Posts Tagged ‘science’
13
Aug
2010
On Words
A modern-day Helen Keller moment, or why the currency of communication is more complex than we think.
Words matter. They shape how we relate to one another and the world at large, they frame what matters and why. They can break your heart (“My feelings for you have changed…”), tickle your mind (“The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know…”) and enlighten your soul (“I have a dream…”). They can steer entire ideologies and even spark the extinction of species.
Words, a fantastic new episode of WNYC’s always-excellent Radiolab, examines the importance of words by imagining a world without them. From a look at Shakespeare’s linguistic chemistry to a first-hand account of what it’s like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke (yep, we’re talking about Jill Bolte Taylor of blockbuster TED Talk fame) to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life and revealed the worldview-changing insight that everything has a name, the hour-long program offers a profound perspective shift in this currency of our day-to-day that we take for granted.
What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols and we start trading symbols? It changes our thinking, it changes our ideas.” ~ Susan Shaller
The episode is available as a free mp3 download and we highly recommend you subscribe to the full series podcast in iTunes, also free.
For further reading, these four books referenced in Words are absolutely fascinating and paint a rich, comprehensive portrait of the layered significance of language in culture and human psychology.
- A Man Without Words by Susan Shaller
- A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind by Charles Fernyhough
- Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
- The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Jill Bolte Taylor
Also of note and highly recommended, a trio of books by Steven Pinker, whom we consider one of the sharpest thinkers on language today:
- The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
- Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
- The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
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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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