Tara Smith on Coronavirus, Pandemics, and What We Can Do

Cities are incredibly important to modern life, and their importance is only growing. As Geoffrey West points out, the world is adding urban areas equivalent to the population of San Francisco once ev...

13 Feb 20231h 12min

Welcome to the February 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

6 Feb 20233h 7min

Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those delibe...

30 Jan 20231h 22min

So you have some information — how are you going to share it with and present it to the rest of the world? There has been a long history of organizing and displaying information without putting too mu...

23 Jan 20231h 16min

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know th...

16 Jan 20231h 10min

Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it's only inspiration, not detailed guidance. S...

9 Jan 20231h 24min

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that ...

2 Jan 20231h 20min

Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round off another year. Ironically, this year the theme ...

19 Dec 202247min