Archive for the ‘science’ Category
06
Aug
2010
Robin Moore’s String Math Portraits
String theory for the rest of us, or what vintage photography has to do with gaming for good.
In the early 1980’s, James R. Murphy began teaching mathematics using string figures in an effort to engage students who didn’t “like” math. Kids found the activity enormously fun and, almost without realizing it, learned to the kind of focus and dedication necessary for solving a problem by completing a series of complex steps — a fundamental skill in math and science. Essentially, it was an early successful experiment in using gaming for education — something on the minds of many of today’s social-good innovators.
One day, Murphy asked Robin Moore, a student of his and a budding photographer, to take some pictures of the string figures, initially intended purely as a visual record. But Moore produced a series of remarkable black-and-white portraits of these kids and their strings.
Taken in La Guardia, often against the backdrop of bathroom walls and decaying hallways, these portraits exude the palpable pride the kids take in their string creations, at once delighted with and enthralled by these logic-driven tangles.
More about the project, including papers about Murphy’s original methodology for teaching via string figures, can be found in Murphy’s String Figures: Teaching Math With String Figures.
And what became of Robin Moore? We, after enlisting the help of Sergey and Larry, couldn’t answer. To be filed in our would-love-to-do-a-story-one-day box: A Portrait of Robin Moore.
via Coudal
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13
Jul
2010
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
What the speed of light has to do with the reinvention of agriculture and our fear of tininess.
This week, we’re busy covering TEDGlobal 2010 for GOOD — which you can follow via our live Twitter stream — so we’re keeping it short and sweet here at Brain Pickings. And, at barely nine minutes, it doesn’t get any sweeter than this brilliant excerpt from Carl Sagan’s 1997 gem, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space and in potential — the tidy, anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.”
The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning.”
For a full immersion into Sagan’s compelling exploration of the science-philosophy continuum, do grab the book itself. Meanwhile, follow along with our weeklong immersion in another end of said science-philosophy spectrum.
We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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