Charming talks for a boost on a bad day | Playlist
Now playing All under the age of 16, brothers Jonny, Robbie and Tommy Mizzone are from New Jersey, a US state that's better known for the rock of Bruce Springsteen than the bluegrass of Earl Scruggs. Nonetheless, the siblings began performing bluegrass covers, as well as their own compositions, at a young age. Here, they play three dazzling songs in three different keys, passing the lead back and forth from fiddle to banjo to guitar.
Math 101: A reading list for lifelong learners
Ready to level up your working knowledge of math? Here’s what to read now — and next. Math 101, with Jennifer Ouellette First, start with these 5 books… 1. “First published in 1930, this classic text traces the evolution of the concept of a number in clear, accessible prose. 2. “This bestselling book originally published in 1988 remains one of the best introductions to the basics of large numbers, statistics and probabilities with illustrations drawn from everyday life: sports, the stock market, the lottery and dubious medical claims, to name a few.” 3. “Pair Paulos with the just-released How Not to Be Wrong. 4. “Most of us take zero for granted, but there was a time when it simply didn’t exist, until some enterprising Babylonian soul inserted it as a placeholder in Eastern counting methods. 5. “The prose gets a bit turgid at times, and some readers might be deterred by the proofs and equations scattered throughout, but Berlinski has some lovely descriptions and turns of phrases. 1. 2. 3.
4 reasons we should fix economic inequality
It’s safe to say that economic inequality bothers us. But why? Harvard philosopher T. M. The great inequality of income and wealth in the world, and within the United States, is deeply troubling. One obvious reason for redistributing resources from the rich to the poor is simply that this is a way of making the poor better off. A justification for reducing inequality through non-voluntary means, such as taxation, needs to explain why redistribution of this kind is not just robbery. These reasons for redistribution are strongest when the poor are very badly off, as in the cases Singer describes. It’s important to note, though, that there is another sense in which these reasons are not egalitarian: They are, fundamentally, reasons to increase the well-being of the poor rather than objections to inequality, that is to say, objections to the difference between what some have and what others have. 1. 2. 3. None of these objections is an expression of mere envy. 4. T.
Be a better writer in 15 minutes: 4 TED-Ed lessons on grammar and word choice
There’s no denying it — the English language can be mighty tricky. When writing a paper, a novel or even an e-mail, you might look at a sentence you just wrote and think, “Is that comma supposed to be there?” or “Is that really the best word to use?” Fear not! TED-Ed has put together a list of four of our favorite grammar and language lessons to get your next piece of writing in tip-top shape. First, let’s look at the often-confusing comma. What about the Oxford comma? Now, take an adjective such as “implacable” or a verb like “proliferate” or even another noun “crony,” and add a suffix, such as “-ity” or “-tion” or “-ism.” Finally, when it comes to good writing, don’t take the easy route!
Graduation…now what? | Playlist | TED.com
Now playing Clinical psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for twentysomethings: Contrary to popular belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In this provocative talk, Jay says that just because marriage, work and kids are happening later in life, doesn’t mean you can’t start planning now. She gives 3 pieces of advice for how twentysomethings can re-claim adulthood in the defining decade of their lives. “In your 20s, you may not get married or figure out exactly what career you want to pursue.
26 ideas from the future
“One of the things about learning how to read — we have been doing a lot of consuming of information through our eyes and so on — that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we’re going to ingest information. You’re going to swallow a pill and know English. You’re going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. The way to do it is through the bloodstream; once it’s in your bloodstream, it basically goes through and gets into the brain and when it knows it’s in the brain it deposits the information in the right places. “I hope it will be a rejection of technology that makes us more isolated from one another and more easily surveilled. “20 years from now, we’ll have nanobots — another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology — that go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our synthetic neocortex and the cloud, providing an extension of our neocortex. “The seamless integration of our physical and virtual worlds. 2. 3. “What is next?
8 math talks to blow your mind
Mathematics gets down to work in these talks, breathing life and logic into everyday problems. Prepare for math puzzlers both solved and unsolvable, and even some still waiting for solutions. Ron Eglash: The fractals at the heart of African designs When Ron Eglash first saw an aerial photo of an African village, he couldn’t rest until he knew — were the fractals in the layout of the village a coincidence, or were the forces of mathematics and culture colliding in unexpected ways? How big is infinity? Arthur Benjamin does “Mathemagic” A whole team of calculators is no match for Arthur Benjamin, as he does astounding mental math in the blink of an eye. Scott Rickard: The beautiful math behind the ugliest music What makes a piece of music beautiful? Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math of coralThe intricate forms of a coral reef can only be expressed through hyperbolic geometry — and the only way humans can model it is by crocheting!
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