On Consumption

Posted by Danny on Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 7:27 pm

1. Eating Video

I’ve been spoiled by several years of always-on Internet connectivity, during which I’ve (mostly) unintentionally honed a skill set for locating and mining veins of delicious information, as I suspect is true of most of you.  Through this process, I’ve become accustomed to a particular, arbitrary signature for the sort of content I consume: if it exists, it is instantly to be had (or at least, the automated process for downloading it can be started by me whenever I wish, and I’m limited only by practical concerns of bandwidth and production time, rather than arbitrary release schedules or regional encoding); it is narrowly tuned to my cognitive capacity; it is “gainful”—meaning it challenges or augments my understanding of a topic I care about; I can have it for free (plus the cost of the connection and my computer).  My ability to readily find content that satisfies these criteria makes me a compulsive sharer (I’m grateful for the networks of people like me who took the time to share links, recommendations, and data I find tasty; how could I not pay it forward?), makes me jealous of my time and picky about the content I spend it on, and therefore makes me completely uninterested in television.

This preamble is here hopefully to extricate myself from the ethos of intellectual snobbery that characterizes people who say things like, “oh, we don’t watch television,” with the implication that such content is qualitatively inferior to that from other media.  There is superb content built for and financed by television (and directly by the people who watch television, occasionally), which I consume regularly and with gusto.  The impatience that drives me away has to do with the pace of delivery and the regimented imposition of choice.  In keeping with gustatory imagery (and charitably forgetting that I talked about mining delicious veins earlier), spending my time on the Internet, at its most satisfying and efficient, combines the thrills of exploration and mastery that (I imagine) describe the experience of hunting food.  I was about to liken watching television to grazing, but even this overstates the viewer’s opportunity to forage independently: watching television is instead like being seated at a conveyor belt of food, and given the option (for a premium) of having other conveyor belts that you can move your chair to.  (This can be extended somewhat to account for PVR services, but my point is already tedious.)  I am spoiled by being able to hunt for exactly the sort of intellectual nourishment I desire, at a pace that befits my hunger and my ability to chew.  Anything that threatens this, like the erosion of net neutrality or SOPA/PIPA’s fumbling, clumsy forays onto my hunting grounds that would damage the ecosystem and biodiversity (the metaphor is slipping; shit!  Hold on—), feels like the threat of starvation, or at best, the imposition of domestication.

2. Quick, quick!  Hoppityhoppityhoppitygo!

Early in our friendship, I tried to share my beloved audiobook, comedy, and lecture collection with Stian, and learned (very gently) that he tended not to be interested in this sort of stuff because it moved too slowly (I think he used a bandwidth metaphor; to remain consistent, I would say he’s staggeringly more efficient than me at mastication).  It made me feel a bit sad and dull at the time, but I recognize I’ve probably done the same thing to people who try to share with me their love of CBC radio, and I fear inflicting the same sense of inferiority when I express my opinions about David Attenborough’s more recent series.  With content like this, the problem isn’t that the matter isn’t delicious or nourishing enough, but that it comes to me at such a slow pace that I become irritated and lose my appetite.  (The counter-image of gorging vs. careful sampling now comes to mind, and wasn’t what I initially planned to talk about, but let’s go with it.)

I first noticed I liked quick material when I discovered Zero Punctuation.  It broke the rules of slow, careful delivery that had been encouraged at all levels of my formal education and was (in my mind, at least, but not inconsistent with Crowshaw’s persona) contemptuous of the lowest common denominator in terms of uptake.  It offered me the opportunity to distinguish myself from those hypothetical, slow-thinking trogs by working up to and achieving total comprehension on the first go of any particular video—an experience that was gratifying, if potentially delusional.

This unspoken conflation of intelligence and pace of delivery was borne out even better in more explicitly intellectual content: I have a brain crush on Vi Hart, whose rapid development of visuals compliments beautifully the flow of her ideas and explanations.  (I’ve started two or three long posts with the intent of featuring her, but none have made it to the website yet, so I’ll content myself with this call-out for now.  There’s nothing about her I don’t like.)  (For a similar experience of flow if not speed, with more polish (for better or worse), see also videos in the RSAnimate series, by folks at the RSA.)

Along similar lines are the VlogBrothers, who recently started doing a pair of lecture series under the title Crash Courses.[1]  Here’re the first of each:

World History, by John Green

Biology, by Hank Green

Their videos (as well as much of their non-Crash-Course content) feature a technique where pauses—as between paragraphs and sentences, but also where a reflective ellipsis might normally live—are sharply and demonstrably omitted.  This creates a sort of hyper-flow, since the information expressed by those pauses remains (you’re just forced to read those rapid shifts in posture or focus the way you would caesura), but the whole is greatly compressed.  Again, this can feel like a challenge to my cognitive capacity, the meeting of which is invigorating; I can even applaud myself that I’m being highly efficient with my time (notwithstanding that I’m invariably procrastinating while I watch these videos).  And, even failing to keep up with the delivery, the technological affordance of a manipulable timeline means I can review a section, or the whole, at no cost, until I do get it.  Both Hank Green in his lecture (above) and Salman Khan in his TED Talk about Khan Academy (below) rightly laud this feature—Green goes so far as to justify his pace by using it.  Cool: a pedagogically defensible manoeuvre around teaching to the lowest common denominator I’m happy to get behind.

3. Gluttony

So, here come my itchy niggles.  First, Green starts out by describing the biology course to follow as “the most revolutionary course in biology of all time.”  I read that grandiloquence as being there solely for the sake of comedy, but even if he doesn’t buy into it completely or at all, this is the sort of language I’m used to hearing around MIT’s OpenCourseWare and similar free, video-based lectures which, while exciting, are still at their cores old-fashioned transmission-based content.

Great: I love lectures and will fight hard to defend their pedagogical validity, but it’s silly (and misleading) to claim they’re revolutionary.  More troubling is that the user-controlled timeline, which is so handy for tailoring the material to one’s pace, depends on one’s isolation while viewing (and presumably, in this context, learning).  Even if my peers are tremendously forgiving, encouraging, patient, or apathetic, I’ll hesitate before pausing and rewinding a video that other people are also watching—I’m inconveniencing my peers and I’m declaring a failure to keep up with material that no one else is having any trouble with, as far as I know.  This is not an educational medium optimized for concurrent group discussion.[2]

More insidiously, learning from fast-paced material is open to all kinds of sabotage and abuse.  For instance, my intellectual insecurity could rationalize fatalism and giving in to frustration—“I must not be smart enough to keep up with this, so I’ll go where I’m more comfortable”—or be used to justify laziness—“I guess I sort of understood; if I rewind now, it means admitting that I didn’t, and anyway, the lecturer has already moved on…”  The most horrible abuse would be someone else leveraging that insecurity against me to mask shortcomings in the content itself.  But, even in the absence of a cynical rhetorician, it’s still a dangerous game to play, pitting my cognitive identity against taking extra time to think critically through the material.[3]

Where does this leave me?  Definitely less gushy about the resources I had in mind to share when I started writing, but less cynical than I probably sound.  I think my efforts to “get up to speed” with this method of transmission have been mostly honest, and that I can think clearly, faster, as a result.  I love the concordance of quick delivery with comedy and I love the concordance of comedy with teaching.

You probably don’t need to be reminded to learn thoughtfully if you’ve come this far through my bull-toots, anyway, so most importantly, enjoy.

Free Brainy Lectures for Everyone!

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.

The Reith Lectures are named for John Reith, the inaugural controller-general of the BBC, and exemplify the corporation’s now (tragically) quaint and paternal-sounding charter to “inform, educate, and entertain.”  They resemble our Massey Lectures (or rather, the other way around), and might be positioned as TED Talks for folks with long attention spans.

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.

It was enough of a jolt of good news to get me blogging again, therefore, when I learned from the ever-fecund Open Culture website that the BBC had made the entire series available for free as an international podcast!

Please, please try 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.

Better than Sunshine Units

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

1. 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
2. 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.

P.S.: Carlin (or Yermus) fans: remember Sunshine Units?

Alan Davies Measures String! Amazing!

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.

Exploring Our World meets Mark Thomas

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.

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