Philosophy: Videos make everything easy

I love to learn through videos. Perhaps I’m a ‘visual learner’, or perhaps I’m lazy, or better yet, probably I was just raised watching the Discovery Channel, MacGyver, and reruns of Gilligan’s Island.

Jacques Cousteau, MacGyver himself, and the Professor from Gilligan’s Island were my childhood rolemodels. Yes, I’ve always been a dork.

Anyhow, I’ve found some lovely new visuals to keep me happy in my current TV-free life. The first is The Elegant Universe from NOVA. It stars and is based on (my new hero?) physicist Brian Greene’s book by the same title. I am currently reading his more recent book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos” for a course on Philosophy and Cosmology, and the NOVA program helps immensely in getting the concepts into an at least almost fathomable form. Physics is hella-complicated, and even with this lovely and very well made video, no I will not be adding Dr. Greene to my list of heroes just yet.

Second is a ‘counterbalance’ archive of conferences in 2000 and 2001 on Perspectives on Evolution. For dorks like me, this is a star-studded event, including:

• Niles Eldridge (cofounder with Richard Dawkins of the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium’),
• Ken Miller (A catholic biologist, strongly critical of “Intelligent Design” and author of “Finding Darwin’s God”),
• Eugenie C. Scott (Executive director of the National Science Teacher’s Association), and
• Michael Ruse (author of several books, including the next one I’ll be reading for my Ethics and Evolution course, “The Evolution-Creation Debate”).
• Not to mention both Michael Behe and William Dembski and a half-dozen others I don’t know so well.

So that’s what I’ve done with my weekend, along with preparing for a presentation on chapter seven of Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos”… So, now, with my hair still too short to pull out, I shall return to my work on ‘time and quantum mechanics’… (sigh…)…. [oh, and the picture above I took on a recent trip to see the parents in Helena – Montana is so beautiful, some day I’ll get a camera and some skills worthy of the beauty all around me]