Ideas Worth Exploring Mark McDonald

Polymers are everywhere. There are dozens of types of plastics, but there are also biological polymers such as DNA and proteins, and together, most of the materials you use every day are made of one of the two types of polymer. Even I’m made out of polymers! Let’s talk about what they are and why they’re taking over the world. 

Gambling, advertising, politics, and household chores. What do these have to do with each other? They’re all areas where your brain can steer you wrong when making decisions, as we’ll see in today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about one of the most influential ideas in the science of judgment and decision making, called dual process theory. This model is explained clearly in the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The book talks about psychological research on how our intuition and reasoning work, and explains where our brains tend to make mistakes, and how to correct those errors. In this episode, I compare your intuition, your System 1, to a robot doing paperwork, and your reason, your System 2, to a detective. I then talk about six heuristics and biases: anchoring and adjustment, loss aversion, availability, attribute substitution, representativeness, and confirmation bias, and how these affect your decision making. 

A walk through the history of the universe, starting with the Big Bang and the creation of the elements in stars, moving through the first molecular replicators, the RNA world hypothesis, and the evolution of life by natural selection. Punctuated equilibrium. The extreme destruction caused by the asteroid that extincted the dinosaurs. The development of animal culture, except for octopuses, which are uncultured cephalopods. Human intelligence, modern civilization, and what lies ahead of us: extinction or spreading throughout the stars. And the possibility of civilization powered by black holes before the universe finally succumbs to heat death. Enjoy! 

Pretend you’re making a new planet from scratch, and you want to know how the climate and weather patterns will be affected by each new feature you add. In this episode we will answer the questions: why is it warmer near the equator? Why does going up in elevation make it colder? We’ll also talk about the terms: albedo, the urban heat island effect, and the Coriolis effect. Finally, we’ll talk about El Niño and what we know about it. So let’s start making a planet!

Unlike in Pokemon, evolution in our world happens slowly, over many generations. In this episode, we talk about how all life on earth is part of the same family and arose from a single common ancestor through a branching pattern of evolution, and how this happens through natural selection, or “survival and reproduction of the fittest”. Also, whales have fingers. I thought you ought to know.

You may have heard of something called the Big Bang, where all the stuff in the universe spread out from a single point. Did you know that the Big Bang is still happening? Well, it is, and you’re in the middle of it! This episode is about the universe, what it looks like, and how it is changing. Also, dark energy, the mysterious thing that makes up the majority of the stuff in our universe, and several possibilities for how the universe might end: The Big Crunch, The Big Freeze, and The Big Rip.