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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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I have a new post up on Dangerous Intersection, "How the mainstream media has failed us". The post is about an essay by John Hockenberry, an award-winning reporter and former correspondent for NBC's Dateline, that's a devastating indictment of the standard operating practices of network TV news.
This delicious map is the Europa Polyglotta, published in 1730 by Gottfried Hensel (or Henselius, after the contemporary fasion of latinising surnames). I’ve managed to piece together only very little information on its origin and background because I found it on a Ukranian website, describing ...
The rise of the atheist movement is drawing attention in popular society, even from bastions of the traditional press. However, most of the media organizations paying attention to atheism show little interest in why atheists are finding a voice, instead preferring to repeat the usual stereotypes. A ...
With the 2008 presidential primary season soon to be in full swing, I figured it was worth the effort to write a post like this. I've received several pieces of unsolicited e-mail in the past few weeks, some from atheists, exhorting me to support the libertarian Republican candidate for president ...
Lately in the news, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has pardoned a rape victim who had been sentenced to prison and 200 lashes. This brutal sentence was handed down because the woman in question was meeting a male friend in public without an escort - violating the country's repressive sharia laws ...
Mike Huckabee may not have the same campaign warchest as other, better-known presidential contenders, but he obviously has some pretty smart campaign handlers on board who understand how to optimize Huckabee's message for the Internet. Check out this "Chuck Norris Approved" ad for Mike Huckabee ...
I don't normally do these things, but Greta Christina started this one, and it seemed the least I could do was to participate. The idea of this meme is to pick three sites from your blogroll that, together, form a combination that no one else has, and that you think says something about the ...
Every year, The Edge asks one "big, deep, ambitious" question of the world's leading thinkers and innovators. This year, the annual question from The Edge asks these thinkers to reflect back on a time when irrefutable facts from the scientific establishment forced them to change their opinions on ...
Given this blog's focus on business evolution and the DNA of innovation, I couldn't resist this: Oliver the Humanzee. Recently featured on the Paranormal Insider blog, Oliver was a sort of chimp-human hybrid that never quite evolved the way he was supposed to: "Oliver was odd for a chimpanzee ...
"What if she doesn't flip? How long do you give it?" "If you can't get to 'em somehow in the first forty-eight hours, more of the same isn't going to be any more effective." "Starvation isn't a motivator?" "Would be for me, but I guess they've proved it with prisoners of war. The ones who can ...
The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s ...
The Idea Connection newsletter recently included an exclusive interview with Michael Gelb, the author of How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci. According to Gelb, there are a handful of Da Vinci Principles for thinking like a genius each day: Curiosita: An insatiably curious approach to life and ...
The USA Today recently highlighted the best ads of 2007 - including the "Evolution" Web video from Unilever's Dove brand and an ad for wind energy from GE's "Ecomagination" campaign. While both of these ads were game-changing, the USA Today opines that the best ad of the year wasn't created ...
At the beginning of last year, I mentioned a prediction made by Pat Robertson: As reported by Americans United, Pat Robertson has joined in the fun, predicting "mass killings" to occur on American soil due to a terrorist attack sometime this year. (Robertson said he expected this to come in ...
“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“, is how statistician Edward Tufte described this chart in his authoritative work ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. The chart, or statistical graphic, is also a map. And a strange one at that. It depicts the advance into (1812) and ...