Brain Pickings

Posts Tagged ‘Vi Hart’

26 FEBRUARY, 2013

How to Tame Trolls: Vi Hart on Dealing with Negative Comments

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“Your greatest creation is yourself. Like any great work of art, creating a great self means putting in hard work, every day, for years.”

Mathemusician Vi Hart has been a regular around here with her whimsical and mind-bending stop-motion explanations of scientific concepts. But it turns out she’s also an astute social psychologist and oracle of human nature: This hand-made disquisition on how to deal with negative comments and trolls should be a cornerstone of basic digital literacy. Like Bertrand Russell, she reminds us that to create is much braver and more difficult than to destroy; like Ezra Pound, she admonishes against taking criticism from people who have never created anything meaningful themselves; like Neil Gaiman, she points to the simple — though hardly easy — truth that the only dignified and worthwhile response to such hateful attacks is to make good art.

I have no power over you that you don’t give me, and you have no power over me that I don’t give you. … Your greatest creation is yourself. Like any great work of art, creating a great self means putting in hard work, every day, for years.

And if all that balanced, psychologically measured, self-aware response fails, there’s always F. Scott Fitzgerald’s approach.

Thanks, Juliette; image: Illustration by John Bauer for Walter Stenström’s “The Boy and the Trolls,” 1915 (public domain)

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11 FEBRUARY, 2013

Mathemusician Vi Hart Explains Space-Time with a Music Box and a Möbius Strip

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The fabric of the universe via backwards Bach.

If mathemusician Vi Hart — who for the past three years has been bringing whimsy to math with her mind-bending, playful, and illuminating stop-motion musical doodles — isn’t already your hero, she should be, and likely will be. (Cue in the GRAMMYs newly announced search for great music teachers.) In her latest gem, Hart uses music notation, a Möbius strip, and backwards Bach to explain space-time:

Music has two recognizable dimensions — one is time, and the other is pitch-space. … There [are] a few things to notice about written music: Firstly, that it is not music — you can’t listen to this. … It’s not music — it’s music notation, and you can only interpret it into the beautiful music it represents.

Also see Hart on the science of sound, frequency and pitch, and her blend of Victorian literature and higher mathematics to explain multiple dimensions.

For a decidedly less whimsical but enormously illuminating deeper dive, see these 7 essential books on time and watch Michio Kaku’s BBC documentary on the subject, then learn how to listen to music.

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03 JANUARY, 2012

Mathemagician Vi Hart Explains Spirals and Fibonacci Numbers in Doodles and Vegetables

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What snuggled-up slug cats have to do with the math of cosmic wonder and simple beginnings.

You may recall mathemagician Vi Hart from her delightful stop-motion explanation of the Victorian novella Flatland on a Möbius strip and her ingenious illustrated unpacking of the science of sound, frequency, and pitch. Her latest doodletastic gem explores the mathematics of spirals and Fibonacci numbers through pine cones, cauliflower, pineapples, artichokes, and daisies.

It seems pretty cosmic and wondrous, but the cool thing about the Fibonacci series and spiral is not that it’s this big, complicated, mystical, magical supermath thing beyond the comprehension of our puny human minds that shows up mysteriously everywhere. We’ll find that these numbers aren’t weird at all — in fact, it would be weird if they weren’t there. The cool thing about it is that these incredibly intricate patterns can result from utterly simple beginnings.”

This is the first installment in Hart’s trilogy on the subject — keep an eye out for the two forthcoming parts.

For more on Fibonacci numbers, meet the man after whom they were named, a young Medieval mathematician who changed the very fabric of our lives — from our calendar to our business to the evolution of technology — when he wrote Liber Abbaci, Latin for Book of Calculation, in 1202. His story is one of the best science books of 2011 — riveting, important, and unmissable.

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