My writings can be found on sites other than this one. Content hunters are invited to read on for discussions about why people think it’s natural for us to have assumed that the Sun went round the Earth — and to view what’s probably the first Powers-of-ten type video, where we zoom from an atomic scale to the edges of galaxies.

I post regularly on 9rules Notes — the blog community’s public forums. Posting there helps inspire me as the people there are quite fun, intellectual and opinionated. In one of my more recent notes I posted a remark by Wittgenstein on Why people say it’s natural for us to have assumed the Sun went round the Earth — which is quite amusing and incited several interesting responses. The lecture that brought the quote to my attention is a TED Talk by Richard Dawkins titled “Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science.” (GVideo) It’s a fun and interesting lecture that I recommend for anyone interested in evolution and life on Earth.

Last year I attended an atheist conference here in Reykjavik where I had the pleasure of seeing Dawkins give a lecture on his book The God Delusion and religion in general. It was quite intriguing, but at the time my opinion of what’s been termed militant atheism was somewhat undecided. In a way I suppose that made me one of the more skeptical persons in that group of skeptics, but it was educating and I would happily attend again if the opportunity presented itself.

Another noteworthy Note I posted recently at 9rules is Let’s take a step back, or ten. It’s a short video that incidentally is a very good follow-up to the lecture by Dawkins above. In it, we zoom from what Dawkins referred to as the middle world (the scale of things with which we evolved): people dining in a public garden, then increasing the scale 10 times gradually, zooming all the way out to an overview of multiple galaxies. I’ve come across similar videos and interactive applets, but this video was made by Charles and Ray Eames. They died in ‘78 and ‘88, respectively, and thus I suspect this is the clip that introduced such ‘epic zooming’ to visualize relative sizes and distances.