I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, 2002
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 »
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 Saturday, August 22, 2009 at 2:17 am
Because Byron’s the cool sort of cat what wonders about things and then fiddles with them until he has answers, he’s been playing with Wordle’s graphic representation of word frequency to see if he can capture and distinguish the flavour of diverse news publications by feeding in a week’s worth of copy. It’s a neat smudging of quantification and art: the data could be presented with more rigour and reliability if he’d used a more basic frequency calculator and set rules about what text gets included (advertisements, classifieds, etc., which might be irregularly available or partially OCR’d across the publications he surveyed), but the benefit to this approach is that the presentation essentially distils the visceral impact without wholly discarding the medium—you’re still sort of looking at the emotional impact of the newspaper, just without all the syntax and filler and communication that honestly we probably can’t afford in this economic climate anyway. His write-up and gallery are available here. I really, really like the decision to match the colour schemes of the papers to the Wordle clouds generated.
Over brunch a few days ago, we talked about expanding the scale and rigour of this project so that the newspapers would be monitored over a period of perhaps a year. The benefit would be a normalisation of the subject matter reported—relatively isolated events that snag media attention briefly but totally, like Michael Jackson’s death, say, would tend toward more appropriate representation in the cloud. Based on Wordle’s current customisation options, here’re my suggestions for such an enterprise:
Collect a snapshot of each publication’s content from a uniform position (like the front page, or from each article featured on the front page) at strictly regular intervals, as close to simultaneously as is practical.
Aim to use a capture technique that extracts information from images as well as text. For example, generating a PDF of the webpages and then running the same OCR software over them would tend to liberate information from static image advertisements.
Begin the project only after deciding upon a universal “ignore list” of common words to filter out interface noise (if we’re not interested in that data). Looking at Byron’s gallery, some words I might filter would be “news,” “am/pm,” “video,” “home,” “articles,” etc. Possibly include the names of the newspapers themselves in the list.
Ensure that the final presentation of the Wordle clouds be generated according to the same rules and with the same settings (except colour scheme). This way tags at a particular size could be more reliably correlated with their frequency across publications.
If anyone’s interested in working with us on this (and assuming that Byron’s still gung-ho after the one-week trial run), it might also be fun to collect a bunch of hypotheses from you folks about what sort of trends you expect to see in terms of register, emphasis, reading-level, etc. This isn’t science, but it could still be a fun experiment.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
