The Joy of Math

in Math | April 12th, 2010

If math went over your head in high school or col­lege, here’s a great way to redis­cov­er what you missed. In late Jan­u­ary, Steven Stro­gatz, a pro­fes­sor of Applied Math­e­mat­ics at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, began blog­ging math­e­mat­ics for The New York Times. And his whole goal is to show you, the read­er, the joy of math. Or, as he describes his mis­sion:

I’ll be writ­ing about the ele­ments of math­e­mat­ics, from pre-school to grad school, for any­one out there who’d like to have a sec­ond chance at the sub­ject — but this time from an adult per­spec­tive. It’s not intend­ed to be reme­di­al. The goal is to give you a bet­ter feel­ing for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Start­ing this week, this blog will be delv­ing into the great ideas at the heart of cal­cu­lus. You can jump on board right here. Thanks to Gregg for the heads up on this one.

Tony Judt on our Uncertain Future

in History, Life | March 30th, 2010

As we men­tioned two weeks ago, Tony Judt, a promi­nent his­to­ri­an and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, has been grap­pling with ALS (oth­er­wise known as Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease) since 2008. With the dis­ease now tak­ing its toll, Judt has gone more pub­lic and start­ed pub­lish­ing with more urgency. On Mon­day, he was inter­viewed by Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (lis­ten below, here or on iTunes). Of the many items dis­cussed, one par­tic­u­lar­ly struck me. When Gross asked whether his­to­ry still mat­tered deeply to him, the his­to­ri­an answered: yes, but:

I think now, I’m more wor­ried about the future. The past is always going to be a mess. It’s going to be a mess because it was mess and because peo­ple are going to abuse it, get it wrong and so on. But I’m rea­son­ably con­fi­dent that with each gen­er­a­tion of his­to­ri­ans, we keep fight­ing hard to get it right again. But we could get the future very seri­ous­ly wrong, and there it’s much hard­er to get it right… I’m encoun­ter­ing the first gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple in col­leges and schools who real­ly do not believe in the future, who don’t think not just that things will get evi­dent­ly and per­ma­nent­ly bet­ter but who feel that some­thing has gone very bad­ly wrong that they can’t quite put their fin­ger on, but that is going to spoil the world that they’re grow­ing up into.

Whether it’s cli­mate change or polit­i­cal cyn­i­cism or over­re­ac­tion or lack of reac­tion, to exter­nal chal­lenges, whether it’s ter­ror­ism or pover­ty, the sense that it’s all got out of con­trol, that they, the politi­cians and so on, media peo­ple, are nei­ther doing any­thing nor telling us the truth. That sense seems to have per­vad­ed the younger gen­er­a­tion in ways that were not true in my expe­ri­ence.

Maybe the last time that might have been true was in the 1920s, where you had the com­bi­na­tion of shock and anger from World War I, the begin­nings of eco­nom­ic depres­sion and the ter­ri­fy­ing real­iza­tion that there might very well be a World War II. I don’t think we’re on the edge of World War III or IV. But I do think that we are on the edge of a ter­ri­fy­ing world. That’s why I wrote the book [Ill Fares the Land].

The first chap­ter of Ill Fares the Land is now avail­able (for free) on The New York Times web­site, and it will give you a quick feel for the issues that Judt thinks we need to con­front. The com­plete Fresh Air inter­view ranges much more broad­ly, going into Judt’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence with ALS, and I’d encour­age you to give it your time. (Stream below.) Also please vis­it Move For ALS to con­tribute to a new cam­paign affil­i­at­ed with Tony Judt to fund ALS research.

Google Lit Trips

in Google, Literature | February 19th, 2010

For three years, Eng­lish teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach lit­er­a­ture. Each “Lit Trip” involves map­ping the move­ments of char­ac­ters over a plot’s time­line and pro­vid­ing excerpts, pic­tures, and links at each loca­tion. I found a lit trip for one of my favorite nov­els, Cor­mac McCarthy’s Blood Merid­i­an, which involves a lot of move­ment across the old West. McCarthy him­self is said to have spent years trac­ing these paths and study­ing loca­tions in prepa­ra­tion for writ­ing the nov­el. You’ll find a com­plete list of lit trips here, includ­ing such clas­sics as Mac­beth, Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Odyssey. It’s dif­fi­cult to get a sense of the fan­tas­tic effect of visu­al­ly unpack­ing a plot with­out down­load­ing a lit trip and try­ing it with­in Google Earth (down­load here). But here’s a video of a lit trip for Make Way for Duck­lings by Robert McCloskey. It will give you a quick taste of the lit trip expe­ri­ence:

Final­ly, you can find a two-part video intro­duc­tion to Lit Trips by Kate Reavey, a pro­fes­sor at Penin­su­la Col­lege, here and here.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Insti­tute for the Study of Psy­cho­analy­sis and Cul­ture. He also par­tic­i­pates in The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast con­sist­ing of infor­mal dis­cus­sions about philo­soph­i­cal texts by three phi­los­o­phy grad­u­ate school dropouts.

Dewey Music: Putting a Friendly Face on Public Domain Music

in Music | January 20th, 2010

As we’ve men­tioned in the past, Archive.org hosts some won­der­ful free, pub­lic domain media. Many of their clas­sic films appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Movies. And they also pro­vide access to lots of free pub­lic domain music (includ­ing a large Grate­ful Dead con­cert archive). Thanks to a new site, Dewey Music, you can now sort through this exten­sive music cat­a­logue with greater ease and find the free gems faster. Dewey Music was cre­at­ed by six indus­tri­ous col­lege stu­dents, and we thank them.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Advertise on Open Culture

in | November 25th, 2009

Reach Savvy Education/Culture Audi­ence Online:

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Audi­ence Sta­tis­tics:

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Data accord­ing to Quant­cast.

Adver­tise with us Through Adwords:

You can imme­di­ate­ly place ads on Open Cul­ture by using Google’s Adwords plat­form. This will give you the abil­i­ty to tar­get the whole site or spe­cif­ic pages. Find direc­tions on how to tar­get our site here.

YouTube Edu Releases Version 2.0, Goes International

in Education, YouTube | October 1st, 2009

A quick bit of break­ing news. YouTube.EDU has released Ver­sion 2.0 today and has gone inter­na­tion­al. The site, launched six months ago, now fea­tures aca­d­e­m­ic con­tent from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, the Nether­lands, Rus­sia, and Israel. As part of this glob­al effort, the YouTube team has brought 45 new uni­ver­si­ties into the fold, includ­ing Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, Open Uni­ver­si­ty, Boc­coni Uni­ver­si­ty, the Open Uni­ver­si­ty of Cat­alo­nia, to name a few. In total, YouTube.EDU now works with over 200 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, and serves more than 40,000 videos. When you vis­it, make sure you have some time to spend. For more details on this glob­al effort, you can read this handy blog post.

For more smart con­tent from YouTube, see our big list: Intel­li­gent YouTube Video Col­lec­tions.

Should You Give to Harvard?

in Education, Harvard, Philosophy | September 29th, 2009

That’s the ques­tion that The Ethi­cist asks in The New York Times. Below, I present the issue and part of the answer. Read through it all and tell us where you stand on the issue.

The Issue

The fis­cal year for major uni­ver­si­ty endow­ments end­ed June 30, and schools have been report­ing their results: not good. In the Har­vard-Yale port­fo­lio game, the lat­ter was down 24.6 per­cent, while its rival lost even more, 27.3 per­cent. If you are an Ivy alum, this might seem a good moment to donate to your alma mater, to help rebuild its bat­tered port­fo­lio. But should you, giv­en the pow­er of edu­ca­tion to improve people’s lives?

The Argu­ment

Do not donate to Har­vard. To do so is to offer more pie to a port­ly fel­low while the gaunt and hun­gry press their faces to the win­dow (at some sort of metaphor­ic col­lege cafe­te­ria, any­way). Even after last year’s loss­es, Harvard’s endow­ment exceeds $26 bil­lion, the largest of any Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty, greater than the G.D.P. of Esto­nia. By con­trast, among his­tor­i­cal­ly black col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, Howard has the largest endow­ment, about $420 mil­lion, a mere 1.6 per­cent the size of Harvard’s. (Donors gave Har­vard more than $600 mil­lion just this fis­cal year.) The best-endowed com­mu­ni­ty col­lege,Valen­cia, in Orlan­do, Fla., has around $67 mil­lion, or 0.26 per­cent of Harvard’s wealth. This is not to deny that Har­vard does fine work or could find ways to spend the mon­ey but to assert that oth­er schools have a greater need and a greater moral claim to your benev­o­lence…  More here.

Math Magic

in Math, TED Talks | August 3rd, 2009

Arthur Ben­jamin is a self-pro­claimed “math­ema­gi­cian.” He’s also a pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics at Har­vey Mudd Col­lege. No need to say more. Watch him go. We’re adding this one to our list of YouTube favorites.

via The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny’s Face­book Page.

Dominic West (aka Jimmy McNulty) Reads Jane Austen

in Literature, Television | July 5th, 2009

If you’ve watched The Wire, you know him as Jim­my McNul­ty, the smart, booz­ing Bal­ti­more cop that likes an occa­sion­al romp and goes rogue here and there. Now, here’s your chance to see anoth­er side of Dominic, the side that’s more at home, at least geo­graph­i­cal­ly speak­ing. Here we have, as Ed tells us, the British actor, an Eton prod­uct, “read­ing Pride and Prej­u­dice (he’s a first-rate read­er) and then smirk­ing before he game­ly sips some Carte Noire cof­fee.” Watch it here, and thanks Ed for the tip.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Cre­ator of the Wire on Amer­i­can Urban Decline

100 Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists

in Science | July 1st, 2009

The title says it all. Lots of sci­ence lec­tures from lead­ing thinkers. Some sci­en­tists (Dawkins, Hawk­ing, etc.) list­ed here are house­hold names. Oth­ers are not. Note that most lec­tures come from broad­er video col­lec­tions that we were men­tioned in our pop­u­lar piece: Intel­li­gent Video: The Top Cul­tur­al & Edu­ca­tion­al Video Sites.

via @acourosa. Also check out @openculture