“The colors of a rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going by⦔
For nearly half a century, Sir David Attenborough has captivated the world as one of our era’s most prominent natural history storytellers. Best known for his Life and Planet Earth series for the BBC, a kind of gold standard for nature documentaries, he is now back with Frozen Planet. The teaser for it bound to put a smile on your day — an adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s classic “What a Wonderful World”, read by Attenborough to scenes of nature at its most breathtaking. Take a breath, and enjoy.
Here is the trailer for Frozen Planet, breathtaking in its own right:
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When Feynman faces a problem, he’s unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinksβ¦ He was so unstuck — if something didn’t work, he’d look at it another way.” ~ Marvin Minsky, MIT
At around minute 39, Feynman gives a fantastic analogy-turned-explanation that captures what’s essentially the heart of the scientific process:
In the case of the chess game, the rules become more complicated as you go along, but in the physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears, on the whole, to be more complicated because we learn about a greater experience — that is, we learn about more particles and new things — and so the laws look more complicated again. But if you realize all the time, what’s kind of wonderful is as we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience, every once in a while we have these integrations in which everything is pulled together in a unification, which turns out to be simpler than it looked before.”
Tender and intelligent, the film reveals some of Feynman’s defining qualities: his intense cross-disciplinary curiosity and determination (he taught himself to be a skillful artist, studying drawing like he studied science); his thoughtful, caring character (the anecdote Joan, Feynman’s younger sister, recounts at about 9:04 is just about the most poetic expression of nerd-affection I’ve ever encountered); and, perhaps above all, the remarkable blend of humility and genius that made him able to see error and wrongness as an essential piece of intellectual inquiry and truth itself.
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What safe sex has to do with 3-D printing, robotics, and education in the developing world.
From the fine folks at PBS Arts comes another fantastic micro-documentary, part of their Off Book series, which previously explored typography, steampunk, visual culture online, and generative art. On the heels of this morning’s Eames documentary, it takes a look at the world of product design, from its aesthetic and pizzaz to its ethic and values, featuring fuseproject’s Yves Behar, Peter Schmitt of MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, and Dr. Harvey Moscot of Mocost Eyewear. Though limited in both scope and “cast,” the film squeezes an impressive amount in its measly 6 minutes and offers a welcome prompt to think a little more deeply about the myriad products with which we interact daily.
What design does at its best is to accelerate the adoption of new ideas.” ~ Yves Behar
For a more in-depth look at the complex and cross-disciplinary facets of product design, from engineering to art history to cultural anthropology, see BBC’s excellent The Genius of Design and, of course, Gary Hustwit’s Objectified. Then, revisit Dieter Rams’ 10 timeless principles of good design.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it's cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
For nearly half a century, Sir David Attenborough has captivated the world as one of our era’s most prominent natural history storytellers. Best known for his Life and Planet Earth series for the BBC, a kind of gold standard for nature documentaries, he is now back with Frozen Planet. The teaser for it bound to put a smile on your day — an adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s classic “What a Wonderful World”, read by Attenborough to scenes of nature at its most breathtaking. Take a breath, and enjoy.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
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