Pattern Recognition: James Burke’s Crash Course History.
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007If you have the kind of brain aids that makes you constantly need to feed it more things, you might be interested in oddly detailed, guided tours through history. If you’re interested in that or learning how we learned how to learn, you’ll like this:
I know some people could be sensitive and call it dry, but James Burke is a pretty serious cut-up considering his field of study, and I’ve worshiped his books for years. Note that this is part 2 of 5 of episode 1 of 10. This can be a serious fast track to general knowledge of the history of science, and is almost an eerily appropriate primer for skeptical thought and understanding of the scientific process and how it effects history, all under the umbrella of chaos! This is multi-threaded teaching and thinking.
In the closing scenes of The Day the Universe Changed, Burke suggested that a forthcoming revolution in communication and computer technology would allow people all over the world to exchange ideas and opinions instantaneously. Subsequent events seem to have proven him right. His views of the connected nature of history have also been substantiated by recent research in chaos/complexity/network theory.
Essentially anything here is going to be similar or have an even wider berth, but I definitely suggest Connections as it caused a bit of an educational revolution that logically played out to its fullest form on the internet.
