God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me. — Thomas Henry Huxley, Nature, Vol. 149
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, 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 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 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. 
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.