In 1848 James Marshall discovered gold in California. News spread quickly all over the world, about unimaginable riches that grew out of the ground. Historians estimate that around 300,000 people, mostly from the eastern states of US, but also from Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America, travelled to California using...
Year: 2013
Perfect day with Lou
It was spring of 1981. I was in love with a blond girl from the all-girls school that was several blocks away from our own, all-boys school, in central Athens. For both of us this was our last year at school. Like our schoolmates we were working hard for the...
Interview with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. This is an edited transcript of an interview I took from Steven on April 2004 in Tucson, AZ, during the World Conference on Consciousness....
A short film about austerity Greece
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2d8BSxDepw] Garbage Alchemists describes the life of four creative designers, architects and sculptors in Thessaloniki, Greece who formed a company called "Scoopa". They dig into garbage and pick things that they transform("upcycle") into designer objects. The film was written and researched by George Zarkadakis and directed by Kyriakos Bouyouris for...
Syria and the West
As the US prepares to launch an attack in Syria, against the Assad regime which allegedly used chemical weapons against its own citizens, the debate has focused mostly on tactics and ethics rather than strategy. The British parliament decided against joining the Americans principally on the, rather sensible and practical,...
The Venusian
In the neighbourhood where I grew up there lived an old man we used to make fun of. His name was Vangelis. Barba-Vangelis[1] was the kind, tender type of fellow who did not mind very much when a ball came crashing through his window or when a can of red...
Digital Killed the Book?
[slideshare id=15657032&style=border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px&sc=no] Digital killed the book from George Zarkadakis In my presentation that went viral in SlideShare I present highlights of the "Salon Model", a concept that aims to decode the social aspect of reading books. My "big idea" is that although we (usually) read books...
Cloudbuster
This is the story of a television star. We shall call him, for convenience, Eliah. To start, we must make clear that he never had big ambitions in life. In fact, his mother remembers him as a very timid child whom scarcely made any friends and tended to spend most...
All about strings: An interview with Leonard Susskind
Leonard Susskind is considered one of the fathers of string theory in physics. He is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Institute of Theoretical Physics.This is an edited transcript of an interview with Leonard Susskind (Stanford 13/04/2004) GZ: What are the big...
Interview with Jean-Marie Lehn, Nobel Laureate in Chemisty (in Greek)
This is an edited transcript of an Interview of Jean-Marie Lehn taken by George Zarkadakis in Athens on 3/05/2006) Ο Jean-Marie Lehn γεννήθηκε στη μεσαιωνική πόλη Rosheim της Γαλλίας το 1938 και στα νεανικά του χρόνια αμφιταλαντεύτηκε να επιλέξει ανάμεσα σε πανεπιστημιακές σπουδές στη φιλοσοφία ή στη χημεία. Τελικά επέλεξε...