Kim Dotcom, Pirate King businessweek.com: "Is Megaupload's founder a criminal mastermind, or the world's most entertaining scapegoat? A file-sharing wizard's ridiculous rise and fall." Read on

Cory Doctorow - The Internet & Freedom KERA: "Could legislation to stop online piracy and fight other internet-centered crimes like terrorism, child abuse, and fraud actually endanger the freedoms we take for granted? We’ll spend this hour with science fiction novelist and boingboing.net co-editor Cory Doctorow. He’ll speak at UTA’s College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series this evening." Read on

Steven Pinker on Thinking About Our Society (Video) Steven Pinker on Thinking About Our Society (Audio) Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, delivers a lecture entitled Thinking About Our Society: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker (Psychology - Harvard University) explores the essence of human nature and what lies behind the statistically unmistakable reduction in violence over the past few centuries.

The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis scientificamerican.com: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor Fred Guterl about the technological Entanglement and the attempts to build the other, hardier Internet." Read on

Megan Prelinger - Another Science Fiction (Video) Author Megan Prelinger presents her book Another Science Fiction, a gorgeous collection of artwork from the aerospace industry during the space-race era of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Beating and nothingness: Philosophy and the Martial Arts Radio ABC: "This week we talk to Dr Damon Young, Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, who is both a philosopher and a grappler, about what martial arts have to tell us of thinking and being." Young is also co-author of Martial Arts and Philosophy: Beating and Nothingness (Popular Culture and Philosophy). Read on

Ray Jayawardhana on Alien Planets "Author and astronomer Ray Jayawardhana discusses Alien Planets and his latest book Strange New Worlds. The lecture focuses on techniques for detecting planets orbiting distant stars." Also available as a video

Scott, Amundsen and Science: 100th Anniversary - Ed Larson (Video) "Marking the 100th anniversary of teams led by Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott reaching the South Pole, science historian Edward Larson will reexamine their so-called Race to the Pole in light of their objectives. Amundsen and his men focused exclusively on reaching the pole and succeeded brilliantly. Scott and his men had multiple objectives, which included conducting a broad array of scientific research by teams of researchers that fanned out across the region. Larson will retell the story of these expeditions in context and contrast it with the conventional wisdom about them." Read on

Reading the Arab spring The Guardian: "A year after the Egyptian uprising, we look at the literature coming out of the region; and Craig Thompson talks about his graphic novel Habibi, in which Islam meets Christianity" Read on