I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read. — Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 1:55 am
I’ve gotten linked to John Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos a couple of times now, so this probably won’t be news for anyone. I’d kind of like to document it though for archival purposes so that, if nothing else, I can know when I discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer cut from the same cloth as Carl Sagan but with perhaps a more straight-forward rhetorical style and less in the way of overt poetics and classical invocation. More on him very soon, but first, of course, the videos.
At the time of this writing there are two videos on the Symphony of Science website, though there are apparently plans to make more.
Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:51 am
Stupidly, at some point, I stopped being a good sponge and started caring about what others saw me sucking up. If everyone in the room seemed to have already sucked it up long ago, for example, the compulsion has grown for me to try to make a note of the thing, and then to pretend as if I, too, was a dead, turgid invertebrate successfully repurposed for carrying this particular popular effluvium. (But the metaphor grows strained… mangled… finished.)
I really regret that I have sometimes—unthinkingly!—nodded my head in mature acknowledgement of my fluency with a name or other reference, uttered by a respected speaker, when that name or reference was at best only semi-familiar-sounding to me. This is for two reasons: first, it adulterates my supremely laudable curiosity, wonder, and avid lust to understand everything about everything everywhere with petty social duplicity; second and more importantly, I am often ashamed into passivity rather than correction, and don’t bother to look up the thing afterwards and educate myself.
Sometimes I wise up and actually hunt down that thing I’ve been nodding my empty head to. Richard Feynman’s come up in XKCD a couple of times, and elsewhere, and I finally looked him up a few months ago. He was (for those of you who don’t know and haven’t looked him up yet but are willing to privately acknowledge your potentially uncommon ignorance by reading onwards) a legendary and beloved teacher of physics, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, a prolific writer of popular and theoretical scientific works, central to explaining NASA’s Challenger disaster, an amateur painter and bongo-player, and so on. I listened with unexpected relish to his autobiographies as audiobooks, and have tried to follow some of his celebrated Lectures on Physics with mixed success. All in all, it was one of my more rewarding admissions and corrections of pretention.
He did an interview/talk for the BBC program, Horizon, in 1991 (available on YouTube and embedded below) wherein he tells abridged versions of a number of the stories in his autobiographies. If you have ten minutes, please consider giving the first video segment a shot—I’m happy I’m not missing this anymore. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
