One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t. — George Bernard Shaw, The Apple Cart, Act I
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 Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:13 am
Yay, more astronomy, sort of. I think It’s safe to assume that most people who’d read this blorg have heard of (and probably by extension, seen) the Powers of Ten video produced by IBM in the bygone era of the ancient 1970s, but if not, here. (also, a heritage-style website may be found here.)
I love the tour through the sciences, moving from cosmology at the outer extent of the journey, through astronomy, then sociology (what the hell, right?—urban sprawl and stuff), biology, chemistry, and then physics. Also, the narrator has the sort of voice that’s only broadcast without irony in productions that are at least two decades old, or The Sciences. Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks or Jay Ingram of Daily Planet are local exemplars.
Recently(ish) on Astronomy Picture of the Day, they featured a video that struck me as a contemporary successor to Powers of Ten, and which I present below. If you have the bandwidth, I strongly suggest viewing this at 720. (Also, if you’d like to read the APOD commentary, it’s here.)
Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Several things of interest to folks who are generally interesting:
Fellow Torontonians who have an interest in looking upwards with the aid of powerful, optical apparatus might be interested in the public viewing opportunities being made available by the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill. (Also, I’d love an excuse to make an evening of it, so you should let me know.) It would be interesting! The DDO houses Canada’s largest telescope (a not-paltry-at-all-really-thank-you-very-much 1.88 metres of aperture feeding a reflector assembly and eventually the hungry, hungry brain connected to the retina in one of your lucky eyes), and until mid-October, will be hosting Saturday (math- and jargon-decaffeinated) lectures followed by public viewings. The price is $10 for adults, $5 for impressionable youth, and adult fare can include one free ticket for such a youth, so, really, it’s peanuts for the cosmos. The talk schedule and ticket information are available here. Events: through to October 17.
Next, for those of you who want to attend a TED conference in person but have lost your last $6000 in the seat-cushions of your private jet and can’t be bothered to fish them out, consider taking a look at TEDx, a brand-compatible way to have the full, engaged TED experience, but without the money maybe, even. In all seriousness, the program is essentially a toolkit that TED puts out for groups (like schools, libraries, nerds like me, etc.) to present the talks recorded at the official venues and facilitate the cerebral orgy that needs must follow. I hosted something like this at home in January 2008 (calling it TED-Local, clever me), and while going through official channels was probably unnecessary for something of that size and ambition, more intense folks than I have taken it to the next level, nay, to the max. TEDxTO, like TED, is full, but, also like TED, will provide a webcast so that we can watch its cognoscenti watch TED’s cognoscenti, and then talk about it (the TEDxTO cognoscenti, that is—if we wish to form a sub-sub cognoscenti, that’s our prerogative, and we can thereafter discuss the discussions about the presenters, and even present those discussions ourselves in the form of a webcast, if we want; it’s fractal). Admittedly, there are also 13 fresh speakers hosted just by TEDxTO, so the process isn’t wholly without added value. I will be going to this meet-up, and folks should join me. (Thanks, Stian, as ever, for hooking me up.) Event: September 10, hazily from 12:00 through 9:00.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm
One of my plans for this space is to regularly highlight TED Talks, which Geoff initially discovered by seeing Sir Ken Robinson’s Talk during a professional development day while on practicum in 2006.I gushed all over the place about it then, but for folks who don’t know about them, the Talks are a series of lectures broadcast from the annual conference of Technology, Entertainment and Design.They tend to be from ten to twenty minutes in length and feature some of the most prolific thinkers and workers in physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, philosophy, health, music, architecture, fine arts, journalism, politics, economics, and occasionally videogames.However, in addition to a showcase of exciting, vanguardey thought, one of the main purposes of the conference is to get all of these people in the same room listening to each other: synthesis of freshly developed ideas across arbitrarily (but often trenchantly) separate fields, for me, is the most valuable and promising aspect of the whole enterprise.They’re also groovy enough to make the lectures publically available on their website and as a video podcast (with a bit of advertisements thrown in tastefully after the talks), which is nice because full attendance costs $6,000 and you need to justify why you’re important enough to take up a seat.
From most people’s perspective, this is very Web 1.0: resources are produced and transmitted from the top down to an audience with little opportunity for viewers of the free talks to contribute meaningfully despite the expansion of commenting functionality.Nonetheless, even if one can’t easily grapple with the authors of the talks in a social constructivist sort of way, one can enjoy them as a gallery of novel thoughts, technologies, and expert articulations of ideas you might have already been incubating.For the most part, the production quality and presentation skills of the lecturers is superb; compare the signal-to-noise ratio for these talks with most of the new documentaries you see on the Discovery Channel and see if you don’t get excited too.
There are a lot of talks I’m itching to bring to your attention but I’ll start with a series of three by Robert Full, a “biologist” at UC:Berkley.“Biologist” is in quotation marks here because the study of life processes seems inadequate to describe the sort of work Full’s doing.Check out the first video:
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.