The Sputnik Observatory, is dedicated to providing a venue for viewing and sharing ideas and philosophies of contemporary culture. Jonathan Harris, who worked on the mindblowing sociological website We Feel Fine, is the site director and blog creator for Sputnik Observatory. Sputnik also has a host of codirectors with diverse backgrounds in journalism, architecture, and ballet. Members of Sputnik have spent the last ten years interviewing scientists, philosophers, academics, and the like. They have over 200 videos of conversations on themes such as coherence, interspecies communication, and urban metabolism.
“Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.”
Here are some of the short interviews that involve mathematics (and all really COOL mathematics). All of these can be embedded into course shells.
Will Wright – Possibility Space
Ian Stewart – Alien Mathematics
Ian Stewart – Pattern-Seeking Minds
Lord Martin Rees – Simple Recipe
Trevor Paglen – Geologic Agents
Jacques Vallee – Information Universe
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