A lot of bad news this year, not just the deaths of beloved celebrities by the dozen, but one political farce after another made all the more painful by the rising availability of information, and the rampant spread of misinformation and the ever growing tirade of opinion drowning out fact.
But it hasn’t all been bad, and through the constant stream of bad news and doomsaying we’ve forgotten quite a few of the highlights. Continue reading “Review – 2016”
I’m a firm believer that it is a duty to share information, and these days it has been made easier and easier for us to reach a huge audience with the knowledge we possess. The internet is awash with stupidity, both good and bad, and there’s plenty of intelligent content out there too, also good and bad (it’s far too easy to fabricate information to suit your own purposes) but it’s amazingly easy to use the internet to educate yourself without having to wade through trash and false-stories.
Enter one of the latest YouTube educators, Kurzgesagt/In a Nutshell. Starting in 2013, they’ve been producing a series of videos – about 5-10 minutes long – that give an overview of some of the more… enormous questions in life. They’re intelligent, offer fairly balanced views when their subjects get a little polarising such as nucular energy and the crisis in the Middle East, but remorseless when the subject is patently being mishandled like environment change or the war on drugs. Animations assist the elegantly written narration whilst unapologetically weaving in pop-culture references without intruding on the education. Continue reading “Kurzgesagt – The Internet Makes You Smarter”
