Zombies, alien overlords, sharks, a mad dictator…math is a dangerous proposition in the hands of TED Ed script writer Alex Gendler.
The recreational mathematics puzzles he retrofits for TED’s educational initiative have been around for hundreds, even thousands of years. In the past, storylines tended to rely on biases 21st-century puzzle solvers would find objectionable. As mathematician David Singmaster told Science News:
One must be a little careful with some of these problems, as past cultures were often blatantly sexist or racist. But such problems also show what the culture was like.… The river crossing problem of the jealous husbands is quite sexist and transforms into masters and servants, which is classist, then into missionaries and cannibals, which is racist. With such problems, you can offend everybody!
Gendler’s updates, animated by Artrake studio, derive their narrative urgency from the sort of crowd pleasing sci fi predicaments that fuel summer blockbusters.
And fortunately for those of us whose brains are permanently stuck in beach mode, he never fails to explain how the characters prevail, outwitting or outrunning the aforementioned zombies, aliens, sharks, and mad dictator.
(No worries if you’re determined to find the solution on your own. Gendler gives plenty of fair warning before each reveal.)
Put your brain in gear, pull the skull-embossed lever, and remember, teamwork — and inductive logic — carry the day!
The prisoner hat riddle, above, hinges on a hierarchy of beliefs and the alien overlord’s willingness to give its nine captives a few minutes to come up with a game plan.
Go deeper into this age old puzzle by viewing the full lesson.
Gendler’s spin on the green-eyed logic puzzle, above, contains two brain teasers, one for the hive mind, and one for an individual acting alone, with a strategy culled from philosopher David Lewis’ Common Knowledge playbook. Here’s the full lesson.
Raring for more? You’ll find a playlist of TED-Ed puzzles by Gendler and others here. The full lesson for the bridge problem at the top of the post is here.
Ayun Halliday, author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, will be leading a free collaborative zine workshop at the Gluestick Fest in Indianapolis Saturday, July 9. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Frank Zappa was always frank. You gotta give him that.
Speaking with Village Voice journalist Howard Smith in 1971, Zappa talked candidly about the tastes, opinions, and beliefs of most Americans, whether they apply to music or politics or anything else. “You have a nation of people who are waiting for the next big thing to happen.” “I see a lot of changes. But I think they’re all temporary things and any change for the good is always subject to cancellation upon the arrival of the next fad. And the same thing with any change for the worst.”
Maybe it’s like this everywhere. But it’s particularly so in America says Zappa:
I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it because [the U.S.] doesn’t have any real sort of values, you know? And a fad provides you with a temporary occupation for your imagination. Really, [America] doesn’t have any real culture. It doesn’t have any real art. It doesn’t have any real anything. It’s just got fads and a gross national product and a lot of inflation.
It’s not a flattering portrait of the States. But know this. Zappa didn’t see himself being above it all: “I’m an American. I was born here. I automatically got entered in a membership in the club.” Yeah, Frank could be frank.
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By the time I got to high school, home economics classes had fallen out of favor: the boys, of course, considered them too “girly,” and the girls considered them enforcers of traditional gender roles wholly out of place in modern society. At that time, America’s widespread obsession with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imagine that learning to cook has regained a certain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home economics” itself, that curious banner that combines a definition of economics nobody now quite recognizes with the less-than-fashionable concepts of domesticity, practicality, and necessity?
At the Internet Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan highlights such works as the Pilgrim Cook Book, published by Chicago’s Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society in 1921 and including recipes for Sausage in Potato Boxes, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy; 1912’s more subdued Food for the invalid and the convalescent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jelly, Cracker Gruel, and advice that, “among other things, beer and pickles are bad for children”; and even older, 1906’s A bachelors cupboard; containing crumbs culled from the cupboards of the great unweddedwhich, warning that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weakling is relegated to his rightful sphere in short order,” offers methods for the making of dishes with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indian Devil Mixture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Haddie.
When Stanley Kubrick died, he left behind numerous film ideas that would never see the light of day. There was his epic Napoleon film; an adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel; his long-talked about Holocaust film Aryan Papers; and so much more.
But this was a new one to hear about: in 1996 Kubrick agreed to direct a music video for UNKLE’s upcoming Psyence Fiction album. You may recall, back when MTV played music videos, seeing Jonathan Glazer’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” video, or Jake Scott’s “Be There,” both from UNKLE’s album. Alas, Kubrick’s video never got made. He had started filming Eyes Wide Shut and then passed away upon its release.
Now “The Corridor,” a glimpse of which you can see above, is an attempt to bring Kubrick and UNKLE back together. It’s not what actually might have been filmed by the director, but something that captures the project in spirit. It’s also a loving tribute to Kubrick’s career and his love of single-point perspective, which has been video essayed elsewhere.
Director Toby Dye, who has directed videos like “Paradise Circus” for Massive Attack and “Another Night Out” for UNKLE, took on the job of bringing “The Corridor” to the screen, co-designed by Ridley Scott Associates, working with Dye’s Black Dog Films.
“The Corridor” uses the one song off Psyence Fiction that never got a video, the Richard Ashcroft-sung “Lonely Souls,” as its backdrop. Dye has created four narratives that play on Kubrick’s iconic films–The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon,and 2001–but then interweaves time and character along a long corridor tracking shot, starring Joanna Lumley and Aiden Gillen.
In addition, “The Corridor” is a video centerpiece to what sounds like a very cool exhibition. Curated by Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder James Lavelle, “Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick” opened yesterday at Somerset House in London and runs through August 24, 2016. Along with the video, the exhibition features artworks celebrating Kubrick’s influence on generations of artists. (The stack of heaters on top of the Overlook carpet is great.)
Said Dye:
‘For me, the unblinking red eye of 2001 A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 perfectly encapsulates the cinema of Stanley Kubrick. For all his films share that same coolly analytical gaze, studying from afar mankind and all its many foibles. Kubrick’s camera never appeared to follow the action, it was as if it moved of its own accord and the tableau of life simply unfurled before it. It was his seemingly never-ending camera zooms from Barry Lyndon that first sparked the seed of the idea behind “The Corridor,” before that idea grew, and grew into something that was, at times, infuriatingly ambitious, but I hope in the best tradition of the man who inspired it.’
Those who can’t attend will have to wait and see if and when the full video for “The Corridor” appears online. In the meantime, Somerset House awaits.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Do you know someone whose arguments consist of baldly specious reasoning, hopelessly confused categories, archipelagos of logical fallacies buttressed by seawalls of cognitive biases? Surely you do. Perhaps such a person would welcome some instruction on the properties of critical thinking and argumentation? Not likely? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wireless Philosophy (or “WiPhi”) videos by philosophy instructor Geoff Pynn of Northern Illinois University and doctoral students Kelley Schiffman of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and several other philosophy and psychology graduates.
What is critical thinking? “Critical thinking,” says Pynn, “is about making sure that you have good reasons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the various instructors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bottom of the post), but Pynn’s introductory video above lays out the foundation. Good reasons logically support the beliefs or conclusions one adopts—from degrees of probability to absolute certainty (a rare condition indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn specifies, does not relate to moral goodness, but to logical coherence and truth value. Though many ethicists and philosophers would disagree, he notes that it isn’t necessarily “morally wrong or evil or wicked” to believe something on the basis of bad reasons. But in order to think rationally, we need to distinguish “good” reasons from “bad” ones.
“A good reason for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it probable. That is, it’s one that makes the belief likely to be true. The very best reasons for a belief make it certain. They guarantee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he discusses these two classes of argument—one relating to certainty, the other probability. The first class, deductive arguments, occur in the classic, Aristotelian form of the syllogism, and they should guarantee their conclusions, meaning that “it’s impossible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false” (provided the form of the argument itself is correct). In such an instance, we say the argument is “valid,” a technical philosophical term that roughly corresponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or reasonable” argument. Some properties of deductive reasoning—validity, truth, and soundness—receive their own explanatory videos later in the series.
In abductive arguments (or what are also called “inductive arguments”), above, we reason informally to the best, most probable explanation. In these kinds of arguments, the premises do not guarantee the conclusion, and the arguments are not bound in rigid formal syllogisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most likely conclusion given the reasoning and evidence. Finding additional evidence, or finding that some of our evidence or reasoning is incorrect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the likelihood of our conclusion and make new inferences. Most scientific explanations rely on abductive reasoning, which is why they are subject to retraction or revision. New evidence—or new understandings of the evidence—often requires new conclusions.
As for understanding probability—the likelihood that reasons provide sufficient justification for inferring particular conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trouble, falling victim to all sorts of fallacies. And when it comes to interpreting evidence, we’re prey to a number of psychological biases that prevent us from making fair assessments. WiPhi brings previous video series to bear on these problems of argumentation, one on Formal and Informal Fallacies and another on Cognitive Biases.
When it comes to a general theory of probability itself, we would all benefit from some understanding of what’s called Bayes’ Theorem, named for the 18th century statistician and philosopher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ Theorem can seem forbidding, but its wide application across a range of disciplines speaks to its importance. “Some philosophers,” says CUNY graduate student Ian Olasov in his video lesson above, “even think it’s the key to understanding what it means to think rationally.”
Bayesian reasoning, informal logic, sound, valid, and true arguments… all of these modes of critical thinking help us make sense of the tangles of information we find ourselves caught up in daily. Though some of our less rationally-inclined acquaintances may not be receptive to good introductory lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharpen our own reasoning skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as critical thinkers in Wireless Philosophy’s thorough, high quality series of video lessons.
Find more helpful resources in the Relateds below.
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If you’ve ever listened to Radiolab, one of the most popular and enduring podcasts out there, you know how much music (and sound more generally) plays a special role in the show’s production. And that’s all largely the creation of Radiolab’s co-host, Jad Abumrad. You know those “jaggedy sounds, little plurps and things, strange staccato, percussive things” that make the show so distinctive? That’s all Abumrad, who majored in experimental music composition and production at Oberlin College.
To get inside Abumrad’s thinking about music (what is sound? what is music? why do we organize sound into music?) watch the video above. Mac Premo interviewed Jad, then turned the conversation into a short creative film. Note: If you don’t react well to seeing fast-moving images, you might want to skip this one.
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In March of 2015, The Guardian published a piece on Prince’s vault, begun by his former sound engineer Susan Rogers before his Purple Rain superstardom: “It’s an actual bank vault, with a thick door,” she said, “in the basement of Paisley Park. When I left in 87, it was nearly full.” That was 30 years ago. Composer and Prince orchestrator Brent Fischer speculated that “over 70% of the music we’ve worked on for Prince is yet to come out.” Already able to release “in a decade what most musicians couldn’t put out in a lifetime,” Prince stored in his vaults enough to reveal him as thrice the prolific genius we knew in life.
Now that Prince has departed, the vault has been finally been opened. What’s in it? Speculation, rumor, and hoaxes abound; we could see a posthumous album a year for the next century. As they trickle out we’ll likely see more conventional, less Prince-like releasing strategies, now that he is no longer personally in control of his output. This will surely make it easier on his fans, but will also strip the music of much of its curious mystique. “A streaming skeptic before it was fashionable,” writes August Brown at the L.A. Times, and “a born futurist,” Prince excelled at “creating new distribution systems under his purview.” As an early adopter of web technology, he began giving away and selling his music and merchandise online as early as 1996, when he created his first official website, “The Dawn” (above).
Prince’s web debut happened in the midst of his pitched battle with Warner Brothers, and three years after he changed his name to the “Love Symbol.” Browsing through the history of his internet strategies allows us to see how his personalized distribution approaches and online identities evolved over the next two decades as he regained full creative independence. We can easily survey that history all in one place now, thanks to the Prince Online Museum, an archive of 16 of Prince’s various websites, each one with its own profile written in Prince’s distinctive idiom, with “testimonials from the people who were involved in creating and running them for Prince,” writes The New York Times, and “links as well as screen shots and videos” of each site, none of them currently active.
There’s even a precursor to Prince’s online world, Prince Interactive, a 1994 CD-Rom “coupled with Prince’s underground film, The Beautiful Experience.” This early attempt makes clear that “Prince was fascinated and excited by the possibilities of connecting directly 2 his audience through their computers. It would be several years until that became a reality 4 him, but the idea started here.” (See a slow video walk-through of the CD-Rom above). After 1996’s “The Dawn” came the first official online retail store, “1–800-NewFunk,” and an online lyric book, “Crystal Ball Online.” Successive sites each had a distinctive focus: on Prince’s charitable foundation with “Love 4 One Another”; on various iterations of his “NPG Music Club,” an “online distribution hub”—including the “virtual estate” of the 2003 iteration (see picture further up); and on rebranding efforts like “3121.com.”
One of the most striking of all of the various sites, “Lotusflow3r” (top) contained “vibrant 3D imagery and animation connected 2 the music” and design of the 3‑CD album set of the same name from 2009. The last entry in the archive, the “3rdEyeGirl” site from 2013, was created for Prince’s new band and “was another example of choosing 2 bypass traditional channels and go his own way.” Each of these site profiles act as “snapshots in time to experience the Web sites just like when they were active,” writes Prince Online Museum director Sam Jennings. They also showcase “his fierce independence” and desire “to connect directly with his audience without any middleman.”
With each film he made, the internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami left critics grasping for superlatives, and his death this past Monday has challenged them to find ways to fully describe the distinctive nature of his cinematic mastery. In his New Yorker obituary for Kiarostami, Richard Brody calls him “simply one of the most original and influential directors in the history of cinema,” as well as “the first Iranian filmmaker who expanded the history of cinema not merely in a sociological sense but in an artistic one,” whose “tenacious, bold, restless originality” brought the world to Iranian cinema and Iranian cinema to the world.
Brody narrated video essays on two films of Kiarostami’s. He calls 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us (above) “the greatest of Kiarostami’s Iranian films,” a showcase for his combination of “patient and loving attention to characters drawn from daily life and to their landscapes with a precise, canny, and fierce distillation of concrete phenomena into brilliant, vertiginous, and liberating abstractions.” In 2012’s Tokyo-set Like Someone in Love, Kiarostami’s final film, he “found himself freer than usual to depict such ordinary events as a woman, her hair uncovered, in a bedroom with a man. But, facing the seemingly limitless freedom of depiction, Kiarostami ingeniously reverses the equation; starting with the title and continuing with the very first shot, he questions the difference between simulation and reality, between imitation and being.”
Audiences everywhere thrilled to Kiarostami’s treatment of those concepts, potentially abstruse in the hands of other filmmakers but never in his, when he put them at the center of 2010’s Juliette Binoche-staring Certified Copy, the first film he made outside Iran. In his video essay “The Double Life of James and Juliette: Mysteries and Perceptions in Kiarostami’s Certified Copy,” cinema scholar Peter Labuza breaks down this many-layered, multifaceted, multilingual work, in one sense a no-frills relationship drama about a man and a woman who may or may not be or have been married, and in another a “complete and total enigma” deeply concerned with “the nature and role of perception.”
Graham Bollard’s “The Minimalist Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami” focuses on the director’s aesthetic choices, such as often shooting inside cars, whose space “helps define the main character’s point of view” and repeating a shot in such a way that “we, the audience, are forced to view it in different ways that take on different meanings,” drawing visual evidence from Kiarostami’s Iranian films like Taste of Cherry, Ten, and Close-Up, from which Hamid Dabashi’s book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future takes its name. The essay ends with a quote from it, describing Kiarostami’s work as “there to filter the world and thus strip it of all its cultures, narrativities, authorities, and ideologies” — no small accomplishment for one lifetime in cinema.
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