Earth - The Pale Blue Dot

This is Carl Sagan reading from his book, "The Pale Blue Dot". Director Michael Marantz shoots the timelapse for this piece, composes the music and edits.

You might just tear up watching this video.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

These are hilarious, its easy to think that some of the videos or points being made are just stating the obvious, but there are people who not only still believe in this stuff, and are so passionate about it, that they want our children to be taught creationist science in schools alongside evolution.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

The only people so stupid as to not understand the answer are the creationists themselves.

There are over 20 of these videos under the YouTube user Thunderf00t.

Watch them here

Fifty Years of Exploration

BP Oil fiasco rendered using Unreal Engine

If you are of the type of the gamer who actually keeps abreast with daily world news besides gaming then you should not be a stranger to the BP Oil fiasco. According to reports, the amount of oil spilling in to the Gulf of Mexico stands at 25,000 barrels a day. Now how much is that in terms of quantity one might ask? We have got the answer for that. We got a video from Youtube which uses the Unreal Engine to render 25,000 barrels. Check it out, its pretty interesting.

Mass physics demonstration I rendered in the UDK, simulating 25,000 barrels stacked around a pillar 15,000 feet high, and then group by group falling to the ground.

I accomplished this by using the UDK to construct the setup and then running the benchmark shortcut command to render the scene.

Source

Whaling deal splits countries and conservationists

A deal that could regulate whaling for the next 10 years is up for debate at the International Whaling Commission's meeting opening in Agadir, Morocco.

The proposal would see Iceland, Japan and Norway given annual quotas with hunts more tightly scrutinised, while international trade could be banned.

Some anti-whaling countries and some conservation groups support the idea, while others are implacably opposed.

Few observers are prepared to predict whether the deal will be approved.

Read the Article

Book: The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley

To argue that human nature has not changed, but human culture has, does not mean rejecting evolution – quite the reverse. Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. The habitat in which these ideas reside consists of human brains. This notion has been trying to surface in the social sciences for a long time. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote in 1888: 'We may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation.' The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in the 1960s that in social evolution the decisive factor is 'selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits'. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation. The economist Richard Nelson in the 1980s proposed that whole economies evolve by natural selection.

This is what I mean when I talk of cultural evolution: at some point before 100,000 years ago culture itself began to evolve in a way that it never did in any other species – that is, to replicate, mutate, compete, select and accumulate – somewhat as genes had been doing for billions of years. Just like natural selection cumulatively building an eye bit by bit, so cultural evolution in human beings could cumulatively build a culture or a camera. Chimpanzees may teach each other how to spear bushbabies with sharpened sticks, and killer whales may teach each other how to snatch sea lions off beaches, but only human beings have the cumulative culture that goes into the design of a loaf of bread or a concerto.

Read the Article

Illegal bushmeat 'rife in Europe'

About 270 tonnes of illegal bushmeat could be passing through one of Europe's busiest airports each year, the first study of its kind estimates.

A team of researchers says the illicit trade could pose a risk to human or animal health and increase the demand for meat from threatened species.

The figure is based on seizures from searches carried out over 17 days at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

The findings appear in the journal Conservation Letters.

A team of researchers from France, Cambodia and the UK said it was the "first systematic study of the scale and nature of this international trade".

"We estimate that about five tonnes of bushmeat per week is smuggled in personal baggage through Paris Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport," they wrote.

Read the Article