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Douglas Adams’ speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge U.K., September 1998.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let’s talk about the four ages of sand.

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From CBC News World.

Part 1: What Afghanistan wanted and how the U.S. responded
Part 2: Is the U.S. a terrorist state?
Part 3: Differing perspectives: Robert Kaplan and Noam Chomsky
Part 4: Can trust be restored?
Part 5: Clash of civilizations