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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Cartographic curiosities
Strange maps may be found hiding in antique atlases or down some of the internet’s more obscure cul-de-sacs [1]. But sometimes, curious cartography greets you on your very doorstep, hand-delivered by servants of the commonwealth. Like this postcard, sent from the Isle of Lewis [2] in the Outer ...
War is terrible, but the causes of war are sometimes laughably trivial. Central America seems to have a special knack for silly casus belli. In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought a four-day conflict popularly called the Football War, after the contested soccer games that lit the fuse of ongoing ...
It's 1841, and Russia is attempting one of its great leaps forward to catch up with the rest of Europe. Railways are all the rage out west. So the Empire would like to lay some track of its own . There’s more than prestige at stake: the new transport technology might just be what the vast, badly ...
Geography was my favourite subject in school; physics the one I disliked the most. If only I’d known about this Map of Physics! This spatial representation of the subject, dating from 1939, defines itself as Being a map of physics, containing a brief historical outline of the subject as will ...
The world may be your oyster, a stage, or one big hospital [1], it is also a Disney ride. It’s a Small World After All (IaSWAA) can be experienced at each of the five Disney parks [2] across the world. The ride has been thrilling - and its repetitive and catchy theme song annoying - guests since ...
There are many ways to look at Europe other than as a collection of nation-states. Plenty of other imagined communities lurk beneath the surface of the standard political map. Check out the continent's alcohol belts [1], have a look at its core and periphery [2], or inspect the languages in which ...
Maybe it’s because the country’s shape tends towards a square, but Poland’s borders give it a solid, anchored appearance on the map of Europe. And yet those borders are relatively new; few other countries, if any, have expanded, contracted and generally moved around on the map quite as erratically ...
Fernweh [1] is what the Germans call that longing for faraway places, the poetic certainty that things are better elsewhere. But there is a superlative degree of geographic desire, a Fernweh even more sublime: the ache for fictional faraway places. Of such nonexistent locations, the mythical ...
A failed experiment in speed: while I was rushing down into the basement without flicking on the light, the door closed before I had reached the downstairs switch. Frantically searching and failing to find it, I was rendered helpless by the dread of pitch darkness enveloping me. That part of my ...
Remember that guy in the Truman Show who pretends to be the protagonist’s best buddy [1]? Who takes him out for a few brewskis on the beach when Truman starts to suspect he’s at the centre of... something? The buddy offers Truman the proverbial shoulder to cry on, but his apparent sincerity is fake ...
Map-readers knew about Brazil long before America was discovered; but they didn’t think of it as a giant country on a distant continent. Brazil, also known by the name Hy-Brasil [1], was a small, mist-shrouded island in the North Atlantic, not too far off Ireland’s west coast. Only, Hy-Brasil ...
Not too many decades ago, being a child in the western world meant having a license to roam: you spent a large chunk of your free time outside, exploring your surroundings, chasing adventure. This is the Huckleberry Finn mould of carefree childhood - even if you weren’t floating down the ...
How do you know you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie? Here are a few clues: an abundance of matching tracksuits, official school attire, or other types of uniform; a nostalgic setting in a recent, pre-digital past; and a panoply of dysfunctional characters, inhabiting meticulously manicured houses ...
In the two decades since German reunification, the German government has spent up to €1,6 trillion on upgrading the defunct economic infrastructure of the communist East to match that of the capitalist West. Yet differences, and associated resentments, between the former BRD and DDR [1] persist ...
George Soros last Sunday blamed Angela Merkel for the euro crisis - and gave her three months to fix it. Speaking at the 7th Festival of Economics in Trento (Italy), the renowned hedge-fund magnate pinpointed the moment when Germany, traditionally the engine of European integration, reversed gears ...