What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbours, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. — Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques (XII: sur M. Pope et quelques autres poètes fameux)
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
Posted by Danny on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:40 am
I’ve been spending more and more time in Second Life as I prepare to do my fieldwork for my thesis, and I’m enjoying it much more than I expected. A few days ago I stumbled onto a community called Thothica, full of folks with academic and casual interests in philosophy, science, literature, and education—this is much more readily appealing to me than the live music, bars, and shopping I’ve mainly seen. When I arrived at the community’s parcel of space, I joined in listening to a live reading from the last chapter of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; the reader, Elaine Lorefield, does public readings in the space twice a week—she’s read Stranger to members of the community from start to just about finish over the last few months (the unabridged version, even!) and weekly reads thought-provoking short stories with discussion to follow. Tonight, we heard “Ephemera” by Steve Rasnic Tem, and then had a two-hour conversation that ranged from curacy to e-reading to open access. All the stuff I love.
What thrills me about this is how readily the experience became wholly legitimate and embodied—how there was almost no distracting contemplation about the “inauthenticity” of the “virtual experience.” Practically speaking, Elaine and the rest of us were sitting at our computers (dotted in this case across Canada and the US, as far as I know) while she read into a headset from her Kindle. It may as well have been a conference call. But, “in-world,” we’d assembled at the community’s library in Thothica at the scheduled time, took seats in the circle of couches and armchairs by the fire (in a configuration damned reminiscent of an actual gathering of this sort, with clustering around the reader and avoidance of text-chatting to other members or walking in front of her, even though these things in no way had an impact on the content delivery), and we listened for about an hour and a half. It was a cultural event rather than an audiobook. Understand, when I say the following, that I’ve been a long-time player of multiplayer games, including socially rich MMOs like Ultima Online in its heyday; I know that this sounds worrisome to people both with gaming experience and on the outside looking in, but I honestly concluded the evening feeling as if I’d spent a night out.
I know the experience is more transparent for me than others because of my fluency with the interface and my fast typing speed, but I really, really see this as a viable educational environment. Before today, I would have been much more cynical when one of the founding Thothica members described the space to me as a sort of campus pub. (Maybe active drinkers could disagree more reasonably.) Second Life is the earliest example I know of as a mainstream “free-to-play” game, so if anyone wants to give it a shot (and see if I’m just bonkers), let me know, and you can join me in the field. There’s a sonnet writing and discussion group on Sunday…
Posted by Danny on Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 9:07 pm
A large fly that was buzzing around the room in which I’ve been doing my reading suddenly fell down and landed on the couch across from me with an audible thud. Here’s my brain:
That was a weird noise; was that the fly?
It was! Must’ve been massive to make that noise.
If it’s dead, it won’t distract me anymore; I wonder what happened to it.
Oh no—it’s injured, poor thing. One of its wings is bent up and it’s trying to straighten it out but it can’t.
I should kill it. It’s a broken machine that can’t be repaired.
It’s wandering around trying to fix its wing—I wonder if it perceives pain in the way I do, or maybe if the confusion I ascribe to its movements is because it’s stuck in a self-repair loop with a component that won’t cooperate and behave the way the entire machine is programmed to. Is it capable of confusion or shock in any sense that I’d recognize, or is this all anthropomorphization?
There must be someone who could fix that wing for it. There’s probably not much call for reconstructive chitinous wing surgery in veterinary practice, but there are specialists in all kinds of insects, anatomy, flight mechanics, microsurgery; has anyone ever, in the history of the world, tried to repair the broken wing of a living fly?
I wonder how long it’ll live like this. Will it starve before it’s eaten? This is the first insect I’ve seen inside the cottage since I got up here; it’ll probably starve. I should kill it.
I can’t kill it. I’m a coward in the face of my considered morality.
Where’s it gone? It’s been crawling around on the couch for more than five minutes; maybe it’s between the cushion and the armrest. I hope nobody finds it dead later—it’s a big fly.
Huh: there it is, and it’s fixed itself. Oh, it’s a little beetle!
Posted by Danny on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 11:46 am
Thanks to the goofy interests of our usual attendants (and not, though the allegation would be fair, due to the name of the event), subject matter at Evenings for Brains tends regularly towards neuroscience and psychology in general. As a result, I was acquainted with V. S. Ramachandran’s TED Talk, and was subsequently chuffed all over to learn that he had produced an extended version of his presentation in the form of a five-part lecture series for the BBC.
When I first stumbled on the Reith lectures a few years ago, I asked around with various British radio buffs whether any attempt had been made by the filesharing and archival communities to collect and release the series online, as I’ve seen done with the Goon Show. I was told that it was a good idea, and that some of the more famous or recent lectures were in “circulation,” but that the body was vast and there was more missing than was accessible. Particularly with old BBC archival material, this had a ring of doom about it: in the company’s (later, corporation’s) early history, it was notoriously in the habit of recording new programs over old reels. I found my Ramachandran lectures, which were recent, and a single fragment of Bertrand Russell’s series, which was famous, and consigned the rest to a teary oblivion shared by the early seasons of the Goons, the pilot of Clue (until recently!), and some Doctor Who episodes which I wasn’t particularly broken up over.
Please, pleasetry some of this stuff. There are names in the list of lecturers you’re bound to know, or topics you already care about. If you’re nuts like me, listen from beginning to end and witness the evolution of western social conventions and intellectual fashions—Uncle Bert often makes my heart sing, but his positivism is shocking and foreign, even to my idealistic, naïve self. If nothing else, try the first Ramachandran lecture (or the TED, linked above), and see if you don’t want more. I so wish the CBC was cool enough to do this with the Masseys; they sell the lectures on CD instead (at the time of writing, anyway—maybe they could maybe be shamed into opening up a bit by the Venerable Beeb). As it stands, the Massey lectures are a bit more populous in the wild than the Reiths were, so folks with the right inclinations and skills will do what they will.
One other thing I’d like to tell you about, O Absent Readership, is another swell bit of totally legal, openly accessible brainy goodness served up by Stanford University and brought to my attention again by Open Culture. Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist, famous for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, has been featured by TED, The Teaching Company, and Big Ideas, and has recently had his open course on Human Behavioural Biology broadcast to the world, OCW-style.
Sapolsky’s name was familiar from the Teaching Company catalogue, but I hadn’t seen him teach until I watched the clip featured on Open Culture. Their pitch is my pitch: try a few minutes of the first lecture—if you’re hooked, the whole course is available to you. (The ability, from home, for free, to see a professor teach and to say, “gosh, I wish I was in his class,” and then to be able to watch ALL the lectures in that class, is like paradise. It’s transmission-based learning, but it’s still so, so tasty.)
What’s most valuable about this series, for me, is that Sapolsky provides a fairly thorough overview of the various lenses for viewing human behaviour scientifically, but is ever at pains (or, takes sadistic pleasure) to tear down the confident edifices of various modes of thought. He uses the metaphor of being trapped within one of many “buckets” when trying to explain human behaviour: evolutionists, molecular geneticists, and ethologist care about different things and countenance different kinds of evidence when explaining phenomena they would all equally recognize. Exploring the conflict between the different buckets, as Sapolsky does here, breaks down the apparent monolith of scientific accord and offers a more accurate picture of this particular way of understanding the world. For this I have great affection.
My approach to the lectures has been to download them from YouTube using FlashGot (free!), rip the audio data from them with AOA Audio Extractor (free!), and then listen to them on my iPod while commuting (fun!). For the buckets with which I’m familiar, this has worked pretty well, and I try to watch the lectures covering stranger topics, like neurology. It’s been awfully rewarding and compelling for me; I hope some of you find this useful, too.
Posted by Danny on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm
(I usually write these posts by hand before putting them up, which means, I think, somewhat less horrible prosody that may otherwise happen, but also, that I can be side-tracked and my posts are either lost or terribly delayed. And, because I don’t date the writing in my notebooks, I have no idea how long ago this was intended to go out. The timestamp is a guess—I actually posted this on May 31, 2011. Appy-polly-logies, absent reader base.)
Both of the projects planned for Exploring Our World at Youth Group have come to nought: attendance is too spotty and folks are too tired coming straight from school to generate a consistent sort of participation. We got one good petition-planning meeting in, with fun, Mark-Thomas-style discussion, but our political machinations petered out; as has been the practice in the past, it’s been just me bringing in neat things, so the Web of Awesome has similarly failed. Alas.
But! While there’s been sadness there, I have discovered a few exciting things that have occupied much of my time and may pleasantly occupy yours.
Posted by Danny on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:54 pm
In response to the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the earthquake on March 11, 2011, there’s been an understandable but unfortunate rise in opposition to nuclear power in Canada (and elsewhere, of course) by folks like me with limited and patchy knowledge of the physics behind radiation, and cynically advanced by stakeholders in public fear and, probably, providers of competing energy sources like fossil fuels. This is unfortunate if you feel that
nuclear power is a contending alternative to fossil fuels for sustaining our energy needs while we seek to transition to cleaner, more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, or that
public fear is, on balance, bad.
I wanted to post about this because there are a few public scientists and science-literate public figures who are trying to make the available data digestible (even appetizing, considering the circumstances) for folks whose dominant sources of information may be less than disinterested in public ignorance. If you have nine minutes, consider watching Martyn Poliakoff covering the workings of a nuclear reactor, the meltdown process, why the sea-water pumped into the plant as an emergency measure will compromise its future viability, and why potassium-iodide pills are being used as a precaution against radiation sickness. I found this to be a valuable and concise primer. (Direct link here.)
If “radiation” is equated uncritically with “badness,” it becomes impossible to judge the gravity of situations involving it, or to make decisions about its use as compared with, say, a coal-burning power plant, the byproducts of which seem to be more readily quantified in public discourse. The enterprise of usefully quantifying radiation (that is, the harmful form of radiation pertinent to living near nuclear reactors or eating bananas) has been recently undertaken by XKCD’s Randall Munroe to provide a sense of context and scale. The blog post featuring the chart in question is over here, but consider also reading Phil Plait’s brief discussion of it, here at Bad Astronomy.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
