Watch an Animated Visualization of the Bass Line for the Motown Classic, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

in Music, Technology | June 1st, 2018

Jamer­son is the Schoen­berg of get­ting from the I chord to the IV chord. He’s algo­rith­mi­cal­ly gen­er­at­ing a new pat­tern every phrase…[He] belongs with Bach, Debussy and Mozart.

- Jack Strat­ton

Side­man James Jamer­son, Paul McCartney’s musi­cal hero and a co-author of the Motown sound, is a great illus­tra­tion of the bass’ impor­tance in pop and R&B his­to­ry.

He kept a funky beat for such artists as Ste­vie Won­der, Martha and the Van­del­las, Mar­vin Gaye, and the Supremes. His low notes helped the har­monies sing.

Jack Strat­ton, leader of the mod­ern Amer­i­can funk band, Vulf­peck, named Jamer­son to his Holy Trin­i­ty of Bass, along with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Sly and the Fam­i­ly Stone’s Lar­ry Gra­ham.

(Joe Dart, Vulfpeck’s bassist, is a pret­ty hot tick­et too.)

Strat­ton’s rev­er­ence extend­ed to a side project in which he visu­al­ly plots some of Jamerson’s savoriest base­lines.

Check out the crag­gy peaks and val­leys on Mar­vin Gaye & Tam­mi Ter­rel­l’s famous ren­di­tion of Ash­ford & Simpson’s “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough,” above.

No won­der it’s the most lis­tened to iso­lat­ed bass track on No Tre­ble, the online mag­a­zine for bass play­ers.

All togeth­er now:

Stratton’s visu­al­iza­tions of the Jame­son lines for Ste­vie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” and “For Once In My Life” are pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing too.

Learn more about Jamerson’s high­ly influ­en­tial bass tech­nique in Dr. Lick’s Stand­ing in the Shad­ows of Motown: The Life and Music of Leg­endary Bassist James Jamer­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Device Invented to Resuscitate Canaries in Coal Mines (Circa 1896)

in History, Technology | May 29th, 2018

Lewis Pol­lard, the cura­tor of the Muse­um of Sci­ence and Indus­try in Man­ches­ter, Eng­land, recent­ly high­light­ed his favorite object in his muse­um’s collections–this gad­get, cre­at­ed cir­ca 1896, used to resus­ci­tate canaries in coal mines.

For about a century–from the 1890s through the 1980s–British coal min­ers had a tra­di­tion of low­er­ing canaries into a coal mine to detect the pres­ence of nox­ious gas­es. As the BBC explains, the “canary is par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive to tox­ic gas­es such as car­bon monox­ide which is colour­less, odour­less and taste­less. This gas could eas­i­ly form under­ground dur­ing a mine fire or after an explo­sion. Fol­low­ing a mine fire or explo­sion, mine res­cuers would descend into the mine, car­ry­ing a canary in a small wood­en or met­al cage. Any sign of dis­tress from the canary was a clear sig­nal the con­di­tions under­ground were unsafe and min­ers should be evac­u­at­ed from the pit and the mine­shafts made safer.”

In decid­ing to send canaries into the mines, inven­tors came up with the some­what humane device shown above. Accord­ing to Pol­lard, the cir­cu­lar door of the cage “would be kept open and had a grill to pre­vent the canary [from] escap­ing. Once the canary showed signs of car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing the door would be closed and a valve opened, allow­ing oxy­gen from the tank on top to be released and revive the canary. The min­ers would then be expect­ed to evac­u­ate the dan­ger area.” This prac­tice con­tin­ued for almost 100 years, until canaries offi­cial­ly start­ed to get replaced by tech­nol­o­gy in 1986.

Read more about Pol­lard’s favorite object here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Uses Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Map Thou­sands of Bird Sounds Into an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

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Discover the Lost Early Computer Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Proto-Internet from the 1970s

in Art, Technology | May 25th, 2018

Most of us got hooked up to the inter­net in the 1990s or there­abouts, though the true ear­ly adopters did it when per­son­al com­put­ers first blew up in the 1980s. But cer­tain Cana­di­an house­holds got online even ear­li­er, in the late 1970s, although not quite on the inter­net as we know it: they had Telidon, a phone line-con­nect­ed video­tex/tele­tex sys­tem that used a reg­u­lar tele­vi­sion as a dis­play. “It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket­place in Cana­da was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982,” writes Don­ald Gilles in the Cana­di­an Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Fuel­ing that fever was “hope and belief in tech­nol­o­gy – sci­ence-based tech­nol­o­gy – as an agent of change, a bringer of nov­el­ty, and enhancer of life.”


When it first came avail­able, Telidon’s con­tent providers includ­ed “cor­po­ra­tions and inter­ests such as The Bay, Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca and the Toron­to Star,” writes the CBC’s Chris Hamp­ton, but “a com­mu­ni­ty of arts-mind­ed elec­tron­ics wonks, tele­com prophets and oth­er curi­ous sorts coa­lesced around it, embrac­ing it as an art medi­um.”

You can see some of those Telidon cre­ators inter­viewed in the short Moth­er­board doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post. While busi­ness­es exper­i­ment­ed with pos­si­bil­i­ties of bank­ing and shop­ping through the sys­tem, artists pushed its bound­aries even fur­ther, using its now severe-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions as a cat­a­lyst for visu­al cre­ativ­i­ty. On some months, artist Bill Per­ry’s Telidon mag­a­zine Com­put­erese drew more view­ers than every oth­er provider com­bined.


Now, more than 30 years after its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, Telidon has attract­ed atten­tion again. It turns out that its ear­ly-com­put­er-art aes­thet­ic has aged quite well, as seen in the exam­ples now being pulled from the archives and Insta­grammed by Toron­to new-media cen­ter Inter­Ac­cess. Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed to make Telidon devel­op­ment tools avail­able to the artist com­mu­ni­ty, Inter­Ac­cess launched this social media project as a way of cel­e­brat­ing its own 35th birth­day. Look­ing back on all the uses artists found for Telidon — every­thing from abstract qua­si-ani­ma­tions to a study of per­spec­tives on the Cold War — we can imag­ine how com­par­a­tive­ly bound­less the mod­ern inter­net would have seemed to them. But we might also won­der what that mod­ern inter­net would look like if it had a lit­tle more of their artis­ti­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous spir­it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

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 Face­book.

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The First 100 Years of the Bicycle: A 1915 Documentary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Enduring Design in 1890

in History, Technology | May 10th, 2018

Back in 1915, French film­mak­ers decid­ed to revis­it the evo­lu­tion of the bicy­cle dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, mov­ing from the inven­tion of the bicy­cle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged dur­ing the 1890s. As the result­ing film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cum­ber­some and seem­ing­ly per­ilous to ride, to tak­ing on the tried and true shape that we still rec­og­nize today.

This film was pre­served by the Nether­lands’ EYE Film Insti­tute. Hence the sub­ti­tles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Mag­a­zine, you can read Eng­lish trans­la­tions below:

1. The drai­sine was invent­ed only a cen­tu­ry ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauer­brun.
2. [This sub­ti­tle nev­er appears in the film.
3. The vehi­cle that lies between the drai­sine and the 1850 bicy­cle has an improved steer­ing wheel and a fit­ted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lalle­ment invent­ed ped­als that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tri­cy­cles were heav­ier than the two-wheel­ers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, var­i­ous improve­ments were made, includ­ing the increased use of rub­ber tyres.
7. In 1875, fol­low­ing an inven­tion by the engi­neer Tri­ef­fault, the frame was made of hol­low pipes.
8. Fol­low­ing the fash­ion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as pos­si­ble.
9. In 1878, Renard cre­at­ed a bicy­cle with a wheel cir­cum­fer­ence of more than 7 feet. Just sit­ting down on one of these was an ath­let­ic feat!
11. At the begin­ning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a small­er one, and the chain was intro­duced on the front wheel for dri­ving pow­er.
12. The bicy­cle of today.

For anoth­er look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 news­reel that gives its own nar­ra­tive account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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 Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)

Watch Boy and Bicy­cle: Rid­ley Scott’s Very First Film (1965)

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip Which Took Place on April 19, 1943

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How the Mysteries of the Vatican Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Artificial Intelligence

in History, Technology | May 10th, 2018


Some­where with­in the Vat­i­can exists the Vat­i­can Secret Archives, whose 53 miles of shelv­ing con­tains more than 600 col­lec­tions of account books, offi­cial acts, papal cor­re­spon­dence, and oth­er his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments. Though its hold­ings date back to the eighth cen­tu­ry, it has in the past few weeks come to world­wide atten­tion. This has brought about all man­ner of jokes about the plot of Dan Brown’s next nov­el, but also impor­tant news about the tech­nol­o­gy of man­u­script dig­i­ti­za­tion. It seems a project to get the con­tents of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives dig­i­tized and online has made great progress crack­ing a prob­lem that once seemed impos­si­bly dif­fi­cult: turn­ing hand­writ­ing into com­put­er-search­able text.

In Codice Ratio is “devel­op­ing a full-fledged sys­tem to auto­mat­i­cal­ly tran­scribe the con­tents of the man­u­scripts” that uses not the stan­dard method of opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (OCR), which looks for the spaces between words, but a new way that can han­dle con­nect­ed cur­sive and cal­li­graph­ic let­ters. Their method, in the lin­go of the field, “is to gov­ern impre­cise char­ac­ter seg­men­ta­tion by con­sid­er­ing that cor­rect seg­ments are those that give rise to a sequence of char­ac­ters that more like­ly com­pose a Latin word. We have designed a prin­ci­pled solu­tion that relies on con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works and sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage mod­els.”

This is a job, in oth­er words, for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, but in part­ner­ship with human intel­li­gence, a sel­dom-tapped source of which the sci­en­tists behind In Codice Ratio have har­nessed: that of high-school stu­dents. Their spe­cial OCR soft­ware, writes the Atlantic’s Sam Kean, works by “divid­ing each word into a series of ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal bands and look­ing for local minimums—the thin­ner por­tions, where there’s less ink (or real­ly, few­er pix­els). The soft­ware then carves the let­ters at these joints.” But the soft­ware “needs to know which groups of chunks rep­re­sent real let­ters and which are bogus,” and so “the team recruit­ed stu­dents at 24 schools in Italy to build the projects’ mem­o­ry banks,” man­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ing the let­ters the sys­tem had prop­er­ly rec­og­nized from those over which it had stum­bled.

And so the stu­dents became the sys­tem’s “teach­ers,” improv­ing its abil­i­ty to extract the con­tent of hand­writ­ing, and not just hand­writ­ing but vast quan­ti­ties of archa­ic hand­writ­ing, with every click they made. The encour­ag­ing results thus far mean that it prob­a­bly won’t be long before large por­tions of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives (which, con­trary to its awk­ward­ly trans­lat­ed name, is such a non-secret it even has its own offi­cial web site) will final­ly become easy to browse, search, copy, paste, and ana­lyze. So they may, in the full­ness of time, prove a fruit­ful resource indeed to writ­ers of Catholi­cism-cen­tric thrillers like Brown — who, after all, has already gone pub­lic with his enthu­si­asm for man­u­script dig­i­ti­za­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

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 Face­book.

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You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

in History, Technology | May 9th, 2018

Grow­ing up, I had a box set of Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ic stamps from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art. For a few weeks I used it to write cod­ed let­ters to a friend, pos­sessed of the same box set, who lived else­where in the neigh­bor­hood. Today’s smart­phone-tot­ing kids, of course, pre­fer text mes­sag­ing, a medi­um which to date has offered lit­tle in the way of hiero­glyph­ics, espe­cial­ly com­pared to the vast and ever-grow­ing qua­si-logo­graph­ic library of emo­ji, all of them approved by the offi­cial emo­ji sub­com­mit­tee of the Uni­code Con­sor­tium. But Uni­code itself, the indus­try-stan­dard sys­tem for dig­i­tal­ly encod­ing, rep­re­sent­ing, and han­dling text in the var­i­ous writ­ing sys­tems of the world, may soon expand to include more than 2,000 hiero­glyph­ics.

“Between 750 and 1,000 Hiero­glyphs were used by Egypt­ian authors dur­ing the peri­ods of the Old, Mid­dle, and then New King­dom (2687 BCE–1081 BCE),” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Sarah E. Bond. “That num­ber lat­er great­ly increased dur­ing the Gre­co-Roman peri­od, like­ly to around 7,000.”

Dur­ing that time under Alexan­der the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Roman Empire, “the lan­guage grew, changed, and diver­si­fied over the course of thou­sands of years, a fact which can now be reflect­ed through its dig­i­tal encod­ing. Although Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs have been defined with­in Uni­code since ver­sion 5.2, released in 2009, the glyphs were high­ly lim­it­ed in num­ber and did not stretch into the Gre­co-Roman peri­od.”

That sit­u­a­tion could great­ly improve if the Uni­code Con­sor­tium approves its revised draft of stan­dards for encod­ing Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs cur­rent­ly on the table, a scroll through which reveals how much more of the visu­al (not to men­tion seman­tic) rich­ness of this ancient writ­ing sys­tem that could soon come avail­able to any­one with a dig­i­tal device. Its rich vari­ety of tools, ani­mals, icons (in both the old and mod­ern sens­es), humans, and ele­ments of human anato­my could do much for the Egyp­tol­o­gists of the world need­ing to effi­cient­ly send the con­tent of the texts they study to one anoth­er. And though I recall get­ting plen­ty com­mu­ni­cat­ed with those 24 rub­ber stamps, who dares pre­dict to what use those tex­ting kids will put these thou­sands of dig­i­tal hiero­glyph­ics when they get them at their fin­ger­tips?

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

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 Face­book.

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The Cutting-Edge Science That Can Turn Everyday Objects, Like a Bag of Chips, Into a Listening Device

in Science, Technology | May 8th, 2018

For decades we’ve laughed at the per­sis­tent movie and tele­vi­sion cliche of “image enhance,” where­by char­ac­ters — usu­al­ly detec­tives of one kind or anoth­er in pur­suit of a yet-unknown vil­lain — dis­cov­er just the clue they need by way of tech­no­log­i­cal mag­ic that some­how increas­es the amount of detail in a piece of found footage. But now, of course, our age of rapid­ly improv­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has brought an algo­rithm for that. And not only can such tech­nolo­gies find visu­al data we nev­er thought an image con­tained, they can find son­ic data as well: recov­er­ing the sound, in oth­er words, “record­ed” in osten­si­bly silent video.

“When sound hits an object, it caus­es small vibra­tions of the object’s sur­face,” explains the abstract of “The Visu­al Micro­phone: Pas­sive Recov­ery of Sound from Video,” a paper by Abe Davis, Michael Rubin­stein, Neal Wad­hwa, Gau­tham Mysore, Fre­do Durand, and William T. Free­man. “We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibra­tions and par­tial­ly recov­er the sound that pro­duced them, allow­ing us to turn every­day objects — a glass of water, a pot­ted plant, a box of tis­sues, or a bag of chips — into visu­al micro­phones.” Or a lis­ten­ing device. You can see, and more impres­sive­ly hear, this process in action in the video at the top of the post.

The video just above mag­ni­fies the sound-caused motion of a bag of chips, to give us a sense of what their algo­rithm has to work with when it infers the sound present in the bag’s envi­ron­ment. In a way this all holds up to com­mon sense, giv­en that sound, as we all learn, comes from waves that make oth­er things vibrate, be they our eardrums, our speak­ers — or, as this research reveals, pret­ty much every­thing else as well. Though the bag of chips turned out to work quite well as a record­ing medi­um, some of their oth­er test sub­jects, includ­ing a brick cho­sen specif­i­cal­ly for its lack of sound-cap­tur­ing poten­tial, also did bet­ter than expect­ed.

The hid­den infor­ma­tion poten­tial­ly recov­er­able from video hard­ly stops there, as sug­gest­ed by Rubin­stein’s TED Talk just above. “Of course, sur­veil­lance is the first appli­ca­tion that comes to mind,” he says, to slight­ly ner­vous laugh­ter from the crowd. But “maybe in the future we’ll be able to use it, for exam­ple, to recov­er sound across space, because sound can’t trav­el in space, but light can.” Just one of many sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly noble pos­si­bil­i­ties, for which watch­ing what we say next time we open up a bag of Dori­tos would be, per­haps, a small price to pay.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Cre­at­ed by Syn­the­siz­ers Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Radiooooo: Dis­cov­er the Musi­cal Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Dif­fer­ent Times & Places

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 Face­book.

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What Is Blockchain? Three Videos Explain the New Technology That Promises to Change Our World

in Technology | May 1st, 2018

You’ve heard the word “blockchain” many times now, but prob­a­bly not quite as many as you’ve heard the word “bit­coin.” Yet you sure­ly have a sense that the ref­er­ents of those two words have a con­nec­tion, and even if you haven’t yet been inter­est­ed in either, you may well know that blockchain, a tech­nol­o­gy, makes Bit­coin, a cur­ren­cy, pos­si­ble in the first place. Their sheer nov­el­ty has already giv­en rise to a mini-indus­try of explain­er videos, more of them deal­ing direct­ly with bit­coin than blockchain, but in time the lat­ter could poten­tial­ly over­take the for­mer in impor­tance, to the degree that it becomes as vital to soci­ety as the pro­to­cols that under­gird the inter­net itself.

Or at least you could come away con­vinced of that after watch­ing the blockchain explain­er videos fea­tured here. The short­est of the three, the one by the Insti­tute for the Future at the top of the post, attempts to break down, in just two min­utes, the prin­ci­ples behind this tech­nol­o­gy, still in its infan­cy, in which so many see such rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial.

“Blockchains store infor­ma­tion across a net­work of per­son­al com­put­ers, mak­ing them not just decen­tral­ized but dis­trib­uted,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. “This means no cen­tral com­pa­ny or per­son owns the sys­tem, yet every­one can use it and help run it.” And accord­ing to blockchain’s boost­ers, that very decen­tral­iza­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion makes it that much more trustable and less hack­able.

In the Wired video just above, blockchain researcher Bet­ti­na War­burg explains her sub­ject in five dif­fer­ent ways to peo­ple at five dif­fer­ent stages of life, from a five-year-old girl to a ful­ly grown aca­d­e­m­ic. Actu­al­ly, that last inter­locu­tor, an NYU his­to­ri­an named Finn Brun­ton, does much of the explain­ing him­self, and right at the begin­ning of his seg­ment (at 9:48) rolls out one of the clear­er and more intrigu­ing run­down of the nature of blockchain cur­rent­ly float­ing around on the inter­net:

A tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tion of blockchain is that it is a per­sis­tent, trans­par­ent, pub­lic, append-only ledger. So it is a sys­tem that you can add data to, and not change pre­vi­ous data with­in. It does this through a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing con­sen­sus between scat­tered, or dis­trib­uted, par­ties that do not need to trust each oth­er. They just need to trust the mech­a­nism by which their con­sen­sus is arrived at. In the case of blockchain, it relies on some form of chal­lenge such that no one actor on the net­work is able to solve this chal­lenge more con­sis­tent­ly than any­one else on the net­work. It ran­dom­izes the process, and in the­o­ry ensures that no one can force the blockchain to accept a par­tic­u­lar entry onto the ledger that oth­ers dis­agree with.

Brun­ton also empha­sizes that “almost every aspect of it that is con­nect­ed with the con­cept of mon­ey” — includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to Bit­coin — “is wild­ly over-hyped.” Those who can look past the Gold Rush-style bal­ly­hoo­ing of those ear­ly appli­ca­tions of blockchain can bet­ter grasp what role the tech­nol­o­gy, which essen­tial­ly enables the build­ing of sys­tems to secure­ly exchange infor­ma­tion over the inter­net that no one per­son or com­pa­ny owns, might one day play in many parts of our lives, from finance to ener­gy to health care. “Cred­it scores that aren’t con­trolled by a hand­ful of high-risk, data-breach-prone com­pa­nies,” promis­es Caris­sa Carter of Stan­ford’s d.school, “cred­i­ble news sys­tems that resist cen­sor­ship; effi­cient pow­er grids that could low­er your pow­er bills.”

Before it can bring those won­ders, Bit­coin must first over­come for­mi­da­ble tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions: as Com­put­er­world’s Lucas Mear­i­an writes, for instance,” the Bit­coin blockchain har­ness­es any­where between 10 and 100 times as much com­put­ing pow­er com­pared to all of Google’s serv­ing farms put togeth­er.”  But then, few of the first devel­op­ers of the tech­nolo­gies that dri­ve the inter­net could have imag­ined all we do with them across the world today, and those who did must have had a sol­id under­stand­ing of its most basic ele­ments. How do you know when you’ve attained that under­stand­ing? “If you can’t explain it sim­ply, you don’t under­stand it well enough,” as Albert Ein­stein once said, and as Citi Inno­va­tion Lab CTO Shai Rubin quotes him as say­ing at the begin­ning of his own blockchain explain­er, per­formed in less than fif­teen min­utes using no pieces of tech­nol­o­gy more rev­o­lu­tion­ary than a white­board and mark­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Actu­al­ly Is Bit­coin? Princeton’s Free Course “Bit­coin and Cur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies” Pro­vides Much-Need­ed Answers

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: A Free Course from Prince­ton

The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book Is Now Free Online

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 Face­book.

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