Questions No One Knows the Answers to, by Chris Anderson and Andrew Park at TED Education, which seems like an interesting video education resource in the Khan Academy mold, even if the TED brand is getting a bit old (here’s one proof).

By the way, Chris Anderson (who I just found out is not the Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson) has a wonderful narrator voice. Not as good as Werner Herzog’s, but pretty close.

This is scary in a Michael Crichton-ish sci-fi sort of way: two AI chat programs are made to talk to each other and the resulting dialogue gets pretty rough.

So here’s a science fiction scenario which I believe nobody ever wrote about: In a near future, machines achieve self-conscience. But rather than deciding to ‘save’ Earth from mankind or put people to use as AA batteries, etc., machines will engage instead in fraticidal tribal warfare. I mean, imagine that computers and OSs become bigger zealots than some of their fanboys (and perhaps encouraged so by their makers).

If you are a writer, you’re welcome to use this premise and get successful with it. I’ll take no royalties. But some kind of tip would be nice.

An HD slow-motion clip of the Apollo 11 Saturn V launch. Nice.

A two-minute minidocumentary about the Big Bang. Personally, it’s thrilling to see the short-form science doc evolve. But seriously: magenta?

The World of Chemistry!

Semiconductor’s Black Rain. Man Ray’s films meet NASA solar observations. Pretty dandy. (via Boing Boing)