Douglas Hofstadter is the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a now-classic work on how the mind arises from mechanical parts. While I'll admit I haven't gotten through the entire book, I recently enjoyed Victim of the Brain, a 1988 docudrama featuring interviews with Hofstadter. It's a strange little film, following Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos as he struggles to understand philosophical questions about consciousness through interviews as well as (slightly cheesy) adaptations... READ ON

In 1958, Project Orion was formed at General Atomics (a defense contractor), seeking to design spacecraft powered by nuclear pulses -- in other words, bombs. The project designed incredibly large vessels, with theoretical sizes ranging up to 400 meters in diameter and weighing 8,000,000 tons. The ships were intended to travel to Saturn and Venus carrying large crews -- but the project ended in the early 1960's without building a full-scale vehicle. The project involved, among others, physicist Freeman... READ ON

Ant researcher Deborah Gordon packs an incredible amount of science into her twenty-minute TED talk from 2003. Discussed: what happens when you dump toothpicks outside the colony; the four jobs worker ants can have; why half of the ants in the colony are just hanging out; what happens when you stick a fiber-optic camera into the colony; how the colony's behavior emerges from a series of simple rules; how colony size changes as a function of colony age (and how you have to dig up all the ants and count... READ ON

When Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Gore's push to solve the climate crisis received even more media attention. I'm familiar with An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore in general, but I hadn't seen his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Like most public appearances by Gore these days, the speech is honest, moving, and truly compelling. In the course of his speech, Gore invokes Alfred Nobel, Winston Churchill, George Orwell, Robert Frost, Mahatma Ghandi, Cordell Hull,... READ ON