u/WanderingPrimate717

There are around 7,000 languages spoken around the world, each dividing and describing reality in different ways.

In this excerpt, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky examines how the separate Russian words for light and dark blue appear to influence how quickly speakers distinguish between the colours.

An interesting example highlighting how language may change what we perceive.

Source: Lera Boroditsky, "How language shapes the way we think", on TED.

Astrophotographer Lucie McCormick captured this drone-based timelapse near Arauzo de Torre, Spain, during the total solar eclipse on 12 August 2026.

For much of human history, the sudden disappearance of the Sun was interpreted through myth and omen. In ancient China, eclipses were described as the Sun being "eaten", with people banging drums and pots to frighten away the dragon believed to be devouring it.

In ancient Mesopotamia, a solar eclipse was treated as a grave omen for the king (although astronomers there had already become remarkably skilled at predicting when eclipses would occur).

Today we understand what is happening: the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow across a narrow path on Earth's surface. We can calculate that path centuries before it arrives.

Knowledge has untangled much of the fear and superstition surrounding an eclipse, but not the awe. If anything, understanding how precise the alignment must be makes it even more extraordinary.

Footage: Astrophotographer Lucie McCormick

In this powerful visualisation, first broadcast on BBC Four in 2010, the late Swedish physician and public speaker Hans Rosling tracks 200 countries across two centuries, plotting life expectancy against income.

What emerges is a world that has changed far more dramatically—and unevenly—than labels like "developed" and "developing" suggest.

These two measures obviously aren't the whole story. But as a four-minute snapshot of how human life has changed, it’s incredibly effective.

Source: The Joy of Stats (BBC, 2010), presented by Hans Rosling. Data and visualisation: Gapminder.

A bleak take on the future of music and art.

We're replacing human creativity in the name of "progress".

Sell the keyboard. Burn the sheet music. Onwards and upwards. Just $20 a month.

Credit: Patrick Cashmore on Instagram

In 1984, Orwell reduces freedom to its most basic condition: the ability to recognise and state an objective fact, even when authority demands otherwise.

If that freedom is lost, he suggests, every other freedom becomes vulnerable.

Physicist Richard Feynman reflects on what science can and can't tell us about the world.

Science may never provide final answers about meaning, our place in the universe or where we're going.

For Feynman, that isn't a failure. The point is to keep investigating without deciding beforehand what nature must be. And to remain open to the possibility that "everything is possibly wrong."

A survey asked 2,000 US adults which decades had the best music, movies, economy, family life, moral values, communities and more. The Washington Post then compared their answers with how old each respondent had been during the decade they chose.

Across much of the analysis, the supposed 'best' years clustered around childhood and adolescence. The pattern resembles the "reminiscence bump": our tendency to retain more vivid and significant memories from our formative years.

The obvious conclusion is that people yearning for a better country or culture are really yearning for their own youth. When the world felt newer, simpler and more secure.

I'm not entirely convinced. Nostalgia undoubtedly colours our judgement, but it shouldn't become a way of dismissing every criticism of the present. There's a lot that has genuinely and objectively deteriorated.

Perhaps nostalgia explains some of it. But there's no doubt: movies, music, television, happiness, politics—it's all gone to crap.

Nice chart though.

In a 1967 radio interview, Ray Manzarek explained the idea behind the band’s name:

>“In between these two areas—the known and the unknown—are The Doors.”

The name was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, itself drawn from William Blake’s line:

>“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Source: Ray Manzarek interviewed by Harry Harrison on The IN Sound, broadcast in August 1967.

In Humankind, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman challenges the concept of “veneer theory”: the idea that civilisation is only a thin layer restraining a fundamentally selfish and violent nature within humans.

He argues that when crisis strikes, what usually emerges isn’t chaos, but an "explosion of altruism".

His argument turns one of our most persistent assumptions about human nature on its head: that beneath the surface, we are fundamentally brutal and savage.

What do you think? Have you read Humankind or any of Bregman's other work?

Source: Interview on Big Think

Written decades before AI entered everyday life, Isaac Asimov's observation feels increasingly relevant.

Our capacity to accumulate knowledge continues to accelerate. Whether our collective wisdom is keeping pace is another question altogether.

In this opening to Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), astronomer Carl Sagan reflects on the scale of the universe, humanity’s place within it, and the need for both imagination and scepticism in pursuing truth.

More than four decades later, his words still carry the same sense of wonder, and urgency.

A classic clip from 2009 of a guy dancing alone at the Sasquatch! Music Festival in George, Washington.

Shout-out to the lone dancers!

At first, the whole scene is a bit ridiculous. He's in his own world, being filmed and probably laughed at. He doesn't care.

Then someone joins him. Then another. A few more follow, and before long, the whole hillside is a dance party.

The clip is often presented as a lesson in leadership. But it's just as much about courage, conformity, and the point at which each of us feel safe enough to step outside our comfort zone and participate.

So who are you in this clip?

The lone dancer?

The first person to join in?

The couple walking away, perhaps a bit uncomfortable?

Or one of the many who arrive in the waves that follow, not wanting to miss out on all the fun?

Australian reporter Ray Taylor asks people on the streets of Sydney a simple question in August 1962:

Do you think there is life on other planets?

The responses are fascinating. One man is convinced after seeing a flying saucer over Lane Cove. Another appeals to the Bible. One woman imagines life shaped by the atmosphere of another planet — and says she’d like to be the first woman in space.

A wonderful little time capsule of how people imagined life beyond Earth at the dawn of the Space Age.

>"You should treat the ocean as if your life depends on it, because it does."

A brief snapshot of the life of Sylvia Earle, one of the great marine biologists, oceanographers and ocean explorers of our time.

Now aged 90, Earle has led more than 100 ocean expeditions and logged over 7,000 hours underwater. She was formerly Chief Scientist of NOAA, was named TIME magazine's first "Hero for the Planet", and founded Mission Blue, a global initiative dedicated to protecting vital ocean "Hope Spots."

Here she reflects on the ocean not as a distant, seperate ecosystem, but as Earth's vital life-support system. Her point is simple: the ocean is not seperate to us. It is bound to every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, and the stability of life on Earth.

Clip from PBS' Brief But Spectacular – Sylvia Earle

From Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974):

>Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster... When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.

It's a stark warning against achievement driven by self-glorification.

The point isn't that ambition is wrong. It's more that when achievement becomes a way of proving an image of ourselves, the victory can never really satisfy us. Success becomes unstable, because the image has to be defended again and again.

You see this everywhere: in sport, celebrity, business, politics, social media, and ordinary life. People driven not simply by excellence, but by the need to be seen as powerful, impressive, admired, important, or untouchable.

If the aim is self-confirmation, the mountain never ends.

The need is to understand the desire itself. What is it trying to compensate for? Where does it come from? And can genuine fulfilment ever be found while we are still trying to prove ourselves to the world?