What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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.

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Transcript

Single best tip I can give you for grilling, is that you should line your grill with aluminum foil. And the reason is what cooks your food is infrared radiation, light that comes off your barbecue from coals. Sounds funny but that red glow, that's what's cooking your food. Actually a combination of the red glow you see and infrared radiation that you can't see but it's there and it's light and it reflects off things that are shiny.

So your grungy black barbecue, that means that the side of the barbecue is absorbing the heat not your food. So what you really want to do is line your barbecue with aluminum foil with the shiny side towards the coals. That reflects heat back up into the food, makes it cook faster and much more even.

The other great thing about barbecue is that a lot of flavor you get from barbecue is actually from fat dripping on the fire. So if you're cooking something that doesn't have any fat in it, like grilled vegetables, brush them with olive oil and brush them quite liberally because the olive oil that drips off and goes down and causes some flare ups, that will create a lot of flavor.