What do Singing in the Rain, Live Is Life, Don't Worry, Be Happy, I Will Survive and Ça fait rire les oiseaux have in common? In a study, French-speaking Internet users identified these five pop songs out of 100, as the most pernicious earworms. Here are their top 25 picks from BRAMS, including audio clips. [more inside]
posted by zarq on May 27, 2010 - 58 comments

Recursion and Human Thought - Why the Piraha don't have numbers
posted by Gyan on Jun 13, 2007 - 47 comments

The Meaning of Life according to various rather famous people (Dennett, Fukuyama, etc). I'm watching the Dennett video at the moment and it starts rather weakly, but, by midway through, is rolling along nicely. With topics like "being good without god" and "the anthropic principle" it struck me as relevant to a couple of recent askmefi threads.
Dennett: [pause] i guess i'll say it again, more slowly...
(oh, and the player interface is rather delicate - give it time to load and click play a few times...)
posted by andrew cooke on Oct 1, 2004 - 17 comments

Iakov Levi analyzes history and literature using a very Freudian approach.
Some highlights:
Pinocchio - The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
Medusa, the Female Genital and the Nazis
Killing God: From the Assassination of Moses to the Murder of Rabin
Without Borders: The Borderline Case of United Europe
::warning! geocities links!::
posted by anastasiav on Sep 18, 2003 - 3 comments

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science - From the publisher's summary, "Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments — illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics — Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe." May be big. Thoughts?
posted by paladin on Oct 29, 2001 - 26 comments