In this 2006 lecture at TED, philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) takes on the "brilliant" contemporary redesign of religion by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life. After acknowledging that Warren's book is, indeed, "brilliant" (it has sold 30 million copies and motivated comparable numbers of people), Dennett…
I've often heard about "flow," but never from the man who was personally responsible for developing the theory: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "cheeks sent me high").
In this TED video, astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. Smoot presents his lecture with the help of dramatic images created through the crunching of massive amounts of real-life data. The bottom line is that…