A clay cylinder covered in Akkadian cuneiform script, damaged and broken, the Cyrus Cylinder is a powerful symbol of religious tolerance and multi-culturalism. In this enthralling talk Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, traces 2600 years of Middle Eastern history through this single object.
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One of Jean Piaget's most famous observations is the phenomenon of "object permanence"—the idea that babies younger than eight months old have no conception of an object once it's hidden from view. It's easy to see how he came to this conclusion.
I don't understand French nearly well enough to understand the explanation in this video, but I was amazed at what the physical world can do when I saw this video.
I thought it would be fun to do a couple of strange shapes to show you the interesting things that you can do with a a bit of glue in topology. There are a couple of standard *strange* manifolds, and I'm going to walk through some simple gluing constructions of them.
One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don't have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another-- we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous.
If you've got 25 hours to spare, you can also hear him do "A History of the World in 100 Objects" as a series of 100 15-minute podcasts.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow
The podcasts were first broadcast last year in two ten week series, last year. Excellent series (although someone did complain that they really wanted to see the objects, which is a bit of a challenge for a radio programme), and the Beeb also gave a chance for people to choose their own object http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/
There is even a book to accompany the series.
One of my favourites is Hinton St Mary, with the mosiac (I'm a Romanist and I was brought up in Dorset), but probably the most emotional was was the Olduvai handaxe - I'd just handled one at the BM a couple of weeks before - there was something very special about it.