Project Thinker

A media platform to facilitate thinking and questioning.

[projectthinker]

How Santa Claus Stole Christmas When He Became a Symbol of Consumerism

Santa Claus stole Christmas when the holiday became a symbol of consumerism and shopping, thereby diluting the deeper spiritual message of Christmas

[projectthinker]

When Wall Street and Silicon Valley come together – a cautionary tale

Increasingly, to oppose tech innovation is akin to defaulting on Enlightenment values. But there is a dark side to this gospel of digitalisation when it is closely aligned with financial motives

[projectthinker]

Religions fear it, businesses exploit it, and individuals constantly struggle to suppress its hedonist forces while indulging in its consumption.

[projectthinker]

What is life but a process of replacing one anxiety or desire with another, one addiction with the next? From babies, trends to jobs and lovers, we jump from one mind occupier to the next so afraid of “boring” solitude in the absence of worry or excitement. Even sleep has been hacked and occupied by the desires and worries of the consumerist culture. Perhaps solitude is so disturbing because in boredom introspection faces us with the mirror of consciousness where we find the “I”, lonely, insecure, and confused fully aware of its mortality and irrelevance, secretly resigned to the emptiness of its existence, fully conscious of its dependence on the distance with the other. But a tweet or an email on a vibrating iPhone quickly rescues us from this depressing twilight zone back to the digital dimension that runs on busy, distractions and attention currency.

[explore-blog]

On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms… . We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

Physicist and writer extraordinaire Alan Lightman, the very first person to receive dual appointments in science and the humanities at MIT, on dark energy, the multiverse, and why we exist – superb, mind-bending read. (via explore-blog)

[explore-blog]

How terrifying to consider that creationism is still taught in the classroom, and on taxpayer money. Cue in Neil deGrasse Tyson, who asserted in no uncertain terms that "intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance."

As Alan Watts memorably put it, “Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world.”

[projectthinker]

Growing Up In The Age of Hypercapitalism

What happens when sense of wonder and experimentation is simply either exploited by social media and advertising companies or it has to be suppressed by dangerous ADD drugs? Is there a space in between for kids to get lost in the solitude of their imagination safe from the attention disruptions of Silicon Valley, Big Pharma and for-profit Education? And what happens to these kids when they grow up and do succeed and are able to climb up the education, corporate, financial ladders? How does what they lost: their childhood, impact their adult life?

[projectthinker]

How Profit-Obsessed Engineers Engineer Ignorance

We need a new generation who see problems not from the prism of advertising dollars, instant-gratification-consumption or “cool” apps, but rather, Engineers who tackle problems of need of the majority instead of non-problems of want of the minority elite. The next revolution won't be tweeted or facebooked and the cure for poverty, cancer, education, obesity will sure as hell not come out of Apple’s App store or Silicon Valley’s Ad-Obsessed R&D departments (maybe GoogleX, though i doubt it). Engineering needs to go back to its roots to target complex and fundamental societal problems that often require more than just over-rational and narrow-minded programmers and mathematicians.

[projectthinker]

2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing

[projectthinker]

The Universe: A History and Perspective

[projectthinker]

Marcelo Gleiser is an astrophysicist. Marilynne Robinson is a novelist. They’re both passionate about the majesty of science and they share a caution about what they call our modern “piety” towards science. They connect thrilling dots among the current discoveries about the cosmos and the new territory of understanding our own minds. A joyous, heady discussion of “the mystery we are.”

[projectthinker]

When Einstein Met Tagore

Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality

[projectthinker]

Vice travels to Ljubljana, Slovenia, to meet superstar Communist philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek. The "most dangerous philosopher in the West" talks about his new film, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, and lectures us on the importance of being on time

[projectthinker]

'We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education'

As colleges feel pressure to graduate more students for less money, professors worry that the value of an education may be diminished.

[projectthinker]

Carl Sagan: Science Is a Way of Thinking

In this 1996 interview, Carl Sagan talks about pseudoscience, UFOs, and the origins of the universe.

[projectthinker]

Saving the Lost Art of Conversation

In a fast-paced digital age, an MIT psychologist tries to slow us down.

[evgenymorozov]

The Snowden saga heralds a radical shift in capitalism

By Evgeny Morozov

The benefits of personal data to consumers are obvious; the costs are not, writes Evgeny Morozov

Following his revelations this year about Washington’s spying excesses, Edward Snowden now faces a growing wave of...