Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Scientists How to Communicate Their Ideas

in Creativity, Education, Life, Physics, Science | March 11th, 2015

Woe to the famous actor who dares to write a novel or start a band or design a line of clothing. The public can be awfully snobby about such extracurricular pursuits. We reward our children for cultivating a wide range of interests, but heaven forfend a celebrity who wanders away from the accepted script.

Hacks! Poseurs! Wannabes!

There are exceptions, of course. I don’t see too many people taking potshots at Leonard Nimoy’s passion for photography, Ed Begley Jr.’s commitment to the environment, or the Wonder Years’ Danica McKellar’s devotion to math.

(Personally, I will brook no unkind words toward animal loving TV dad Dick Van Patten, not after he fathered the only cat food the small mammal with whom I live a lie will deign to eat.)

If there’s a formula to be gleaned from these examples, it’s likely a synthesis of iconic role, number of years spent on the pastime of choice, and a rabid curiosity of the sort that drives ordinary mortals to become educators. Once a public figure is in possession of that formula, the public he or she serves will grant a pass to pursue a side interest.

I’m not sure that science could be called a side interest of Alan Alda’s.

Not when he ranks hosting Scientific American Frontiers as the pinnacle of his TV career.

He played physicist Richard Feynman onstage, and has written plays about Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. He’s one of the annual World Science Festival’s MVPs. At this rate, his love of science seems destined to carry him from cradle to grave.

By now, he’s probably met more scientists than M*A*S*H fans—enough to suggest a troubling gap between the scientific message and the manner in which it’s delivered. To put it another way, if you think science is boring, perhaps the trouble is with the scientist.

The solution? Improv training.

Uh oh. Is there a danger this knife could cut both ways? Will some eminent biologist or astronomer be pilloried for playing freeze tag a bit too zestfully or joining a level 1 team at the Annoyance or UCB East? Like, how dare Stephen Hawking think he can make a machine?

It’s worth the risk (technically, Alda espouses Viola Spolin’s exploratory improvisation form over the kind with a strictly comedic goal, but c’mon. I know a gateway drug when I see one…)

His belief is that scientists who study improv are better equipped to communicate the complicated nature of their work to public officials, the media, and former theater majors such as myself. The level of engagement, flexibility, and awareness that improvisation requires of its practitioners are also the stuff of good TED talks.

Watch the “before and after” presentations of participants in his improv workshop at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, above. His thesis holds water, it would seem. Improv hones the senses and helps one to clarify what is essential in any scene. Even the solo scene wherein one explains wave particle duality or specialized leaf forms to one’s fellow adults.

I’ll bet those same improv-based skills could help a TV star to persuade his students that he’s just as approachable and supportive as any old teacher. (Maybe even more so, to judge by his handling of an invisible jar of jellyfish that slips through one scientist’s fingers.)

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

Charles & Ray Eames’ A Communications Primer Explains the Key to Clear Communication in the Modern Age (1953)

Ayun Halliday is an author and illustrator who teaches improv to teenage girls. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Guide to Logical Fallacies: The “Ad Hominem,” “Strawman” & Other Fallacies Explained in 2‑Minute Videos

in Philosophy | March 11th, 2015

Here at Open Culture, we like to think we keep discussions reasonable. Not every site can say that; if you’ve ever dared to scroll down into the comments on Youtube (to pick an example purely at random) you know what I mean. But on that very same repository of streaming videos and shouting matches, you can also find a helpful aid to your debates both online and off: PBS Idea Channel’s “Guide to Common Fallacies.”

When humans talk, sometimes we adhere to the rules of logic, and sometimes we break from them. In everyday life it doesn’t matter that much either way, but, in the heat of an argument, and especially amid the potential conflagration of an internet argument, consistency is all. Under such conditions, someone who commits even a common logical fallacy may well do so without realizing it, and if you feel like educating them, you can reply with a link to whichever of these videos covers the fallacy they used:

Host Mike Rugnetta (whom you might remember from the previous Idea Channel video we featured, “Math Might Not Actually Exist”) breaks down the fallacy in question, accompanying his explanation with a visual stream of illustrations, clips from movies, TV, and video games — and of course those mainstays of comment threads, animated GIFs. And he doesn’t just explain, he demonstrates, staging a short debate with a straw-filled, shoddily arguing version of himself each and every time.

Logic has always struck me as an inherently fascinating subject, and these videos certainly provide quick and funny hits of it. I do have my doubts as to whether they’ll actually help anyone win an argument. So point out others’ logical fallacies if you must, but bear in mind that you might be the only one who learns anything as a result.

Does Math Objectively Exist, or Is It a Human Creation? A New PBS Video Explores a Timeless Question

Free Online Philosophy Courses

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Download The Newly-Discovered Sherlock Holmes Story as a Free Audio Book

in Audio Books | March 10th, 2015

Quick fyi: A couple weeks ago, the literary world gasped when a lost Sherlock Holmes story was apparently discovered in an attic in Scotland. Read it online here. It hasn’t been completely confirmed that the story came from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle. Some experts still have their doubts. But even so, the fine folks at Audible have produced an audio recording of the story, narrated by the award-winning narrator/actor Simon Vance. You can download it for free at Audible (on the condition that you create a username and password).

It’s also worth noting that if you start a 30-day free trial with Audible, you can download two free audio books, including many contemporary bestsellers. At the end of the 30 days, you can join Audible’s subscription service, or you can cancel. Either way, you can keep the two free audio books. Get more details here.

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Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

in Books, Literature | March 10th, 2015

“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” by Grete Stern (1904–1999). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expanding stories reshaped modern fiction. He was one of the first authors to mix high culture with low, merging such popular genres as science fiction and the detective story with heady philosophical discourses on authorship, reality and existence. His story “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” which describes a novel that is also a labyrinth, presaged the hypertextuality of the internet age. His tone of ironic detachment influenced generations of Latin American authors. The BBC argued that Borges was the most important writer of the 20th century.

Of course, Borges wasn’t just an author. When not writing fiction, Borges worked as a literary critic, occasional film critic, a librarian, and, for a spell, as the director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. His tastes were famously eclectic. He did not think of much of canonical writers like Goethe, Jane Austen, James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He favored the 19th storytellers like Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling.

In 1985, Argentine publisher Hyspamerica asked Borges to create A Personal Library — which involved curating 100 great works of literature and writing introductions for each volume. Though he only got through 74 books before he died of liver cancer in 1988, Borges’s selections are fascinating and deeply idiosyncratic. He listed adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells alongside exotic holy books, 8th century Japanese poetry and the musing of Kierkegaard. You can see the full list below. A number of the selected works can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo
36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

As you will observe, Borges’ list is very short on books by women writers. As a counter-offering, you might want to explore this list: 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives.

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Stories (Read 7 Free Online)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 29 ) |

The Visual Art of William S. Burroughs: Book Covers, Portraits, Collage, Shotgun Art & More

in Art, Literature | March 10th, 2015

As an artist, William S. Burroughs was undoubtedly his own man, beholden to no particular aesthetic, movement, or school, always independent even as a frequent collaborator with many other notable writers and artists. It didn’t hurt that he came from money—Burroughs’ grandfather invented the adding machine, and the writer’s inheritance, writes the Daily Beast, “left the young scion free to pursue education and drugs at his leisure.” Yet, although he pursued the latter without reservation, he also worked harder than most of his contemporaries, constantly innovating and pursuing new paths. Burroughs’ “entire creative project,” writes blogger Dan Shelalevy, “encompassed art, graphics, calligraphy, type, photography, film, assemblage, poetry, spoken word, and music…. Culture itself was his medium.”

He may be associated primarily with the Beats, but Burroughs himself rejected the label, saying, “We’re not doing at all the same thing, either in writing or in outlook.” As a visual artist, London’s October Gallery informs us, he “collaborated with Keith Haring, George Condo, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.” As in his writing, Burroughs experimented throughout his art career with collage, incorporating photographs and pop culture ephemera like comic strips and advertising into paintings richly textured—as in the thick impasto surrounding the portrait of Samuel Beckett above—and often violent, as below.

The notorious gun enthusiast often blasted holes through his canvasses and even experimented with shotgun painting. (See him with his shotgun below, on the front page of a Times article covering a 2005 exhibit of his work.) Burroughs also incorporated gun imagery into his paintings—often made on slabs of plywood—and used pop art techniques like stencils and spray paint, as below.

Burroughs even designed his own book covers, as you can see at the top of the post in the relatively austere paperback covers for Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, both featuring repeating patterns of symbols. His visual art reflects the same obsessions we find in all of his work. These recurring motifs are what Paul Pieroni, co-organizer of the 2005 gallery show at The Riflemaker gallery in London, describes as a “hetero-ontology of forces at work,” including the “central themes” of “vice, violence and passion.”

The same imagery that recurs in hallucinatory novels like Junky, Naked Lunch, and The Western Lands appears in the writer’s artwork: “thus, as in his literature,” says Pieroni, “we find war, cocks, violence, dirt, parasites, guns—junk.” In Burroughs’ hands the detritus of American culture—the contents of advertisements, foreign policy briefs, and seedy motel rooms—takes on an ominous, mythic significance that shows us as much about ourselves as it does about the artist.

William S. Burroughs Shows You How to Make “Shotgun Art”

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The 1981 TIME Magazine Profile That Introduced Michel Foucault to America

in Philosophy | March 10th, 2015

These days, would we expect to find a profile of a homosexual radical-left philosopher specializing in discipline and punishment in the pages of Time magazine? Maybe, maybe not—and few of us would find out if there were one, given that the magazine seems to have long since ceded its centrality in American culture, falling back on a subscriber base of retirees and dentist offices. But in November 1981, when Time was definitely still TIME, it did indeed run such a profile, and now you can read it in full in PDF form.

“Watching French Marxists grapple with the radical theories of Michel Foucault, says the philosopher’s translator Alan Sheridan, is like watching ‘a policeman attempting to arrest a particularly outrageous drag queen.’ ” So reports journalist and cultural historian Otto Friedrich in the piece’s opening. “The solemn specialists who patrol the American university have their own difficulties with Foucault. Leo Bersani of the French department at Berkeley eulogizes him as ‘our most brilliant philosopher of power,’ but Yale Historian Peter Gay dismisses him: ‘He doesn’t do any research, he just goes on instinct.’ ”

Other sources offering accolade, condemnation, and a mixture of both for the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge and The History of Sexuality, include (broadly speaking) colleagues like literary theorist Edward Said, who complains that Foucault “has never been able to explain historical change,” and philosopher Richard Rorty, who suggests Foucault “join the bourgeois liberals he despises.” When Foucault himself speaks, he exhibits the expected tendency toward intellectual defiance and rug-pulling redefinition of terms, though the article also gathers several moments of surprising frankness about his own life. (“I cannot experience pleasure,” he claims.)

Of course, not every American of the day got to know Foucault through Time. Rather than in that most mainstream of all magazines, they may have discovered him through one of the least: Chez Foucault, the low budget fanzine we featured last week. And the connection goes deeper: “In 1981, when Time magazine published an article on Foucault,” writes James Miller in his biography The Passion of Michel Foucault, “the photograph accompanying the piece [above] showed Foucault sitting with Simeon Wade”—publisher of Chez Foucault. Wade put the ‘zine together with other University of California students, a group whom the philosopher’s ideas would continue to influence until his death, as evidenced by his final UC Berkeley lectures in 1983, and beyond—as collegians currently working under the system of control known as the cultural theory department can attest.

via Critical Theory/Progressive Geographies

Hear Michel Foucault’s Lecture “The Culture of the Self,” Presented in English at UC Berkeley (1983)

Michel Foucault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Documentary Explores the Theorist’s Controversial Life and Philosophy

Watch a “Lost Interview” With Michel Foucault: Missing for 30 Years But Now Recovered

Read Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Weapons of Mass Instruction: Watch a 1979 Ford Falcon Get Converted in a Tank Armored with 900 Free Books

in Books | March 10th, 2015

He has a wild look in his eyes, but a beautiful idea in his mind. Meet Raul Lemesoff, an eccentric character from Buenos Aires, who takes old cars and turns them into “militaristic bibliothecas” that drive the streets of Argentina, giving free books to those who want them. This is an ongoing project for Lemesoff, but the weaponized 1979 Ford Falcon you see above was specially created to celebrate World Book Day on March 5th. You can thank 7UP for commissioning that project.

via Mental Floss/This is Colossal

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Watch “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Wittgenstein’s Masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Gets Turned into Beautiful, Meditative Music

in Music, Philosophy | March 9th, 2015

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (available in our collection of 130 Free Philosophy eBooks has surely set a fair few of its readers on the path to philosophy. But how much music has it inspired? Improbable as it may sound, the German-Austrian philosopher of mathematics, language, and mind’s ultra-terse 1922 masterpiece has brought about at least two pieces. We’ve previously featured Finnish composer M.A. Numminen adapting the Tractatus into an avant-garde comic opera. Today, we have Tibor Szemző’s Tractatus.

You can download the whole piece as a single MP3 on Ubuweb, or hear it above. According to UBU’s page about it, the work, first composed for Szemző and Péter Forgács’ video Wittgenstein Tractatus, “took six months of hard work in the studio to produce, yet it is only 30 minutes and 30 seconds long.”

And not only has Szemző set to music Wittgenstein’s statement after statement on the relationship of language to reality, he’s done so in seven different languages, combining readings recorded in English, Spanish, and Hungarian in Budapest, Japanese in Tokyo, Czech in Prague, the original German in Vienna, and Slovak in Bratislava.

Though I can only really follow three of those (assuming I really grasp Wittgenstein in the first place), Szemző’s Tractatus makes me appreciate how well Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — with its simple yet complex lines like “Everything we see could also be otherwise” and “The light that work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light” — functions not just as a set of lyrics, but as an exercise in foreign-language comprehension. And didn’t Wittgenstein want to get us thinking about language in the first place?

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera

Wittgenstein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Tribute to the Philosopher, Featuring Tilda Swinton (1993)

See the Homes and Studies of Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche & Other Philosophers

Free Online Philosophy Courses

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Alan Alda Uses Improv to Teach Scientists How to Communicate Their Ideas

A Guide to Logical Fallacies: The “Ad Hominem,” “Strawman” & Other Fallacies Explained in 2‑Minute Videos

Download The Newly-Discovered Sherlock Holmes Story as a Free Audio Book

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

The Visual Art of William S. Burroughs: Book Covers, Portraits, Collage, Shotgun Art & More

The 1981 TIME Magazine Profile That Introduced Michel Foucault to America

Weapons of Mass Instruction: Watch a 1979 Ford Falcon Get Converted in a Tank Armored with 900 Free Books

Wittgenstein’s Masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Gets Turned into Beautiful, Meditative Music

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