The Famously Controversial “Monty Hall Problem” Explained: A Classic Brain Teaser

in Math, Television | October 3rd, 2017

When the news broke last week of the death of game-show host Monty Hall, even those of us who couldn’t quite put a face to the name felt the ring of recognition from the name itself. Hall became famous on the long-running game show Let’s Make a Deal, whose best-known segment “Big Deal of the Day” had him commanding his players to choose one of three numbered doors, each of which concealed a prize of unknown desirability. It put not just phrases like “door number three” into the English lexicon but contributed to the world of stumpers the Monty Hall Problem, the brain-teaser based on the much-contested probability behind which door a contestant should choose.

Let’s Make a Deal premiered in 1963, but only in 1990, when Marilyn vos Savant wrote one of her Q&A columns about it in Parade magazine, did the Monty Hall Problem draw serious, frustrated public attention.

“Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats,” went the question, setting up a Let’s Make a Deal-like scenario. “You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, ‘Do you want to pick door No. 2?’ Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?” Yes, replied the unhesitating Savant and her Guinness World Record-setting IQ, you should switch. “The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.”

This logic, which you can see broken down by University of California, Berkeley statistics professor Lisa Goldberg in the Numberphile video at the top of the post, drew about 10,000 letters of disagreement in total, many from academics at respectable institutions. Michael Shermer received a similarly vehement response when he addressed the issue in Scientific American eighteen years later. “At the beginning of the game you have a 1/3rd chance of picking the car and a 2/3rds chance of picking a goat,” he explained. “Switching doors is bad only if you initially chose the car, which happens only 1/3rd of the time. Switching doors is good if you initially chose a goat, which happens 2/3rds of the time.” Thus the odds of winning by switching becomes two out of three, double those of not switching.

Useful advice, presuming you’d prefer a Bricklin SV‑1 or an Opel Manta to a goat, and that the host opens one of the unselected doors every time without fail, which Hall didn’t actually do. When he did open it, he later explained, the contestants made the same assumption many of Savant and Shermer’s complainants did: “They’d think the odds on their door had now gone up to 1 in 2, so they hated to give up the door no matter how much money I offered. By opening that door we were applying pressure.” Ultimately, “if the host is required to open a door all the time and offer you a switch, then you should take the switch. But if he has the choice whether to allow a switch or not, beware. Caveat emptor. It all depends on his mood” — a rare consideration in anything related to mathematics, but when dealing with the Monty Hall problem, one ignores at one’s peril the words of Monty Hall.

Can You Solve These Animated Brain Teasers from TED-Ed?

John Cage Performs Water Walk on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

A Young Hunter S. Thompson Appears on the Classic TV Game Show, To Tell the Truth (1967)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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

Watch Tom Petty (RIP) and the Heartbreakers Perform Their Last Song Together, “American Girl”: Recorded on 9/25/17

in Life, Music | October 2nd, 2017

It was already a terrible day. Then came the news (retracted, then later sadly confirmed by The New York Times and the BBC) that Tom Petty has passed away at the age of 66. The cause, apparently a heart attack. This summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to see my first Tom Petty show, knowing it might be, as he said, his “last trip around the country,” the final big tour. And I’m so glad I did. What more could I say? It was a wonderful show, a magical two-hour singalong, which ended with “American Girl,” one of my favorites.

Above, you can see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play their last song together–again “American Girl”–at their final gig at the Hollywood Bowl. This video was recorded just last week.

If you’ve never given their music a serious listen, just click play on the playlist below. It might be one of the best wall-to-wall hours in music.

via Rolling Stone

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Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression

in Books, History | October 2nd, 2017

An odd phenomenon has been at work in the past few years. Print book sales slope upward while eBook sales creep down. The trend manifests the opposite of what most people—or most people who write about these things—expected to happen, quite reasonably in many respects. Perhaps through sheer historical momentum, print retains its aura of authority.

But everyone knows that buying isn’t reading, which may indeed be in decline given the primacy of images, audio, and video, of YouTube explainers and documentaries such as the one above, which tells the tale of the “Pack Horse Librarians.”

These forgotten heroes, like the famed Pony Express, braved wind, rain, and rough terrain to deliver books to isolated settlers who otherwise may have had nothing to read.

But this is not a tale of cowboys and frontiersmen. The Pack Horse Librarians appeared in an Industrial Age, and what’s more they were mostly women. Called “book ladies” and “packsaddle librarians,” the librarians were deputized during the New Deal, when FDR sought to end the Great Depression by creating hundreds of jobs addressed to the country’s real social, material, and cultural needs. In this case, the Pack Horse Librarians responded to what many of us might consider a crisis, if not a crime.

“About 63% of the residents of Kentucky were without access to public libraries,” and somewhere around 30% of rural Kentuckians were illiterate. Those rural Kentuckians saw education as a way out of poverty, and the Works Progress Administration agreed, overseeing the book delivery project between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” made around $28 a month (a little over $500 in 2017) delivering books to homes and schoolhouses. By 1936, writes the site Appalachian History, “handmade and donated materials could not sustain the circulation needs of the pack horse patrons.”

Surveys of readers found that pack horse patrons could not get enough of books about travel, adventure and religion, and detective and romance magazines. Children’s picture books were also immensely popular, not only with young residents but also their illiterate parents. Per headquarters, approximately 800 books had to be shared among five to ten thousand patrons.

To compensate for scarcity, a University of Kentucky presentation notes, librarians themselves created books of “mountain recipes and scrap books of current events.” But the service quickly grew to delivering more than 3,000 donated books per month, after a drive in which every PTA member in the state gave to the cause.

Eleanor Roosevelt (photographed above visiting a Packhorse Library in West Liberty, KY) was a champion of the service, which founder Elizabeth Fullerton modeled after a similar venture in 1913, itself a professionalization of work done by the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs in the late 19th century.

We can see that the history of women librarians on horseback goes back quite a ways. But it is a history now forgotten, despite the efforts of recent books like Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. A recent trend involves suggesting historical American figures who might replace all those monuments to the Confederacy. We might well add Pack Horse Librarians to the distinguished list of candidates.

The service lost its funding in 1943, “leaving some communities without access to books for decades,” Appalachian History writes, “until bookmobiles were introduced to the area in the late 1950s.” These services seem quaint in an era when widespread delivery by drone seems imminent. We seemingly live in the most information-rich, instant access society in history. Yet a significant number of people in the U.S. and around the world have little to no access to the internet. And a similar degree of illiteracy—at least of basic information and critical reasoning—may warrant a similarly direct intervention.

via The Smithsonian

Striking Poster Collection from the Great Depression Shows That the US Government Once Supported the Arts in America

The Future of Content Delivery

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

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

An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965)

in Art, Film, Life, Museums | October 2nd, 2017

A visit to an artist’s studio can shed light on his or her work.

The British Arts Council’s short film above affords an intimate glimpse into Alberto Giacometti’s studio in Montparnasse circa 1965, the year when he was the subject of major retrospectives at both the Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The artist passed most of his working life in cramped space at 46 rue Hippolyte. Early on, he entertained plans to relocate “because it was too small – just a hole.”

Others visitors to the studio described the artist’s environs in more literary terms:

In a charming little forgotten garden he has a studio, submerged in plaster, and he lives next to this in a kind of hangar, vast and cold, with neither furniture nor food. He works very hard for fifteen hours at a stretch, above all at night: the cold, his frozen hands – he takes no notice, he works. - Simone de Beauvoir

And:

This ground floor studio… is going to cave in at any moment now. It is made of worm-eaten wood and grey powder.… Everything is stained and ready for the bin, everything is precarious and about to collapse, everything is about to dissolve, everything is floating.… And yet it all appears to be captured in an absolute reality. When I leave the studio, when I am outside on the street, then nothing that surrounds me is true. — Playwright Jean Genet

And:

The whole place looking as if it had been thrown together with a few old sticks and a lot of chewing gum.… In short, a dump. Anyway he said come in when I knocked.… He turned and glanced at me, holding out his hand which was covered in clay, so I shook his wrist.… He immediately resumed work, running his fingers up and down the clay so fiercely that lumps fell onto the floor - Essayist James Lord

These impressions paint a portrait of a driven, and disciplined artist, who logged untold hours modeling his formes elongee in clay, unceremoniously crumpling and rebuilding in the pursuit of excellence.

The camera documents this intensity, though his untranslated remarks suggest a man capable of taking himself lightly, certainly more so than the accompanying narration does.

Like the narration, Roger Smalley’s dissonant score lays it on thick, the sonic equivalent of heads like blades and “limbs bound as though bandaged for the grave.” Perhaps we should conceive of the studio as a scary place?

In actuality, it proved a hospitable work environment and the impulse to relocate eventually waned, with the artist observing that “the longer I stayed, the bigger it became. I could fit anything I wanted into it.”

Explore the recent Tate Modern Giacometti retrospective here and take a closer look at the studio via Ernst Scheidegger’s photos.

“Giacometti” will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Watch 1915 Video of Monet, Renoir, Rodin & Degas: The New Motion Picture Camera Captures the Innovative Artists

1.8 Million Free Works of Art from World-Class Museums: A Meta List of Great Art Available Online

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

in Art, Books, History, Museums | October 2nd, 2017

Surely we’ve all wondered what we might do as prominent nineteenth-century industrialists, and more than a few of us (especially here in the Open Culture crowd) would no doubt invest our fortunes in the art of the world. Railcar manufacturing magnate Charles Lang Freer did just that, as we can see today in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Together with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Sackler having made it as “the father of modern pharmaceutical advertising”), it constitutes the Smithsonian Institution’s national museum of Asian art, gathering everything from ancient Egyptian stone sculpture to Chinese paintings to Korean pottery to Japanese books.

We like to highlight Japanese book culture here every so often (see the related content below) not just because of its striking aesthetics and consummate craftsmanship but because of its deep history. You can now experience a considerable swath of that history free online at the Freer|Sacker Library’s web site, which just this past summer finished digitizing over one thousand books — now more than 1,100, which breaks down to 41,500 separate images — published during Japan’s Edo and Meiji periods, a span of time reaching from 1600 to 1912. “Often filled with beautiful multi-color illustrations,” writes Reiko Yoshimura at the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog, “many titles are by prominent Japanese traditional and ukiyo‑e (‘floating world’) painters such as Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).”

Yoshimura directs readers to such volumes as Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Utagawa Toyokuni’s Thirty-Six Popular Actors, and artist, craftsman, and designer Kōetsu’s collection of one hundred librettos for noh theater performances. Even those who can’t read classical Japanese will admire an aesthete like Kōetsu’s way with what Yoshimura calls his “caligraphic ‘font,’ ” all “skillfully printed on luxurious mica embellished papers using wooden movable-type.”

While the online collection’s scans come in a more than high enough resolution for general appreciation, to get the full effect of bookmaking techniques like mica embellishment — which only sparkles when seen in real life — you’d have to visit the physical collection. Some things, it seems, can’t yet be digitized.

Enter the collection of Japanese Illustrated Books here.

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120)

Behold the Masterpiece by Japan’s Last Great Woodblock Artist: View Online Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

A Wonderfully Illustrated 1925 Japanese Edition of Aesop’s Fables by Legendary Children’s Book Illustrator Takeo Takei

“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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

Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings

in Art | September 29th, 2017

The caricature was once a highly-regarded art form, before it was cornered on the upper end by the New York Review of Books and on the more pedestrian side by boardwalk and street fair artists. During the European Renaissance and the ensuing centuries of artistic development, nearly every artist had a caricature side project—if only in the margins of their sketchbooks—and some, like Leonardo da Vinci, were widely known and appreciated for their skill in the art.

Generally renowned these days for the high seriousness of his Mona Lisa, Last Supper, and Vitruvian Man, Leonardo does not tend to be associated with grotesque humor. Yet the caricatures “were some of his most popular and influential works,” writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, “from the 16th century up to the time of [William] Hogarth,” the hugely popular 18th century English visual satirist.

These caricatures connect Leonardo not only to graphic art of the future but to an earlier, Medieval world—the “hellish visions of Bosch and Bruegel.” They are “Gargoyles,” wrote critic Kenneth Clark, “the complement to saints; Leonardo’s caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty.

And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away.” Clark tempers this characterization by noting that these drawings “in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.”

Indeed, Leonardo loved unusual faces and heads—he found odd-looking people of all kinds fascinating, and turned them into tragicomic figures fit for the stage. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century biographer of Renaissance artists, wrote that Leonardo was “so delighted when he saw curious heads, whether bearded or hairy, that he would follow anyone who had thus attracted his attention for a whole day, acquiring such a clear idea of him that when he went home he would draw the head as well as if the man had been present.”

We can’t say that stalking exhibits much respect for the kinds of boundaries most people would prefer to maintain, but Leonardo’s behavior does display a reverence for interesting human physiognomy, both a source and a foil for his idealizations of the human form. Leonardo’s caricatures resonate into the late 20th century in the work of Ralph Steadman, the gonzo illustrator and political cartoonist.

In his satirical illustrated biography of Leonardo, Steadman remarked that the Renaissance artist who ennobled the human form also found “that man was not what he appeared to be, despite the prevailing atmosphere of fine thoughts and high aspirations.” Steadman quotes a passage from Leonardo’s notebooks that sounds much more Swiftian or Rabelaisian than high-minded Renaissance humanist:

His Holiness the Pope surrounded himself with none but craven guzzlers, gross pretenders and a host of fawning dignitaries who grimaced through their days at court with no more grace than beggars I had entertained in days gone by — though they had neither choice nor wit to rise above themselves and in that they had a reason.

Oh that I had ways to surely serve their putrid masquerades and twittery to make a dragon from the very menagerie within the Vatican itself.

If I could take for its head that of a mastiff or setter, for its eyes those of a cat, for its ears those of a greyhound, with the eyebrows of a lion, the temples of an old cock and the neck of a water tortoise.

O vile monster! How much better it for men that thou shouldst go back to hell! For this the vast forests shall be stripped of their trees; for this an infinite number of creatures shall lose their lives.

Though the caricatures may not go as far as the horrifying hodgepodge in this description, they do portray human beings with rather less classical equanimity than the serene Mona Lisa or the very composed Christ. But due to Leonardo’s skill and seemingly irrepressible love for the human form—even if he had a jaundiced view of human nature—the caricatures continue to be inspiring pieces of work.

Ralph Steadman’s Wildly Illustrated Biography of Leonardo da Vinci (1983)

What Leonardo da Vinci Really Looked Like

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

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

Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep

in Health | September 29th, 2017

Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4–7‑8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it “takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere.” And once you master it, you can use the 4–7‑8 breathing technique (explained and demonstrated in greater detail here ) to lower your anxiety levels (useful these days!), navigate tension-filled moments, and deal with food cravings.

Elsewhere, Weil has said, “If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.” Hence why he created an audio recording, Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing, which you can still purchase online.

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via The Ladders

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How to Cook Like Frida Kahlo & Georgia O’Keefe

in Art, Food & Drink | September 29th, 2017

It’s a myth that starving artists don’t eat.

They do, just not often or well. Their meals rarely rate recipes, let alone cookbooks.

Those cookbooks do exist though.…

The mostly conceptual Starving Artist Cookbook put together by EIDIA (aka artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) comes close to the spirit of sustaining life through meager ingredients… like spaghetti or 4 pages of shredded Pravda.

Not so this other title, which approaches cute overload with an abundance of Instagram-worthy illustrated fare—mojitos, an unstructured berry tart, a “manly” burger.…

Do “starving” artists no longer fear being outed as posers?

Successful artists may not worry about that, as they eat whatever and however they want.

Andy Warhol had the taste of an eccentric child.

Marina Abramović takes the ascetic route.

Many have glady traded the candle in the chianti bottle for the most rarified restaurants in town.

Georgia O’Keefe and Frida Kahlo, PBS Digital Studios’ series the Art Assignment informs us, took cooking—and eating—seriously.

So seriously, their culinary efforts led to cookbooks, which the Art Assignment’s host, curator Sarah Urist Green, tries out on camera.

O’Keefe, who grew up in Wisconsin on homemade yogurt, homemade cheese, and plentiful homegrown produce, ground her own flour in order to bake daily loaves of whole wheat bread.

Green treats viewers to a brief overview of O’Keefe’s life and work as she struggles with the grinder. (You might get the same, or better, results if you take a $5 bill to a good bakery right at opening.)

She also tackles the wheat germ Tiger’s Milk smoothie advocated by Adele Davis, a nutritionist whom O’Keefe admired, and Green Chiles with Garlic and Oil and Fried Eggs, using recipes from the cookbooks A Painter’s Kitchen and Dinner with Georgia O’Keefe.

Before attempting the same, you might want to watch the Kahlo-centric episode, above, in which Green discovers a much better method for roasting the poblano peppers she haplessly substituted for New Mexico chiles in O’Keefe’s egg dish.

Here, they’re used for Chiles Rellenos, a dish whose pronunciation the self-effacing Green butchers, along with a multitude of other Spanish phrases, a fact not lost on the video’s Youtube commenters. They also take issue with the presence of plantains, her preparation of the Nopales Salad, and her cooking skills in general. No wonder Green—a self-proclaimed wussy where serranos are concerned—seems so eager to reach for a shot of tequila as dinner is finally served.

Green chose the dishes for this episode from Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo by Marie-Pierre Colle and Kahlo’s stepdaughter, Guadalupe Rivera.

Kahlo herself learned to cook from her mother’s copy of El Nuevo Cocinero Mejicano, and from husband Diego Rivera’s first wife, Guadalupe (leading one to wonder if some of that cookbook’s recipes aren’t misattributed to the more famous cook).

As with the O’Keefe video and the cookbooks cited herein, there’s a wealth of vintage photos and reproduced artwork on display.

Even though Green alludes to Kahlo’s dark side, sensitive stomachs might have trouble with the inclusion of the graphically violent Unos Quantos Piquetitos. Another painting, My Nurse and I is at least related to eating, if not cooking and recipes.

Those with stomachs of steel on the other hand can continue on to another Art Assignment—the supremely gross Meat Sculpture from the Futurist Cookbook.

MoMA’s Artists’ Cookbook (1978) Reveals the Meals of Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois & More

Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Discuss Emily Dickinson with her informally at Pete’s Mini Zinefest in Brooklyn this Saturday. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Famously Controversial “Monty Hall Problem” Explained: A Classic Brain Teaser

Watch Tom Petty (RIP) and the Heartbreakers Perform Their Last Song Together, “American Girl”: Recorded on 9/25/17

Before the Bookmobile: When Librarians Rode on Horseback to Deliver Books to Rural Americans During the Great Depression

An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965)

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings

Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep

How to Cook Like Frida Kahlo & Georgia O’Keefe

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