"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge."
- John Naisbitt, Megatrends
In the information age where almost everything is believed to be acessible at the click of a mouse we tend to loose sight of the reliablility, the quality of the information. This collection is my try to put together some quality links which are/might soon become lost in the complex and every growing web that is the internet. Obviously, opinions differ (and these links lean heavily towards cognitive science) so take what you like; in Macklemore's words "One man's trash, that's another man's come up."
Some totally awe inpiring videos.
- TED's Chris Anderson on Questions No One Knows the Answers to
- Khan Academy on You Can Learn Anything
- Prof. Amar Bose's last lecture to his acoustics class at MIT. Some very deep personal reflections on how to have a good career. Skip to 26:10 mark to get to the relevant part. Though you could consider watching the whole thing.
Nautilus, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review and The New Yorker contain some of the best science journalism I have personally come across.
- Ingenious Nautilus and me If I am not wrong this was the first article in Nautilus. Absolutely beautiful a must read.
- The man who tried to redeem the world with logic
A brilliant article about Walter Pitts best-known for two classical papers in Neuroscience Logical Calculus of the ideas immanent in Nervous Activity and What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain, the latter, is co-authored by Jerome Lettvin (A very fascinating autobiography can be found here.)
- Lighting the brain On the discovery of optogenetics by Karl Deisseroth and his team.
- Two Heads The Churchlands on the mind body problem.
Similar articles may be found on the Brain segment of the New Yorker. Might also want to check out this column by the late neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.
Here are some wonderful links about Milestons in Neuroscience Research, Classics in the history of Psychology and a treasure chest full of Autobiographical chapters compiled by the Society for Neuroscience
Artificial Intelligence
Some recommended websites and blogs belonging to Andrej Karpathy, Scott Aaronson (check out the Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science series). Also look for some intruiging essays and articles on the website of the founders of the field Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy additionally this gem of a reading list by Gerald J. Sussman.
General
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If you are a scientist, Richard Hamming's research philosophy as mentioned in his talk "You and Your Research" is a wonderful one to adopt.
- Books shape our world. Some reliable resources for free (and legal!!!) access to books Project Gutenberg, Open Library and a comprehensive list of wonderful science oriented books compiled by educator Arvind Gupta. (A TED talk by him can be found here)
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Some very helpful articles for those interested in a career in academe by Philip Guo
and Matt Might
Did you find everything on this page boring? Head over to xkcd or PhD comics for a laugh or if you already think you have procrastinated enough, why not head over to Zen Pencils for some inspiration (and some more procrastination) before you start working again.