Adam Savage (Host of MythBusters) Explains How Simple Ideas Become Great Scientific Discoveries

in Life, Science, TED Talks | November 20th, 2012

A good TED talk is like a com­mer­cial for a great idea. There might not be much meat to sink into, but like any good ad agency, TED has its own unique for­mu­la for mak­ing even the most eso­teric sub­ject grab­by.

Who, after all, would have thought that a video of a British guy lec­tur­ing about how schools kill cre­ativ­i­ty would get more than 8 mil­lion hits? Evi­dent­ly the folks at TED did, and were they ever right.

Good TED talks come in a few fla­vors. That British guy I men­tioned? Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about con­tem­po­rary edu­ca­tion is one of TED’s best pol­i­cy cri­tique talks (and its most pop­u­lar over­all). There are also the per­son­al sto­ries that com­pel and the demon­stra­tions of great new ideas.

This talk by actor and edu­ca­tor Adam Sav­age might fall into more than one of those buck­ets. In the video above, Savage—who designed mod­els for two Star Wars movies and hosts Myth­busters on the Dis­cov­ery Channel—talks plain and sim­ple about some of humanity’s most amaz­ing sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. He walks us through how Eratos­thenes cal­cu­lat­ed the Earth’s cir­cum­fer­ence more than 2000 years ago and how Hip­poly­te Fizeau mea­sured the speed of light in the mid-1880s.

These two men used noth­ing more than their own brains and a few rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple tools to make aston­ish­ing­ly accu­rate obser­va­tions. It’s stuff we already know, but in true TED style Sav­age makes the whole thing rev­e­la­to­ry and inspir­ing.

“What hap­pens when you think about the dis­cov­er­ies and what they were think­ing is you under­stand that they were not so dif­fer­ent from us,” Sav­age says. “The peo­ple who made these dis­cov­er­ies just thought a lit­tle bit hard­er about what they were look­ing at. And they were a lit­tle bit more curi­ous.”

Savage’s video is part of TEDEd’s Lessons Worth Shar­ing, which comes bun­dled with oth­er videos and exer­cis­es that teach­ers can use to dis­cuss the notion that sim­ple ideas can lead to sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery.

It’s also a very good  com­mer­cial for curios­i­ty. Sev­en and a half min­utes pro­mot­ing curios­i­ty. Take a look. Curios­i­ty, as Sav­age says, can change the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Adam Sav­age (Host of Myth­busters) Tells Sarah Lawrence Grads to Think Broad­ly … and Don’t Work for Fools

1370 TED Talks List­ed in a Neat Spread­sheet

TED-Ed Brings the Edgi­ness of TED to Learn­ing

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. See more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Brian Eno Once Composed Music for Windows 95; Now He Lets You Create Music with an iPad App

in iPad, iPhone, Music, Technology | November 20th, 2012

Now run­ning through my speak­ers, even as I write this: Bri­an Eno’s lat­est album, Lux. The disc offers four pieces of ambi­ent music, a style that, even if Eno did­n’t tech­ni­cal­ly invent it, he cer­tain­ly took it to a new lev­el of fas­ci­na­tion and pop­u­lar­i­ty. He com­posed these tracks — if “com­posed” is indeed the word — as gen­er­a­tive music, a process rather than a style, but one he named and has pro­mot­ed since the nineties. For a def­i­n­i­tion of gen­er­a­tive music, I turn to Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, a book that does not leave my night­stand. “One of my long-term inter­ests has been the inven­tion of ‘machines’ and ‘sys­tems,’ ” he writes, “to make music with mate­ri­als and process­es I spec­i­fied, but in com­bi­na­tions and inter­ac­tions I did not. My first released piece of this kind was Dis­creet Music (1975), in which two sim­ple melod­ic cycles of dif­fer­ent dura­tions sep­a­rate­ly repeat and are allowed to over­lay each oth­er arbi­trar­i­ly.”

In Lux, we have the lat­est iter­a­tion of that musi­cal mod­el. But even if this new record or its pre­de­ces­sors won’t make your playlist, there’s at least one Bri­an Eno com­po­si­tion with which you’ll already feel inti­mate­ly famil­iar. I refer, of course, to the Win­dows 95 start­up sound. Eno describes the musi­cal chal­lenge as fol­lows: “The thing from the agency said,‘We want a piece of music that is inspir­ing, uni­ver­sal, blah- blah, da-da-da, opti­mistic, futur­is­tic, sen­ti­men­tal, emo­tion­al,’ this whole list of adjec­tives, and then at the bot­tom it said ‘and it must be three and one quar­ter sec­onds long.’ ”

From that list of 150 vague words, Eno craft­ed 84 minia­ture pieces of music. You may have heard the one Microsoft ulti­mate­ly went with hun­dreds, or thou­sands, of times. Obvi­ous­ly they’ve sound­ed the same on every play, and this very fact dis­pleas­es their cre­ator, espe­cial­ly when he cre­ates with gen­er­a­tive sys­tems in the first place. “What I always want­ed to do was sell the sys­tem itself, so that a lis­ten­er would know that the music was always unique,” Eno con­tin­ues in A Year. “With com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy I began to think there might be a way of doing it.” Com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, which has come a long way since the days of Win­dows 95, has brought us to the release of Scape, the first gen­er­a­tive music iPad app ($5.99) from Eno and Peter Chil­vers. “The idea is that you assem­ble pieces of music out of son­ic build­ing blocks — we call them ‘ele­ments’ — which then respond intel­li­gent­ly to each oth­er,” Eno says in the intro­duc­to­ry video just above. Scape fol­lows Bloom and Trope, the duo’s pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tive music apps for the iPhone. Does it strike you as strange that the man behind such an icon­ic Microsoft theme now releas­es apps only for Apple devices? It’s no big sur­prise: Eno even com­posed the Win­dows 95 sound on a Mac.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Resurrecting the Sounds of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s New Biopic

in Film, History | November 20th, 2012

If you’re head­ing to see Steven Spiel­berg’s new biopic of Abra­ham Lin­coln, you can go there know­ing one thing (oth­er than Daniel Day-Lewis has deliv­ered anoth­er Acad­e­my Award-win­ing per­for­mance) — and that’s that the direc­tor, cast and crew paid close atten­tion to the his­tor­i­cal details. In an inter­view yes­ter­day, Sal­ly Field (who plays Lin­col­n’s wife Mary Todd) described how she immersed her­self in the lan­guage of the era, pored over let­ters exchanged between Lin­coln and his wife, gained 25 pounds to resem­ble Mary’s doc­u­ment­ed mea­sure­ments. And then there’s this curi­ous detail. Dur­ing the film­ing of Lin­coln (watch the trail­er below), Daniel Day-Lewis and Sal­ly Field nev­er spoke to one anoth­er out of char­ac­ter. They knew each oth­er sim­ply as “Mary Lin­coln” and “Mr. Lin­coln” through­out.

In the video above, we get to lis­ten to sound design­er Ben Burtt talk about his own quest for his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­i­ty — that is, how he tried to recap­ture the sounds that Lin­coln heard dur­ing his life­time. Of course, we don’t have audio record­ings from the 1860s. But Burtt found cre­ative ways to res­ur­rect sounds from the peri­od, like record­ing the tick-tocks of Lin­col­n’s per­son­al watch, or cap­tur­ing the sounds made by mahogany doors that still stand in the White House. We’ll let Burtt explain the rest above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Sur­viv­ing Wit­ness of the Lin­coln Assas­si­na­tion (1956)

Louis CK Plays Abra­ham Lin­coln, America’s 16th Pres­i­dent and (Yes) Stand-Up Come­di­an Too

Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Direct­ed as a Teenag­er

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Noam Chomsky Explains Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

in MIT, Philosophy, Psychology, Science | November 20th, 2012

While pop­u­lar­ly known for his pierc­ing and relent­less cri­tiques of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy and eco­nom­ic neolib­er­al­ism, Noam Chom­sky made his career as a researcher and pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics and cog­ni­tive sci­ence. In his 50 years at MIT he earned the appel­la­tion “the father of mod­ern lin­guis­tics” and—after over­turn­ing B.F. Skinner’s behav­ior­ist paradigm—founder of the “cog­ni­tive rev­o­lu­tion.” But these are labels the self-effac­ing Chom­sky rejects, in his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly under­stat­ed way, as he rejects all tri­umphal­ist nar­ra­tives that seem to promise more than they deliv­er.

Such is the case with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. The term, coined in 1956 by com­put­er sci­en­tist John McCarthy, once described the opti­mism with which the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty pur­sued the secrets of human cog­ni­tion in order to map those fea­tures onto machines. Opti­mism has turned to puz­zle­ment, ambiva­lence, or in Chomsky’s case out­right skep­ti­cism about the mod­els and method­olo­gies embraced by the field of AI.

Nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly san­guine about the prospects of unlock­ing the “black box” of human cog­ni­tion through so-called “asso­ci­a­tion­ist” the­o­ries, Chom­sky has recent­ly become even more crit­i­cal of the sta­tis­ti­cal mod­els that have come to dom­i­nate so many of the sci­ences, though he is not with­out his crit­ics. At an MIT sym­po­sium in May of last year, Chom­sky expressed his doubts of a method­ol­o­gy Nobel-win­ning biol­o­gist Syd­ney Bren­ner has called “low input, high through­put, no out­put sci­ence.”

Recent­ly Yarden Katz, an MIT grad­u­ate stu­dent in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences, sat down with Chom­sky to dis­cuss the prob­lems with AI as Chom­sky sees them. Katz’s com­plete inter­view appeared this month in The Atlantic. He also video­taped the inter­view and post­ed clips to his Youtube chan­nel. In the clip above, Katz asks Chom­sky about “for­got­ten method­olo­gies in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Chom­sky dis­cuss­es the shift toward prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion in engi­neer­ing and com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy, which “direct­ed peo­ple away from the orig­i­nal ques­tions.” He also express­es the opin­ion that the orig­i­nal work was “way too opti­mistic” and assumed too much from the lit­tle data avail­able, and he describes how “throw­ing a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine” at the prob­lem leads to a “self-rein­forc­ing” def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess that is at odds with sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery.

In the clip below, Chom­sky dis­cuss­es a new field in sys­tems biol­o­gy called “Con­nec­tomics,” an attempt to map the wiring of all the neu­rons in the brain—an endeav­or prick­ly biol­o­gist Syd­ney Bren­ner calls “a form of insan­i­ty.” Katz asks if the “wiring dia­gram” of the brain would pro­vide “the right lev­el of abstrac­tion” for under­stand­ing its work­ings.

The inter­view is worth read­ing, or watch­ing, in full, espe­cial­ly for stu­dents of neu­ro­science or psy­chol­o­gy. Chom­sky dis­cuss­es the work of his one­time col­league David Marr, whose posthu­mous­ly pub­lished book Vision has had an enor­mous influ­ence on the field of cog­ni­tive sci­ence. Chom­sky also prais­es the work of Randy Gal­lis­tel, who argues that devel­op­ments in cog­ni­tive and infor­ma­tion sci­ence will trans­form the field of neu­ro­science and over­turn the par­a­digms embraced by ear­ly researchers in AI. While this is an excit­ing time to be a cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist, it seems, per­haps, a dif­fi­cult time to be a pro­po­nent of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, giv­en the com­plex­i­ties and chal­lenges the field has yet to meet suc­cess­ful­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Rolling Stones at 50: Mick, Keith, Charlie & Ronnie Revisit Their Favorite Songs

in Music, Radio | November 19th, 2012


The Rolling Stones are cel­e­brat­ing their 50th anniver­sary this year, and like every­thing with the Stones, they’re doing it big. The band has sched­uled a series of five spe­cial con­certs on both sides of the Atlantic, begin­ning next Sun­day in Lon­don and con­tin­u­ing in Newark, New Jer­sey, and Brook­lyn, New York, in Decem­ber.

And like every­thing with the Stones, it’s expen­sive. Tick­ets for the Lon­don shows, for exam­ple, range in price from about $150 to $1,500, which has prompt­ed more than a few com­plaints. The band has defend­ed the prices, say­ing that they’re doing a large-scale show with only five audi­ences to cov­er the pro­duc­tion costs. “We’ve already spent a mil­lion on rehears­ing in Paris,” gui­tarist Ron­nie Wood told The Tele­graph recent­ly. “And the stage is going to be anoth­er few mil­lion. And the lights. We feel no bad thing about tick­et prices. We’ve got to make some­thing.”

The rock ’n’ roll busi­ness­men also expect to make some­thing from a pay-per-view broad­cast of the sold-out Decem­ber 15 show in Newark, along with sales of a new illus­trat­ed auto­bi­og­ra­phy called The Rolling Stones: 50 and a ret­ro­spec­tive album called GRRR!, which comes in sev­er­al edi­tions rang­ing from the three-disc basic CD ver­sion to a five-disc vinyl boxed set. While pro­mot­ing the album, all four mem­bers of the Stones agreed to be inter­viewed by Melis­sa Block of the NPR pro­gram All Things Con­sid­ered. Block asked each of the Stones to pick one song from their exten­sive cat­a­log to dis­cuss. It’s an inter­est­ing series of con­ver­sa­tions, and you can hear each one by fol­low­ing these links:

Along with the expect­ed clas­sics, GRRR! includes two new songs, includ­ing the first sin­gle released by the Stones in six years, “Doom and Gloom.” (See the video below.) It’s a blus­tery tune, lack­ing the rhyth­mic sophis­ti­ca­tion and inven­tive­ness of the band’s ear­li­er work, but it amply demon­strates that even after 50 years, the Stones still know how to rock.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Rolling Stones Jam With Their Idol, Mud­dy Waters, 1981

The Rolling Stones Sing Jin­gle for Rice Krispies Com­mer­cial, 1964

The Rolling Stones Sing the Bea­t­les’ ‘Eight Days a Week’ in a Hotel Room, 1965

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David Sedaris Reads You a Story By Miranda July

in Literature, Podcasts, Radio | November 19th, 2012

Thanks to his fre­quent appear­ances on radio’s This Amer­i­can Life, David Sedaris pos­sess­es one of the most rec­og­niz­able author voic­es in the world. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly light and insin­u­at­ing, it has come to seem as much a part of his oeu­vre as the San­ta­land Diaries and his anec­dotes about his par­ents, sib­lings and boyfriend. His arch spin on var­i­ous region­al and gen­er­a­tional phras­es is noth­ing if not instant­ly rec­og­niz­able.

What a plea­sure, then, to hear the sin­cer­i­ty with which he deploys this instru­ment in ser­vice of a fel­low author’s work. Invit­ed to choose a sto­ry to read aloud for the New York­er’s fic­tion pod­cast, Sedaris went with “Roy Spivey” by Miran­da July, anoth­er writer who could nev­er be accused of hid­ing behind her work. One sus­pects there are ele­ments of auto­bi­og­ra­phy with­in this tale, though don’t dri­ve your­self nuts try­ing to fig­ure out the iden­ti­ty of the male movie star seat­ed next to the main char­ac­ter. Just enjoy the non-wink­ing gen­eros­i­ty with which Sedaris embod­ies July’s female nar­ra­tor, even when called upon to get her through a bath­room scene that — in spir­it, any­way — recalls one of his most cel­e­brat­ed, non­fic­tion­al fol­lies.

(Speak­ing of which, stay tuned for the post-sto­ry inter­view for the sort of admis­sion Sedaris fans have come to crave.)

For more lit­er­ary read­ings, see our pre­vi­ous post: The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day’s region­al accent does noth­ing for her book sales.

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Salvador Dalí Reveals the Secrets of His Trademark Moustache (1954)

in Art, Random | November 19th, 2012

In a 2010 poll, Sal­vador Dalí’s facial hair was vot­ed the most famous mous­tache of all time. The flam­boy­ant mous­tache was part of his schtick, there’s no deny­ing that. But some have assigned a deep­er mean­ing to it. The Wike­pe­dia entry for Dalí attrib­uted the facial hair to 17th-cen­tu­ry Span­ish mas­ter painter Diego Velázquez (see image). And yet per­haps the influ­ence was more lit­er­ary than painter­ly. Appear­ing on the game show The Name’s the Same in Jan­u­ary, 1954, Dalí was asked (at the 4:00 mark) whether the stache was a joke. To which the Span­ish painter respond­ed, “It’s the most seri­ous part of my per­son­al­i­ty. It’s a very sim­ple Hun­gar­i­an mous­tache. Mr. Mar­cel Proust used the same kind of pomade for this mous­tache.” And there you have it, the artis­tic influ­ence of the world’s most famous facial hair.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s 100 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s The Divine Com­e­dy

Sal­vador Dali Gets Sur­re­al with Mike Wal­lace (1958)

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

A Tour Inside Sal­vador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Span­ish Home

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The Best Music to Write By, Part II: Your Favorites Brought Together in a Special Playlist

in Literature, Music | November 19th, 2012

Last Fri­day, we raised the top­ic of writ­ing to music, and we asked all of you out there what music you write to, if you write to music at all. The num­ber and vari­ety of your sug­ges­tions was a lit­tle over­whelm­ing, and very wel­come, and pro­vid­ed a wealth of rec­om­men­da­tions to put togeth­er into a playlist. There was quite a lot of agree­ment among you and a near-con­sen­sus on instru­men­tal music over vocal. But it also came as no sur­prise that Open Cul­ture read­ers’ tastes span a range of gen­res, cul­tures, and peri­ods and that every­one who wrote in seemed to raise the bar a lit­tle high­er for drop-dead gor­geous, med­i­ta­tive com­po­si­tions.

Out of all of your rec­om­men­da­tions, I have made a selec­tion of six­teen artists that I believe is rep­re­sen­ta­tive. (Apolo­gies if your sug­ges­tions didn’t make the cut—there’s bound to be some bias here). What­ev­er your pos­ture and pref­er­ence for vol­ume lev­els, light­ing arrange­ments, or time of day or night, you might try on each of these while you tap away at your lat­est piece of work. Who knows? You could strike a new rhythm, hit an unfa­mil­iar groove and shake out of a too-famil­iar rut, or shift the tem­po just so, change per­spec­tive, tem­per an unruly mood….

Or maybe just find some cool new music to dig while you cook din­ner.

Last week’s post began with Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way, which I believe inspired some jazz lovers to com­ment. Komiska sug­gest­ed the top-notch Mod­ern Jazz Quartet’s ren­di­tion of “Lone­ly Woman” (above).

Bill Evans’ name also came up quite a bit in your sug­ges­tions. Below is his “You Must Believe in Spring.”

Min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er Steve Reich, and oth­er con­tem­po­raries of his like Philip Glass, got many a men­tion. Below is a live per­for­mance of the first two sec­tions of Reich’s Music for 18 Musi­cians.

Ambi­ent syn­the­siz­er music by the likes of the Scot­tish duo Boards of Cana­da, Tan­ger­ine Dream, for­mer Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, and Bri­an Eno came up quite a bit as well. Com­menter Emma Gray Munthe men­tioned the work of less famous but very influ­en­tial elec­tron­ic com­pos­er Jean Michel Jarre. Lis­ten to his ground­break­ing album Equinoxe below:

A few of you point­ed out that any kind of music serves to dis­tract from your process. Cheeky Michael West said as much and more how­ev­er with his lacon­ic ref­er­ence to John Cage’s 4’33″, the ulti­mate min­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tion. Below, lis­ten to (or observe, rather) an orches­tral inter­pre­ta­tion of Cage’s con­cept:

(more…)

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