I created this LIFE talk to explore three sources of information that seem similar to the offerings of LIFE. Hungry minds of any age and any background might get satisfaction from TED talks, the Great Courses and from many videos on YouTube. All three of these sources can be explored on a computer and, if your setup allows, on a television set. All three have apps that can be applied to phones and tablets such as the Galaxy or iPhone or iPad. Great Courses can often be borrowed from the Portage County public library and requests can be made to purchase courses of interest.
TED talks and YouTube are free on any device connected to the internet. Great Courses are not free but the cost of downloading the audio version is much lower, especially when the course of interest is on sale. I only buy at those times. I download the audio version and play it in my car through the sound system of the car using an iPod and iTunes.
Part 1 - TED talks
TED talks are on the internet. They are not all on the TED web site. If you know about a TED talk and you can't find it in the TED website, search YouTube and Google.
They were started from the idea of Richard Saul Wurman and they began in 1984. They are all related to the theme that good ideas should be spread.
Many TED talks show a transcript of what the speaker is saying, often with underlining of the words being spoken when the video is running.
I usually use this Ernesto Sirolli talk as my favorite TED talk.
This recent talk by an Israeli historian is another good one. The link goes to his transcript but clicking on his picture will bring up his talk.
The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. Complete madness.
4:11 In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
4:42 Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi.
5:35 Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas.
How, exactly, do we do it? What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.
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Here is a link to several blog posts about TED talks
http://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/search?q=TED+talks
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Here is a link to a playlist, a set of TED talks, put together because all 10 talks are aimed at changing a typical way of thinking.'
https://www.ted.com/playlists/91/everything_you_thought_was
Here is a recent talk on addiction that seems memorable.
https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
Here are 2 talks on the subject of Twitter and other brief messages that have stuck in my mind.
Twitter security, bullying and troll behavior:
https://www.ted.com/talks/del_harvey_the_strangeness_of_scale_at_twitter
Texting saving lives:
https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_lublin_texting_that_saves_lives