An Animated Introduction to the Famous Thought Experiment, the “Trolley Problem,” Narrated by Harry Shearer

in Animation, Philosophy | March 13th, 2019

You don’t have to get too deep into the study of ethics before you run across the trol­ley prob­lem. It comes up so read­i­ly that it hard­ly needs an intro­duc­tion: a run­away train is on course to col­lide with and kill five peo­ple work­ing on the tracks, but you can pull a lever that will switch it to anoth­er sec­tion of track on which stands only one per­son. Do you pull it? Accord­ing to a pure­ly util­i­tar­i­an inter­pre­ta­tion, you should, since one life lost sure­ly beats five lives lost. But faced with the deci­sion, real indi­vid­u­als tend to strug­gle: not pulling the lever feels like let­ting five peo­ple die, but pulling it feels like mur­der­ing one.

What if you could stop the train by push­ing one espe­cial­ly large indi­vid­ual off a bridge into the train’s path, stop­ping it but killing him? Few say, or at least admit, that they would do it. But why not? The Har­ry Shear­er-nar­rat­ed ani­ma­tion above, a part of BBC Radio 4 and The Open Uni­ver­si­ty’s series on the his­to­ry of ideas, con­sid­ers what our respons­es reveal about how we think eth­i­cal­ly.

“What the trol­ley prob­lem exam­ines is whether moral deci­sions are sim­ply about out­comes, or about the man­ner in which you achieve them,” says Shear­er. “Lots of peo­ple say they would switch the points, but they would­n’t push the man off the bridge. Are they sim­ply incon­sis­tent… or are they on to some­thing?

The TED-Ed video just above, writ­ten by edu­ca­tor Eleanor Nelsen, gets deep­er into what they might be on to. “The dilem­ma in its many vari­a­tions reveals that what we think is right or wrong depends on fac­tors oth­er than a log­i­cal weigh­ing of the pros and cons,” says Nelsen. “For exam­ple, men are more like­ly than women to say it’s okay to push the man over the bridge. So are peo­ple who watch a com­e­dy clip before doing the thought exper­i­ment. And in one vir­tu­al real­i­ty study, peo­ple were more will­ing to sac­ri­fice men than women.” The study of “Trol­ley­ol­o­gy,” a sub­ject since Philip­pa Foot first artic­u­lat­ed the prob­lem in 1967, now finds “researchers who study autonomous sys­tems” col­lab­o­rat­ing with philoso­phers “to address the com­plex prob­lem of pro­gram­ming ethics into machines.” Alter­na­tive­ly, of course, they could just put the ques­tion to the near­est two-year-old.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

What Is Free­dom? Watch Four Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Free­dom & Free Will Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Eth­i­cal “Trol­ley Prob­lem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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An Animated Introduction to the Chaotic Brilliance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Homeless Graffiti Artist to Internationally Renowned Painter

in Animation, Art | March 4th, 2019

By the late 1970s, New York City had fall­en into such a sham­bol­ic state that nobody could have been expect­ed to notice the occa­sion­al streak of addi­tion­al spray paint here and there. But some­how the repeat­ed appear­ance of the word “SAMO” caught the atten­tion of even jad­ed Low­er Man­hat­tan­ites. That tag sig­ni­fied the work of Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the lat­ter of whom would cre­ate work that, four decades lat­er, would sell for over $110 mil­lion at auc­tion, a record-break­ing num­ber for an Amer­i­can artist. But by then he had already been dead for near­ly 20 years, brought down by a hero­in over­dose at 27, an age that reflects not just his rock-star sta­tus in life but his increas­ing­ly leg­endary pro­file after it.

“Born in 1960 to a Hait­ian father and a Puer­to Rican moth­er, Basquiat spent his child­hood mak­ing art and mis­chief in Boerum Hill,” Brook­lyn, says Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Jor­dana Moore Saggese in the ani­mat­ed Ted-Ed intro­duc­tion above. “While he nev­er attend­ed art school, he learned by wan­der­ing through New York gal­leries, and lis­ten­ing to the music his father played at home.”

He seems to have drawn inspi­ra­tion from every­thing around him, “scrib­bling his own ver­sions of car­toons, com­ic books and bib­li­cal scenes on scrap paper from his father’s office” (lead­ing to a method that has some­thing in com­mon with William Bur­roughs’ cut-up tech­niques). He also spent a great deal of artis­ti­cal­ly for­ma­tive time laid up in the hos­pi­tal after a car acci­dent, por­ing over a copy of Gray’s Anato­my giv­en to him by his moth­er, which “ignit­ed a life­long fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my that man­i­fest­ed in the skulls, sinew and guts of his lat­er work.”

A skull hap­pens to fea­ture promi­nent­ly in that $110 mil­lion paint­ing of Basquiat’s, but he also made lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of oth­er works in his short life, hav­ing turned full-time to art after SAMO hit it big on the Soho art scene. The day job he quit was at a cloth­ing ware­house, a posi­tion he land­ed, after a peri­od of unem­ploy­ment and even home­less­ness, when the com­pa­ny’s founder spot­ted him spray-paint­ing a build­ing at night. Suc­cess came quick­ly to the young Basquiat, but it cer­tain­ly did­n’t come with­out effort: still, when we regard his paint­ings today, don’t we feel com­pelled by not just what Saggesse calls a dis­tinc­tive “inven­tive visu­al lan­guage” and hyper-ref­er­en­tial “phys­i­cal evi­dence of Basquiat’s rest­less and pro­lif­ic mind,” but also of the glimpse they offer into the rare life lived at max­i­mum pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, max­i­mum inten­si­ty, and max­i­mum speed?

To delve deep­er into the world of Basquiat, you can watch two doc­u­men­taries online: Basquiat: Rage to Rich­es, and Jean Michel Basquiat-The Radi­ant Child.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by TASCHEN

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Jim Morrison Declares That “Fat is Beautiful” .… And Means It

in Animation, Food & Drink, Health, Life, Music | March 1st, 2019

There’s a bit of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance in a young rock god giv­ing voice to the fat pride move­ment some four decades after his death.

Years before social media ampli­fied celebri­ty weight gain cov­er­age to the realm of nation­al news, The Doors’ lead singer, Lizard King Jim Mor­ri­son, was the sub­ject of intense bod­i­ly scruti­ny.

The musician’s drug of choice—alcohol—swiftly added some extra cush­ion­ing to the sexy, shirt­less young lion image pho­tog­ra­ph­er Joel Brod­sky man­aged to cap­ture in 1967.

That lean, leather-pant­ed ver­sion is the one the Mor­ri­son direc­tor Patrick Smith went with for the Blank on Blank ani­ma­tion above, using audio from a 1969 inter­view with the Vil­lage Voice’s Howard Smith (no rela­tion).

Occa­sion­al­ly ani­ma­tor Smith bal­loons the 2‑D Morrison’s bel­ly for humor­ous effect, but let’s be frank. By today’s stan­dards, the 5’11 Mor­ri­son, who by his own esti­mate tipped the scales at 185lb, was hard­ly “fat.”

Pleas­ing­ly plump per­haps…

Fill­ing out…

Eat­ing (and drink­ing) like some­one whose bank account did­n’t require belt tight­en­ing.

His com­pas­sion toward gen­er­ous­ly pro­por­tioned bod­ies like­ly sprang from ear­ly expe­ri­ence.

As pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lin­da McCart­ney recalled in Lin­da McCartney’s The Sixties—Portrait Of An Era:

He … told me that he’d grown up as a fat kid that no one want­ed to know and that this had caused him a lot of emo­tion­al pain.

Then he explained what had brought it all to the sur­face. Appar­ent­ly he had been walk­ing around Green­wich Vil­lage that morn­ing and a girl who he knew as a child had spot­ted him and start­ed going crazy over him. That both­ered him because he sensed the hypocrisy of it all. When he was a fat mil­i­tary brat these peo­ple had reject­ed and ignored him but now, because of his new pub­lic image, they were fawn­ing over him.

That “new pub­lic image” is the one most of us think of first when think­ing of Jim Mor­ri­son, but as a flesh and blood exem­plar, it was unsus­tain­able. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Brod­sky reflects:

The shot on the inner sleeve of the Great­est Hits album was pret­ty near the end, I think. By that time, he was so drunk he was stum­bling into the lights and we had to stop the ses­sion. Mor­ri­son nev­er real­ly looked that way again, and those pic­tures have become a big part of The Doors’ leg­end. I think I got him at his peak.

Mor­ri­son didn’t dwell on child­hood mis­eries in his Vil­lage Voice inter­view, nor did he show any self-loathing or regret for physiques past.

Rather, he gave voice to the pos­i­tive effects of his increased size. He felt like a tank, a beast—a body of con­se­quence.

(To con­sid­er the impli­ca­tions of bod­i­ly size for a female in Morrison’s world, have a look at car­toon­ist Péné­lope Bagieu’s Cal­i­for­nia Dreamin’: Cass Elliot before the Mamas and The Papas.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

The Last Known Pho­tos of Jim Mor­ri­son, Tak­en Days Before His Death in Paris (June 1971)

The Doors Play Live in Den­mark & LA in 1968: See Jim Mor­ri­son Near His Charis­mat­ic Peak

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City March 11 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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18 Classic Myths Explained with Animation: Pandora’s Box, Sisyphus & More

in Animation, History, K-12, Life, Literature | February 22nd, 2019

Greek myths have an incred­i­ble shelf life.

We may not retain all the play­ers’ names or the intri­ca­cies of the var­i­ous plot lines, but the cre­ative pun­ish­ments the gods—Zeus, in particular—visited upon those who dis­pleased them have pro­vid­ed mod­ern mor­tals with an endur­ing short­hand for describ­ing our own woes.

Tempt­ed to sneak a peek inside a lover’s diary? Take a tee­ny swig from the liquor cab­i­net whilst hous­esit­ting? Go snoop­ing in your teenager’s Inter­net his­to­ry?

DON’T DO IT, PANDORA!!!

But if curios­i­ty com­pels you to explore beyond the famous punch­lines of mythology’s great­est hits, TED-Ed’s ani­mat­ed Myths from Around the World series is a rec­om­mend­ed rum­mage.

Aver­ag­ing around five min­utes per tale, each episode is packed tight as a snake in a can of mixed nuts. Pre­pare to be sur­prised by some of the tid­bits that come spring­ing out.

Take Pandora’s box, above.

(Actu­al­ly it was a jar, but why quib­ble?)

Not to unleash too many major spoil­ers, but how many of us remem­bered that the thing con­tained a bit of good along with all that evil?

Or that the ves­sel she wasn’t allowed to open was but one of many gifts the gods bestowed upon her at birth? In fact, Zeus gave her two presents, that pret­ty box, jar, what­ev­er, and—wait for it—an irre­press­ibly inquis­i­tive nature.

Or the close con­nec­tion between Pan­do­ra and Prometheus? Zeus con­ceived of Pan­do­ra as a ret­ri­bu­tion for Prometheus steal­ing fire and return­ing it to earth.

Remem­ber Prometheus?

No, not the guy who’s doomed to spend his life rolling a mas­sive rock uphill, only to have it roll back down before he reach­es the top. That’s Sisy­phus, as in Sisyphean task, like laun­dry or clean­ing the cat lit­ter.

Prometheus is the Titan who winds up chained to a rock so Zeus can send a hun­gry vulture—some say eagle—to devour his liv­er once a day.

(Which kind of puts the cat lit­ter in per­spec­tive.)

In addi­tion to ancient Greek crowd pleasers, the 18-episode Myths from Around the World playlist delves into the famil­iar stuff of Norse, Chi­nese, and ancient Egypt­ian leg­ends, as well as less wide­ly known Cam­bo­di­an and Irish tales.

Each video’s descrip­tion has a link to a full Ted-Ed les­son, with the usu­al com­ple­ment of quizzes, resources and oppor­tu­ni­ties for teacher cus­tomiza­tion.

Watch the full playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Myth of Sisy­phus Won­der­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed in an Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film (1974)

Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Ili­ad & Odyssey Using Stick-Man Draw­ings

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course) 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this March. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch 66 Oscar-Nominated-and-Award-Winning Animated Shorts Online, Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

in Animation, Film | February 5th, 2019

I recent­ly heard some­one quip that pro­pos­als to cut the Acad­e­my Awards are tan­ta­mount to sug­gest­ing that the NFL trim down the Super Bowl. Cer­tain­ly for many who would rather watch the for­mer any day of the week, even the play-by-play of tech­ni­cal cat­e­gories repays atten­tion. Yet peo­ple who think of the Oscars as a major sport­ing event with big stars and block­busters going head-to-head can still appre­ci­ate the show as more than spec­ta­cle. How else, for exam­ple, would most of us learn about bril­liant ani­mat­ed short films like the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s Ani­mal Behav­iour, made by hus­band and wife team Ali­son Snow­den and David Fine and nom­i­nat­ed in this year’s Oscars? (See the trail­er above.)

Snow­den and Fine pre­vi­ous­ly won an Oscar in 1995 for Bob’s Birth­day, a hilar­i­ous short about an unhap­py British den­tist. Their lat­est film takes a charm­ing, anthro­po­mor­phic route to the ques­tion Fine pos­es as, “Should what comes nat­u­ral­ly to you be some­thing that you seek to change to please oth­ers, or should oth­ers accept you as you are?”

Group ther­a­py par­tic­i­pants seek­ing accep­tance include Lor­raine, a leech with sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety, Vic­tor, an ape with anger issues, and Cheryl, a pray­ing man­tis, writes the Nation­al Film Board, “who can’t seem to keep a man.”

The NFB informs us that Ani­mal Behav­iour is their 75th Oscar-nom­i­na­tion in the cat­e­go­ry of Ani­mat­ed Short Film, and whether you’re inclined to watch this part of the awards or not, you can get caught up with their exten­sive playlist of 66 Oscar-win­ning and nom­i­nat­ed films on YouTube. (Bob’s Birth­day is not avail­able, at least in the U.S., but you can watch it here.) See Snow­den and Fine’s first film, George and Rose­mary, a sto­ry in which “two gold­en agers prove that pas­sion isn’t reserved for the very young.”


Watch the very impres­sive stop-motion ani­ma­tion of 2007’s Madame Tut­li-Put­li, an “exhil­a­rat­ing exis­ten­tial jour­ney” direct­ed by Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczer­bows­ki. See Chris Landreth’s 2013 Oscar-win­ning com­put­er-ani­mat­ed short, Ryan, about a char­ac­ter “liv­ing every artist’s worst night­mare.”

And see the 2007 Oscar-win­ning exis­ten­tial ani­mat­ed short The Dan­ish Poet, direct­ed by Torill Kove and fea­tur­ing nar­ra­tion by Liv Ull­mann. The offer­ings are vast and var­ied, dis­play­ing the very best of Cana­di­an ani­ma­tion, a nation­al art that usu­al­ly goes unseen and unac­knowl­edged by audi­ences out­side its bor­ders. But after watch­ing sev­er­al of these films you might agree that NFB ani­ma­tion deserves its long his­to­ry of recog­ni­tion at the Oscars. See the com­plete playlist of films here.

Many of these films can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917 to 1931)

The Psy­che­del­ic 1970s Ani­ma­tions of Kei­ichi Tanaa­mi: A Music Video for John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko!,” Sur­re­al Trib­utes to Elvis & Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, and More

Free Ani­mat­ed Films: From Clas­sic to Mod­ern 

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

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A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

in Animation, History, Technology | February 1st, 2019

Thanks for watch­ing his­to­ry. I hope I men­tioned every­thing. — Bill Wurtz

Here at Open Cul­ture, we hap­pi­ly acknowl­edge that learn­ing is not a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion.

The inter­net may be doing a num­ber on our atten­tion spans, but as the world has grown small­er, the edu­ca­tion­al buf­fet has grown rich­er, more var­ied, and vast­ly more afford­able.

Take for exam­ple the His­to­ry of the World.

Geog­ra­phy fans can approach the sub­ject via Ollie Bye’s year-by-year ani­mat­ed map.

John Green’s play­ful Crash Course series offers a won­der­ful respite for any kid grind­ing their way through AP World His­to­ry.

Those of a more tra­di­tion­al mind­set, who pre­fer a state­lier pace can lose them­selves in 46 lec­tures by Richard Bul­li­et, pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.

And then there’s world his­to­ry accord­ing Bill Wurtz, above, a cre­ator of short, anachro­nis­tic-look­ing videos, whose YouTube fame was kin­dled by Vine, a now defunct app for shar­ing short-form videos.

Chaf­ing at Vine’s 7‑second time con­straints, Wurtz under­took a more ambi­tious project, a con­densed His­to­ry of Japan that would employ the same tech­niques he brought to bear in his short­er works: graph­ic text, clip art, and Microsoft Paint draw­ings. He zeroed in on the sub­ject because he knew pre­cious lit­tle about Japan, and looked for­ward to doing some vir­gin research.

Wurtz fol­lowed up the 9‑minute His­to­ry of Japan, above, with His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess.

The non­cha­lance of the title is reflect­ed in Wurtz’s offhand­ed nar­ra­tion. Any word or phrase over two syl­la­bles runs a risk of being trans­formed into an infomer­cial-wor­thy musi­cal jin­gle: space dust, the moon, Egypt…

You may bri­dle at first, but stick it out. Its charms sneak up on you.

Time is not par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­a­tive in Wurtz’s com­pressed uni­verse. Whether it’s 10 min­utes pass­ing before some major devel­op­ment or 500 mil­lion years, their pas­sage is accord­ed equal heft.

Humans show up around the four minute mark, grab­bing stuff, bang­ing rocks, fig­ur­ing out agri­cul­ture…

(Mesopotamia’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as a “sweet dank val­ley” between the Tigris and Euphrates is a par­tic­u­lar high­light.)

This is the rare his­to­ry video where sci­ence plays a major role. It takes time out for weath­er updates—the floor is no longer lava, the entire world is now an ocean… it’s sober­ing to remem­ber that ozone is what made it safe for mul­ti-celled life forms to ven­ture forth on land.

Empires rise and fall, uncon­quer­able rulers are unseat­ed and for­got­ten.

(That’s the Tamil Kings. Nobody con­quers the Tamil Kings. Who are the Tamil Kings? Mer­chants prob­a­bly and they’ve got spices…)

Of course the prob­lem with a great overview such as this is the back end’s shelf life can prove rather short. It’s been a lit­tle over a year and a half since Wurtz post­ed the video, and thus far, his part­ing shots still feel pret­ty rel­e­vant: armed drones, 3d print­ing, plas­tic-choked oceans, and a seem­ing­ly unbridge­able gap between the desire to save the world and an actu­al plan for doing so.

Fried by 11 months of inten­sive research and labor on His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess, Wurtz is cur­rent­ly tak­ing a leave of absence from his­to­ry. These days, he’s pour­ing his ener­gies into orig­i­nal music videos like “At the Air­port Ter­mi­nal.” He also devotes a bit of every day to  answer­ing fans’ ques­tions, rou­tine­ly turn­ing in upwards of a dozen suc­cinct hum­ble, all-low­er­case replies:

1.18.19  7:00 pm   what inspired you to make “the entire world, i guess”? was it a project you already had in mind from before or did you start it when you saw you could do more than just japan

it’s always a nice idea to try to explain the whole world in one video. it’s sure­ly some­thing i’ve always want­ed to do, but was­n’t confident/experienced/stupid enough to believe i could do it until after i had done japan which worked so well

1.18.19  12:53 am   are you ever going to make any­thing else as in depth as his­to­ry of japan or the world?

that would take so much time that by the time it was done you prob­a­bly would­n’t care any­more, but some­one else will so i still might do it

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, he’s the sub­ject of a live­ly sub-red­dit. One fan, red­dit user n44m, was inspired to plot the time­line of His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, below.

To learn more about some of the civ­i­liza­tions, events and per­sons fea­tured in His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, check out anoth­er fan’s anno­tat­ed tran­scrip­tion here.

And rather than nit­pick about cer­tain crit­i­cal bits of his­to­ry that were left on the cut­ting room floor, try writ­ing a script for your own his­to­ry based ani­ma­tion:

The more you learn, the more you find out how much you’re gonna have to leave out. It’s like 99%. That was painful. — Bill Wurtz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? A New TED-Ed Animation Explains

in Animation, Books | January 25th, 2019

Ray Brad­bury’s Fahren­heit 451 envi­sions a future where “fire­men” are sent out not to put out fires, but to burn up any books they find with flamethrow­ers. To stu­dents assigned to read the nov­el today, the idea of an Amer­i­ca that has out­lawed books entire­ly might seem like an intrigu­ing if far-fetched notion, per­haps more suit­ed to the real­i­ty of the 1950s than the real­i­ty of today. Even if we’ve nev­er read Fahren­heit 451, near­ly all of us know the basic out­line of its sto­ry by now, so why should we still read it? In less than five min­utes, the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Madis­on’s Iseult Gille­spie offers an answer to that ques­tion.

“Fahren­heit 451 depicts a world gov­erned by sur­veil­lance, robot­ics, and vir­tu­al real­i­ty, a vision that proved remark­ably pre­scient, but also spoke to con­cerns of the time,” says Gille­spie. “The nov­el was pub­lished in 1953, at the height of the Cold War.  The era kin­dled wide­spread para­noia and fear through­out Brad­bury’s home coun­try of the Unit­ed States, ampli­fied by the sup­pres­sion of infor­ma­tion and bru­tal gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tions. In par­tic­u­lar, this witch hunt men­tal­i­ty tar­get­ed artists and writ­ers who were sus­pect­ed of com­mu­nist sym­pa­thies. Brad­bury was alarmed at this cul­tur­al crack­down. He believed it set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent for fur­ther cen­sor­ship, and was remind­ed of the destruc­tion of the Library of Alexan­dria and the book-burn­ing of fas­cist regimes.”

These con­cerns, though rel­e­vant to the era in which Brad­bury wrote Fahren­heit 451, are essen­tial­ly time­less. As with all dystopi­an fic­tion, the nov­el “ampli­fies trou­bling fea­tures of the world around us and imag­ines the con­se­quences of tak­ing them to an extreme.” Some of the trou­bling fea­tures of the world 65 years ago have dimin­ished, but some have great­ly increased, and we would do well to bear in mind that in Fahren­heit 451 â€śit was the apa­thy of the mass­es that gave rise to the cur­rent regime. The gov­ern­ment mere­ly cap­i­tal­ized on short atten­tion spans and the appetite for mind­less enter­tain­ment, reduc­ing the cir­cu­la­tion of ideas to ash. As cul­ture dis­ap­pears, imag­i­na­tion and self-expres­sion fol­low.” Cul­ture may take many more forms now than it did in the 1950s, but with­out our con­stant vig­i­lance, all of them could still be extin­guished, just as eas­i­ly as paper goes up in flame.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Father Writes a Great Let­ter About Cen­sor­ship When Son Brings Home Per­mis­sion Slip to Read Ray Bradbury’s Cen­sored Book, Fahren­heit 451

An Asbestos-Bound, Fire­proof Edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 (1953)

New Edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 That’s Only Read­able When You Apply Heat to Its Pages: Pre-Order It Today

A Teas­er Trail­er for Fahren­heit 451: A New Film Adap­ta­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Ever-Rel­e­vant Nov­el

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Sto­ry Fahren­heit 451 as a Radio Dra­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Complex Math Made Simple With Engaging Animations: Fourier Transform, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Neural Networks & More

in Animation, Math | January 15th, 2019

In many an audio engi­neer­ing course, I’ve come across the Fouri­er Trans­form, an idea so fun­da­men­tal in sound pro­duc­tion that it seems essen­tial for every­one to know it. My lim­it­ed under­stand­ing was, you might say, func­tion­al. It’s some kind of math­e­mat­i­cal reverse engi­neer­ing machine that turns wave­forms into fre­quen­cies, right? Yes, but it’s much more than that. The idea can seem over­whelm­ing to the non-math­e­mat­i­cal­ly-inclined among us.

The Fouri­er Trans­form, named for French math­e­mati­cian and physi­cist Jean-Bap­tiste Joseph Fouri­er, “decom­pos­es” any wave form into fre­quen­cies, and “vir­tu­al­ly every­thing in the world can be described via a wave­form,” writes one intro­duc­tion to the the­o­ry. That includes not only sounds but “elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields, the ele­va­tion of a hill ver­sus loca­tion… the price of  your favorite stock ver­sus time,” the sig­nals of an MRI scan­ner.

The con­cept “extends well beyond sound and fre­quen­cy into many dis­parate areas of math and even physics. It is crazy just how ubiq­ui­tous this idea is,” notes the 3Blue1Brown video above, one of dozens of ani­mat­ed explo­rations of math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts. I know far more than I did yes­ter­day thanks to this com­pre­hen­sive ani­mat­ed lec­ture. Even if it all seems old hat to you, “there is some­thing fun and enrich­ing,” the video assures us, “about see­ing what all of its com­po­nents look like.”

Things get com­pli­cat­ed rather quick­ly when we get into the dense equa­tions, but the video illus­trates every for­mu­la with graphs that trans­form the num­bers into mean­ing­ful mov­ing images.

3Blue1Brown, a project of for­mer Khan Acad­e­my fel­low Grant Sander­son, has done the same for dozens of STEM con­cepts, includ­ing such sub­jects as high­er dimen­sions, cryp­tocur­ren­cies, machine learn­ing, and neur­al net­works and essen­tials of cal­cu­lus and lin­ear alge­bra like the deriv­a­tive para­dox and “Vec­tors, what even are they?”

In short­er lessons, you can learn to count to 1000 on two hands, or, just below, learn what it feels like to invent math. (It feels weird at first.)

Sander­son­’s short cours­es “tend to fall into one of two cat­e­gories,” he writes: top­ics “peo­ple might be seek­ing out,” like many of those men­tioned above, and “prob­lems in math which many peo­ple may not have heard of, and which seem real­ly hard at first, but where some shift in per­spec­tive makes it both doable and beau­ti­ful.” These puz­zles with ele­gant­ly clever solu­tions can be found here. Whether you’re a hard­core math-head or not, you’ll find Sanderson’s series of 3Blue1Brown ani­ma­tions illu­mi­nat­ing. Find them all here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Cit­i­zen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teach­es Adults the Math They Missed in High School

Free Math Text­books 

Math Mag­ic

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

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