Not far from the invention of fire… we must rank the invention of doubt. — Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays, Vol 6, viii
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, 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, 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.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 11:32 pm
A quick post and a long video: Alan Davies of Quite Interesting fame recently featured in an episode of the venerable BBC documentary series, Horizon. In the grand pedantic tradition of trying to answer rhetorical questions, Alan wanders through laser measuring technology, fractals, atomic structure, and quantum mechanics as he tries to figure out “how long is a piece of string.”
Davies is impossible to dislike, as most QI watchers will probably attest; I think this video could be a good teaching tool because his bafflement, occasional glazing, and plaintive insistence on real-world relevance resonate with a lot of the students I’ve seen who are dealing with these ideas for the first time, and could thereby possibly spin sympathy into engagement. Moreover, through the frustration of just trying to figure out how long his piece of string is, he remains stoic and good natured—this is pleasant.
A couple of final points: I’m usually impatient with some of the more popular conventions of documentary filmmaking, of which plenty are employed in the above video; I nonetheless found this a rewarding view in toto. Secondly, the YouTube version linked to in the Open Culture post where I found this originally has already been taken down. If you get to this version in time and find it a worthwhile resource, you might consider nabbing it while you can.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 5:28 pm
For the last year and a half I’ve been working with Jenny to host “Exploring Our World” out of St. Clements with the older Youth Group Kids. This is billed (defensively, by me) as a “Secular Enrichment Class on Sundry Exciting Topics,” but essentially means I get to talk with intelligent and interested highschoolers about neuroscience, astronomy, ethics, and music. Programming, for the most part, has been semi-prepared (read: spontaneously inspired) (alternatively read: slapdash—deleted as applicable based on the results after the fact, typically), but we’ve just started a couple of long-term projects that I’ll be following here and wanted to tell you about.
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:54 pm
A whole bunch of Evenings for Brainses ago our conversation turned to the decline of funding for orchestras and the loss of public interest and understanding in concert music generally. I remember I was advancing (in part on behalf of Satan) that the end orchestras would not be synonymous with the end of culture or even with the end of sophisticated music—that, though tragic especially for the last few, lonely members of a moribund species, species do go extinct; languages do go extinct; crafts do go extinct, and life continues impoverished in that sense but certainly able to develop new species, languages, crafts, etc. For music specifically, there are neat, crowd-sourced newcomer-species like Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, arriving with the growth of access to the Internet and to creation tools; the musical language in which one needed to be fluent to understand the ideas of complex concert music is changing, like any other living language (if also simplifying); multi-track digital audio workstation software, sophisticated digital signal processing, and especially physical modeling synthesis, challenge the definition of “musician” and the nature of the craft. Rah, rah, rah. At the time, even though I was exploring the above position in earnest, I was pontificating far outside of my aesthetic: I abhor extinction because I like information; not—and this is a much better reason—because diversity of species, of ideas, and of skills makes for a more resilient system in which to live.[1] It doesn’t really matter, though, since at the time, I didn’t go to concerts or speak Concert Music; my positions were tediously academic.
Joel returned to Toronto from his work in Mongolia this summer and Gid and I became housemates in October, so I’ve had a sudden influx of concert music in my life. Among other things, this has meant three (so far) trips to Roy Thompson Hall to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the last two months, after a drought that probably goes back to Grade Nine. I’ve noticed some things I want to tell you about.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
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.