Intellectual Babble

I forgot to blog yesterday because I got really, really into this whole Edge Question-of-the-Year thing. (Yes, this is me continuing in the same vein as Friday. It is that fascinating) See, they asked all these scientists "What is your most dangerous idea?" They should have said "what is the most dangerous idea to be coming out of future science" but it ends up being the same thing. You see, all these people who are very, very smart wrote all these mini-essays about how the world is going to change forever. I am way more excited about Darwin than I have ever been in my life, because I finally understand why his discoveries were so important, and it has absolutely nothing to do with monkeys or komodo dragons or strange birds, no matter what they tell you at school. I am beginning to understand why physics might be important to know, and it has nothing to do with the way stuff moves. I am going to link the articles that have gotten me the most excited (or maybe this can better be considered a topical list of just about all the articles), but I highly recommend locking yourself up somewhere for the next few days and digging through this thing (I am only on page 4 of 13 because I am slooooow, so expect this list to grow and grow) because it will change your life.
KEVIN KELLY on Anonymity
DENIS DUTTON on Art
FREEMAN DYSON on Biotechnology
RICHARD E. NISBETT on how we make Choices
ALISON GOPNIK with a meta-idea on Controversy
DAN SPERBER on Culture
HAIM HARARI on Democracy (I've quoted this one in the sidebar, I found it so important)
STEVEN PINKER on people being Different ("Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments")
PHILIP ZIMBARDO on Evil v. Heroism
MICHAEL SHERMER on the Free Market
MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI taking the opposing view of the Free Market
CLAY SHIRKY on Free Will
GREGORY COCHRAN on Human Evolution
DAVID LYKKEN with a great idea about Parental Licensure
SIMON BARON-COHEN on empathy-based Politics
RAY KURZWEIL about Radical Life Extension
MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN, RICHARD FOREMAN on Relativism
ROGER C. SCHANK proposing to do away with Schools
JAMES O'DONNELL on the State
PIET HUT on Time (just for Billy, although I guess you may be allowed to read it to)

Otherwise, TUMC's youth group called me via my mom's handy last night and it was awesome to talk to all sorts of people that I haven't talked to in forever and I love you all dearly. I promise to put together a big box of German chocolate for you this week and hope that my mom will not keep it all to herself.
I also managed to get up and go to church today and Nadja had exciting piano-related adventures and I got somehow roped into a LAN Party? I am still unsure how the latter happened, but I guess I get to prove my complete lack of skills at electronic games to a large group of Germans, rather than just to some 5-year-old I used to babysit (it is pretty embarrassing to be beaten really, really badly at Nintendo by a 5-year-old). And then, instead of going through all this fascinating Science, I spent the afternoon watching a combination of winter sports and that movie about a fat camp with Ben Stiller (it was a channel-flipping kind of day, and Piff had the remote, as always). But now I have parked myself back here by the internet to Expand my Mind, making up for the fact that I am being increasingly inattentive at school.

These are things that have been floating around in my head for a long while, but this guy puts them better because he is smarter and more experienced than me. It makes me feel good about myself and also depressed at the same time.