We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Each Englishman is an island, they say, but apparently it takes a Frenchman to put that saying into practice. Philippe Gonzalvez made this map of his own face back in the 1980s. “I must say that by now there is much more snow on the Mountains of Moustache and that the Hair Republic has been ...
As there has been a lot of chatter about the goings-on at Redoubt, I thought I'd post the latest AVO update (3:35 PM): Redoubt volcano has not erupted. Seismicity is dominated by small discrete earthquakes and tremor remains at the diminished levels of the past two days. Webcam images are now clear ...
Instead of talking about how Reuters came late to the party let's embrace the fact that they came at all. (Anyone with the reference?)
Thomas over at Jihadica has a lot more on the term ruwaybidha, including one of the traditions from which some version of the term stems, also politely correcting my original transliteration. I still think that the term implies a sense of authority or responsibility, almost like a shepherd (al ...
Brian is now a cog in the federal justice system so it is up to me to carry the weight, at least for today. Husayn al-Jarabani of al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Ahmad Naji was among the three individuals that Yemen authorities arrested yesterday in San'a. For those with an incredible memory, Naji ...
As any regular reader of Daylight Atheism knows, the topic of morality is a major concern of mine. In essays on Ebon Musings, I've sketched out a secular moral theory I call universal utilitarianism. Here on this site, In the past, I've written about the roots of this morality and the virtues that ...
One can sometimes get the impression - not from reading this blog, of course - that all Islamists are violent, even if they aren't all al-Qaeda. For those, I would recommend this piece in the February issue of the CTC Sentinel on "Deconstructing Salafism in Yemen" by Laurent Bonnefoy, a bright ...
I have thought for some time now that a book that is really needed is some sort of jihadi dictionary, explaining common words phrases and allusions that often pepper jihadi magazines and videos. Not that the book would really sell beyond a few hundred copies, but still.... Anyway, one particular ...
The Redoubt watch is now been going for well over a month and this is how quickly things can change when monitoring volcanoes. The headline in my volcano RSS, when I saw it said: "Redoubt quiets after weeks of activity, though eruption still possible" By the time I clicked on the link, the ...
Presumably there is more news than me finally being able to transfer al-Wahayshi's latest speech on to my i-pod so that I can listen to his creaking voice as I manuever around campus. The news services are following what we have been reporting for a couple of days now, and saying that parliamentary ...
“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ‘sounds like Chinese’. I’ve been told the Korean equivalent is ‘sounds like Hebrew’,” says Yuval Pinter (here on the excellent ...
The people who remain in Chaiten face the potential for a devasting pyroclastic flow, so says Jorge Muñoz of the SERNAGEOMIN in Chile. The volcano is still producing large ash columns on Tuesday and a flyover of the dome forming inside the caldera has lead to the concern that a collapse on a ...
So, there has been a lot of talk about "volcano monitoring" over the last 24 hours, now hasn't there? Now, I'm not going to revisit this discussion, but as an example of why it might be important, there is an article today about the location of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the ...
Just days after al-Zawahiri's audiotape "From Kabul to Somalia" was released the fighting in the latter has picked up. The NY Times has coverage here, and Reuters has more coverage here. I was also struck by this report yesterday in the NY Times, which opens: The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller ...
In a number of conversations I had yesterday with both governmental and non-governmental sources it does seem clear that the two year delay for parliamentary elections, which we talked about yesterday, is going to happen. Here is an al-Jazeera story on the deal - about which little is known at the ...