go about PROOFING YOUR BRAIN. 1. Change your mindset to “postmore” by challenging culture’s ingrained assumption that “more” of everything is automatically better. 2. Grow your gratitude. Our poor, starved, frozen ancestors would cry tears of joy if they suddenly landed in our culture of abundance. Fostering our appreciation of this bounty can also block the consumerist “cool” pressure to deride so many of our fine, workable possessions as “so last year”. 3. Be enough. We’re constantly told that we aren’t rich enough, glam enough, cool enough, networked enough, etc. This has a powerful insidious effect on our primitive, socially competitive brain circuits. It’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddlers wanting “more, more, more!
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POPSLaws of Nature, Source Unknown The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe. Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. “Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist.
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POPSCoffee - I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast :-) One man's roller coaster history with coffee: "I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast: The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep. Therefore, I celebrate it two hours later when I am fully conscious".
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POPSStretching the Mind Stretching your mind is hard. Once we've settled on a worldview that suits us, we tend to hold on. New information is bent to fit, information that doesn't fit is discounted, and new views are resisted.
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POPSReasons to like ClipCast according to ouyangwulong... I've done a lot of writing about my perspective on ClipCast, but i just read some really insightful comments by ouyangwulong that said it better than i have been able to. Wanted to share them with everyone by clipping them. Thank you ouyangwulong. Not just for having such a positive perspective on it, but for truly tapping into and expressing the essence of what it's all about. It was truly a great feeling to read your comments. By the way, i'm eric goldstein on facebook. Would love to see the "other side" of your clips...friend me if you like :)
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POPSMath Behind Ancient Islamic Tile Patterns Decoded When Peter J. Lu traveled to Uzbekistan, he had no idea of the mathematical journey that he was about to embark on as well. See the full research article as published in Science . It's a wonderful example of original, multidisciplinary academic research bridging history and mathematics that happens to force us to re-think the sophistication of ancient geometrical knowledge. When Lu looked at photographs of Islamic buildings, he found that he could break the patterns on their surfaces up into the same shapes, even though the shapes often weren't immediately visible. "I couldn't sleep for days," he said. "I skipped Christmas break to work on it."
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