Difference between revisions of "Alan Kay at Marshall McLuhan Lecture (2003)"

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[Applause]

well first of all we welcome all of you to the Marshall McLuhan lecture this is

the first year that's held at new school University we're very enthusiastic about it being held here our Media Studies

program was started in 1975 who was

inspired by Marshall McLuhan and his

teachings and his writings it is quite appropriate that this university that's

tried at its best to provide a forum for visionary thinkers to be a home for this

lecture series and to welcome Alan Kay who is one of the station's most

preeminent visionaries to speak to all of us this evening my task is now completed which was to

welcome you here in the first place and now to do my second mission which is to

say that it is a pleasure to be co-hosting this event with the Canadian

consul general who I will now welcome this podium please welcome Consul

General Michael Phillips [Applause]

it's my turn to say how delighted we are to be collaborating with the new school

and organizing this lecture now this is

the fourth year that this annual lecture is is being held but the end but it's

first time that's being held with the new school we're very grateful for the

enthusiastic involvement of the new school and also grateful that the new

school has lent its and prestige to to

honoring Marshall McLuhan the McLuhan lecture is a cornerstone of the

consulates yearly program called the upper north side get it to celebrate

Canadian achievement the lecture of

course is a yearly celebration of the intellectual heritage of our legendary

Canadian media visionary our aim is to

draw on contemporary innovative thinkers from many disciplines to stimulate

thought about how Marshall McLuhan's ideas continue to influence the global

village his very his ideas are very much with us today of course the only the

other day I saw an article in The New York Times discussing the tribute and

light near the World Trade Center and it

referred to McLuhan's idea that light is a pure communication medium on behalf of

the consulate I want to thank dr. kay for agreeing to this lecture the first

he's following in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe camille paglia

and Jerry Brown and I also want to thank

Terry McLuhan the daughter of Marshall McLuhan who's here tonight for her

helpful support she brings insights as

only a member of his family could thank you too

[Applause]

my my job is now finished now called dr.

Wilder Thank You president Kerry and

council Phillips in a book by Michael

Hiltzik called dealers of lightning which Alan Kay actually coins a title to

it about Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Park as it's known in the trade the

chapter about Alan Kay is titled not your normal person more than anyone else

at the core of the computer revolution Alan consistently dared to be different

he dared to be ridiculed and eventually

he dared to be great the day that he was interviewed it's reported for his job at

Parc he was asked what do you think your greatest achievement will be at Parc

it'll be the personal computer he replied what's that once at Parc perhaps Alan's

quirkiest habit of many but was carrying around this contraption about so yeah

big that he called the Dynabook sometimes the mini-com or the kitty comm

it went by different names but generally that's called the Dynabook and for anybody who would listen he would flip

it open and say well here will be the flat panel display in the keyboard and

you'll have all your music and mail and films and everything right in here now

people would smile indulgently but he

never backed down from his vision and as we know the rest is history

not only did Allan have the idea of the personal computer but moreover he had

the idea of the interface that would make it usable for real people he and

his colleagues did a great deal of their research and still do with children

knowing that while adults will put up with almost anything they have to look

at windows for instance

he wrote if the medium is the message

then the message for children of low-bandwidth time-sharing is bla they

simply won't pay attention now I'm proud to say that at the age of about six my

daughter in the early 1970s was one of Alan's pioneering kid researchers that

parkour every Saturday she would go over there where Park employees would gather

it seemed like it was in a basement somewhere between mr. wizard and Mister

Rogers in this setup and and and these kids would do mysterious things all

morning so I called my daughter last night and said what were you doing I know it's a Saturday morning she said

well it was before there were mice was sort of like it was before dinosaurs

when dinosaurs ruled the earth so we had big turtles on the floor and we could

use the computer to make them move around and draw things so I guess instead of mice you know turtles we now

have mice so I guess I'd rather have turtles but in any case as you can read

in your program subsequently after the dazzling years at Parc Allan went on to

become chief scientist at Atari a fellow at Apple Computer of VP of research and

development at Disney and he's currently president of viewpoints Research

Institute still working on the cutting edge still working with children

he's garnered many many awards and and

memberships and all the rest Academy kinds of memberships but one thing you

may not know about is and he's one of the most professional amateur pipe

Organists you will ever you will ever meet Alan has spent his life promoting

the notion that the computer is a means and not an end

quoted in Hill six book he said he told

me today there was a better book about this but people get trapped into

thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given

it's part of the way our nervous system works but it's dangerous to take it as a

given because then it controls you rather than the other way around

that's McLuhan insight he wrote one of

the bigger ones of the 20th century and on that note it is my great pleasure

to present this year's Marshall McLuhan lecture dr. Alan Kay

[Applause]

thank you it's a real pleasure to be invited here and I brought a few toys

along too to help with the talk but I'm

reminded by this this lecture of a story

that I that my old friend Neil postman told me Neil and his friend Charlie wine

gardener actually followed McLuhan around when they were students and they

said McLuhan was a really dynamic lecturer but he never answered questions

he was asked every time somebody had asked him a question he'd stop for a

second he'd say well how about this idea and somebody asked him a question about

that and he'd stop for a second you say well how about this idea so Marshall

McLuhan was a generator of ideas and

although I've never had the pleasure of being at one of his talks I presume that

they just started and he went through

one idea after another probably on somewhat similar to Buckminster Fuller

and then at some point the talk stopped

and that was the end of that flow I of ideas for that for the evening now in

this talk tonight I actually made up a beginning middle and end but we may

never get to the end and I think that's fine my talk actually starts with this

book how many people remember this

little paperback book here this is the one original one I had this is now

yellowed and I was an undergraduate at

the University of Colorado when I first tried to read this book and I actually

couldn't understand it and it was my I

read many books every year understood most of them but I couldn't understand

this book but I didn't think anything of

it because there's a wonderful saying that Leon Lederman the Nobel

prize-winning physicist once gave an advice to readers of one of his books

which is if you don't understand it don't worry just keep on reading and the

next time you see these ideas they'll be hauntingly familiar so my my majors in

college were mathematics and I had another one in molecular biology and the

year after I failed to read understanding media this wonderful book

came out by Jim Watson the co-discoverer

of the structure of DNA and it was mostly about tiny little bacteria that

exists in our gut ecoli and I was

fascinated because I was working also working my way through school as a

systems programmer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research so I'd

been programming for about four years by

this time and molecular biology the gene

was the first book that started really talking about the fundamentals of life

as though there are a new kind of mechanism not the kind of mechanisms we

associate with meshing gears and clockwork and the normal mundane

machines that we build but a new way of

propagating effects around complicated structures and I was fascinated to find

out just what kinds of things are inside this tiny little bacterium and I knew

that the cells in our body are about 2,000 times as large so we're a nee coli

has about five million proteins cell in our body has about 60 billion proteins

large molecules that do work and so in

any kind of computer terms even a single cell in our body was far

beyond all of the computers that existed on earth back then and I also happen to

know that our thumb joints have about a

billion of these cells and in fact your

thumb you'll never forget this now next

time you look at your thumb you'll remember forever that it's about a

thousand cells wide so it's almost

within the limit of being able to see those cells so it's about a thousand

cells by 1,200 cells by about 800 cells hi and Jim Watson like all of us has

about a hundred trillion of these cells in their body that has a lot of cells

each one of them was 60 billion proteins and here's the most interesting thing

that the atoms in our body don't persist

so even in our bones which we think of as being rather permanent all of the

atoms in our body are recycled about once every seven years think about that

for a second the blood set the red blood cells we have are recycled about every

hundred days large parts of our body

mass are recycled every few weeks and so

if you look at it if you ask what is a human being from the standpoint of

molecular biology we're actually a pattern we actually move through space

sucking up energy and matter

reformulating that into us continuously and leaving less organized stuff behind

us as we move through time and space and so we persist as well as we do for our

seven or eight or nine decades on this planet because we're constantly

rebuilding ourselves every second of every day

what does this have to do with this talk

well it it's a new kind of context and this talk is all about context so when I

went to graduate school the computers

were enormous on the outside and tiny on the inside and programming was actually

a lot like making a clock with gears so

the programs were small you could do precision work on small programs and you

could get them to run but what was happening at that very same time was a

kind of expansion that we're still in

the middle of today so the invention of computer graphics by heavens Sutherland

the invention I think of personal

computing even though I made up the term I always think of when I think of

personal computing I think of these two images here's Ivan sitting in front of

display screen doing interactive computer graphics in 1962 here's

Engelbart in the mid-60s actually doing

the kind of networked computing we wish we could do today

and here's West Clark with one of the

first computers that where the human was higher than it was in fact one of his

design goals was if you put it on a table and you sat down to it your head

would be higher than it so he didn't like to have the idea of computers

looming over you and so these three images were kind of the proto images of

personal computing and right around then

Gordon Moore's law which I think everybody has heard of in this room which is the prediction that all good

things in silicon were going to double

somewhere between every year and every two years and he made a thirty-year

prediction and that prediction was quite accurate so the doubling period for the

last 30 or 35 years now has been about

18 months and many other technologies that have doubled faster than that then

finally the graduate school I went to as part of the ARPA Research community

which was about 17 places some of them

universities some of them companies that have been funded in the public domain by

the Department of Defense to essentially invent computing and one of the

inventions that had was in the wind and

was the ARPANET which is what we call the Internet today and so as a graduate

student there one of the things that we

were told that we had to do besides work on our thesis was to figure out how we

could make a computer network that could have more than a billion nodes and yet

never break and of course I started

thinking of biological organisms because we don't have the same 300 or 400

million nodes on the internet as we did ten years ago but the Internet has that

never stopped and so what's happened is the Internet is I believe the only

artifact of humans that we know of in history that has

replaced all of its atoms and all of its bits at least twice now since it first

started working in 1969 and has never

had to be stopped so this is a new kind

of machine context the only the closest

thing to it may be the record holder could be the United States of America

which if you think of it as a system run

by the Constitution as its operating system has had this wonderful property

of being able to renew itself over and over again generation after generation

and has never failed completely has had

some disastrous chapters but is

basically held together and the system has prospered so all of these things got

me thinking about computing and I came up with a an idea that today is called

object-oriented programming in which

every little software thing that you

make things out of is kind of like a biological cell and you can control the

cells the cells are computing in parallel you can map them onto a vast

worldwide network or you can have millions of them inside of a single

machine and with that we thought we could do some nifty things like make a

desktop computer and this is the first

personal computer I made we we called it

a personal computer at uni and this is a picture of it on its own display so you

can sort of see what it looked like kind of modern for 1967 it had a tablet for

drawing into and multiple windows and a

start of a graphical user interface and an object-oriented operating system

and there was a pseudo semi professor at

Utah his name was Bob Barton and he was

there under duress he he was the world's greatest computer designer and was a

friend of the head of the department and he'd been talked out of out of industry

basically to spend a couple of years as a professor at the University of Utah and he didn't really like graduate

students he was a very mysterious character this is this isn't actually a

photograph of him I believe he's never been photographed so in order to depict

him I I found somebody on the net that

that looked kind of like him and then blurred

and he was really grumpy and the worst

thing was he didn't he wouldn't talk to the graduate students so I really wanted

to talk to him so I went and visited his

home and talked to his wife and I got a

few things out of her but the main thing I found out was that he liked McLuhan and so I made my project the summer of

67 that by god I was going to read and

be able to talk to this guy about understanding media so this time I try

to not quite a frontal attack I found the Gutenberg galaxy which may

be Marshall McLuhan's greatest book many

ways of thinking about it it's a fantastic book and through that I got a

much stronger idea of what McLuhan was talking about and that allowed me to

then reread understanding media and when I understood what McLuhan was talking

about in understanding media just blew my mind um having read the book a couple

of times since then I believe only half the things in it are true but if you

consider the area that Marshall McLuhan was working in a 500 batting average is

incredible because and so reading the

reading the book is an interesting challenge you have to read it in it in

the way every book should be read but really are which is to try and sift

through every statement and try and understand whether you know the

hyperbole was tuned into something

divine or was just a reverberation and I

believe that these books are the most among the most valuable books written in

the 20th century

now here's a quote I really love and an

interesting thing about this quote is I'm sure it was by McLuhan I think I

might have heard it from Neil postman it has various attributions people have

used this quote quite a bit if you look on the web there are various

attributions to it I have not been able to find this quote myself and any

written work of Marshall McLuhan so if somebody knows where this quote is I

would really love to track it down but

on the other hand you know this is like somebody once said if there weren't a

God we'd be forced to invent one and so

this is one of these quotes that if Marshall McLuhan didn't make it up so

what it's a perfect McLuhan type quote and it represents one of his main ideas

which is that the context which is what's really important in our life is

essentially invisible we're the fish and this pink water that it's swimming

around and isn't is something that the fish is not strongly aware of and once I

understood a bit about what McLuhan was saying it reminded me of a model of

creativity that Arthur Kessler had done in the act of creation also in the

mid-60s and I've colored it to make it

sink up with McLuhan idea so Kessler said yeah human thought is

kind of like a plane and with an ant

wandering around on it and the ant can have the illusion that it's making

progress that it's choosing goals and directions that it's solving problems

getting around obstacles but in fact everything the ant does is pink but

every once in a while and there might be a little blue outlaw idea but

we've all been to school we've got parents we go to church we live in a

culture so there's a lot of mechanisms

for doing this Chris flat in action as we'll see in a minute the kersplat is a

wonderful first order idea because most ideas are mediocre down to bad so you

absolutely want to have our kersplat and the reason that Chris flat has built

into us and into our culture is because most of the 80,000 years humans have

been around we have been a subsistence society and a subsistence society has to

be very careful about the experiments it makes so if you're living on the edge of

disaster finding out how your culture has learned how to live in this very

chancy way of doing things and then committing to it wholeheartedly is

actually a very good first order strategy it turns out it's a terrible second order strategy and it's part of a

large collection of strategies in which the first order strategy and the second

order strategy are both true but opposite but every once in a while when

you're waking up in the morning or out for a jog or taking a shower instead of

raucous splat you get a Kirpal how many people here have had a Kirpal so just

just to help you the technical term for a kerpow is holy shit

and how many people have had her Kirpal

okay seems to come from the heavens we

aren't aware of how we arrived at this Kirpal and in fact in the old days when

people had your pals they went out and started religions on the basis of it

only sometimes was this a good idea because like all ideas their pals

themselves are usually mediocre down to bad but they have this epiphany epifanov

feeling attached to them that makes them seems so true so perfect so apt so much

from God now today what we need to do

with when we have ideas like this is to use some of the methods of science to

try and deal with this new insight and

Cussler had a very interesting side comment they point out that the

emotional reaction connection connected

with the kur powers range from laughter to the ah-ha of science to the long

drawn-out sigh of art and so because he

pointed out that a joke is an example of

an act of creation where the purpose of the joke is to leave you lead you down

the pink pathway and then suddenly reveal it's about something blue and you

have this emotional explosion in science the AHA is often accompanied by laughter

and I wonder if anybody would be willing to I can barely see you out there but I

wonder if anybody has an idea about why scientists laugh when they make a discovery be so much more effective if

somebody in the audience volunteered anybody just hi

what's funny about it

yeah and it's I mean basically the ways scientists think about is the universe

just because they had an insight doesn't mean the universe suddenly changed to be

in accord with that insight and it was

always there that's what's cool about it

so science is all about dealing with stuff that's right in front of our noses

except we can't see it and this long drawn-out sigh about art Kessler pointed

out was that one of the great functions of art specially high art is to remind

us that there are other contexts because we basically pull into simple little

goldfish bowls for efficiency and we

need something to constantly remind us that there's a lot more perspectives on

ideas and then of course the last thing

is is that it really helps to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge because

then that gives you a way of colliding contexts that are normally not thought

to have any overlap at all and for the learning stuff that I've been interested

in for so long the kicker for most modern knowledge most knowledge that

happened after 1600 generally requires

an enormous amount of effort on the learner to understand it as indeed does

McLuhan stuff because the greater the

invention the weirder the discovery the

more effort the learner has to make in order to escape from the air pink plane

into the blue plane of the particular idea so I got one of these huge ones

when I visited Seymour Papert

he had been working with children he here's one of the first Turtles he had

papper it was a mathematician who'd spent five years with Piaget in

Switzerland and he had come up with an

incredible idea and we'll see how it's related

in a second so he had a turtle that could roll around on the floor and he

had one on the screen and so to get a child to write a little program to draw

a circle with with the turtle seamer

would have the child acted out with his body close his eyes move his body in a

circle and then ask the child what are you doing the child said I'm going a little and turning a little over and

over and if you type that into logo here

forward five is going a little right five as turning a little repeat is over

and over and if you say let's do that

then this turtle with its pen down draws

us a perfect circle without now you may

remember from school that you had to know something about x squared plus y

squared equals R squared in order to do this and there's none of that here this

is something that a six-year-old can do and the reason is that Patrick knew

mathematics and he was actually teaching children I was sitting there with

watching this with my jaw dropped he was actually teaching children the what is

called the differential geometry of vectors which happens to be the language

mathematical language that most of modern science is actually represented

in and I thought this was the greatest thing I'd ever seen

anybody use computers for because it could actually transcend all of the

algebra that normally is in the way in learning ideas like calculus and bring

it home to being a toy the children

didn't even know they were learning mathematics they were just playing with this turtle so on the flight back to

Utah I started thinking man forget about

that desktop machine we have to do a children's computer and this is what

Carroll was referring to as I made this cardboard model when I get back back to

Utah about what this machine should look

like and I knew this machine was possible because of Moore's law

so the interesting thing about being a prophet back then is it was easy if you

just paid attention to physics and people who understood physics so Gordon

Moore was a solid-state physicist and he

backed up his Moore's Law assertion the problem was that most most people

especially most business people did not understand his arguments and so they

were consistently wrong about computing for more than 30 years in fact still are

but if you actually follow this stuff you could plot out in time exactly when

you could build a machine like this they were already flat screen display so this

I don't think of this as much of a prediction but it was a great focuser of

romantic zeal because this is a very romantic thing the idea of children of

11 and 12 learning advanced physics by

programming up their own space wargames so they could play but basically in

using this notion of being in a world where math actually was a language that

made sense to talk was something that just completely gripped my imagination

or reminding me of musical instruments and so I thought of this Dynabook as an

instrument whose music is ideas and then

I realized that I might very well be dead by the time the computer has ever

used this way because if you look at the history of printing you have manuscripts

you have the printing press imitating the manuscripts as McLuhan pointed out

you have the Aldous books about 50 years

later cheap books that you could put in a saddlebag but the real printing

revolution trailed by more than a hundred years really started in the 17th

century to produce what we call modern

thought it's true there are important things deadly things life concerning

things in the 16th century like the Reformation the Reformation was an

attempt to and deal with problems that were of

great concern back here from the 17th century on the way reforms and so forth

were looked at was in a completely different direction forward so I had

this image of there being these big expensive mainframes the inevitability

of the desktop computer and then this Elvis like notebook computer and that

all of us would be long gone by the time stodgy humanity got around to using the

computer for what was good for so we actually talked about how people were

going to use this thing for imitating paper for decades now we didn't think

they're gonna use it to imitate paper for three decades so there was no way we

could be as cynical as what has actually happened now let's talk for a second

about what we were interested in and I want to relate this to McLuhan's ideas

because in thinking about what was going

on the key thing for me was that McLuhan

said no matter what else you think you're paying attention to just try and

invert figure and ground and try and see if you can pit parcel out what the

actual context is that's invisible while

you're being distracted by all these things around and so the part of the

invisible context of the printing revolution was the regularity of it so

it actually the regular area of it actually changed the kind of argument that people thought they could write

about and it changed the argument from being allegorical which could survive

many different slips of monks pens and

even telling the monks telling the stories differently to something where

the very galleys that you proved as an author where

guaranteed to be replicated thousands and thousands of times so this changed everything about the way

we argued and it took a long time for that change but the change was probably

the biggest change in human history now what were we concerned about so looking

ahead you have to ask questions about what is the invisible context that

computers could provide that could actually be beneficial from for

humankind and you also have to ask questions about what is the invisible context they could provide that will be

anything but beneficial for us so one of

the things that concerned a lot of us back then was how easily fooled humans

had been over their entire history and especially to us in the 60s and the

early seventies we thought pathetically

fooled and so we're very concerned about this notion of being fooled now my

friend Betty Edwards have teaches drawing I think everybody is familiar

with her drawing on the right side of the brain books and she has a wonderful

thing she shows her class

on the first day of drawing class she points out that the reason they're

having trouble drawing is not because they can't move their arm they're having

trouble drawing because they are too

quickly perceiving something about the objects in front of them the perceptions

of what they are and the labelings of them are so acute and so fast that they

never get a chance to actually look at them and so one of the many examples she

shows in that first day is this one where she shows these two tables and

says so for example the size and the

shape of these two tabletops is exactly the same and her class says no that

can't be possible she does this with cardboard but since I have a computer

here so I'll take that tabletop put it

right down there and then I'll rotate it and this is not

a trick people have accused me of it but

in fact all of the table tops in this drawing were made from a single table

top shape I've shown this hundreds of

times it's one of my favorite examples and talks and I still can't see that

they're the same shape however if you're

curious about this the slide is not gonna be on long enough but the way to decide that they are is you take a

pencil and do just what artists do to avoid being fooled put your arm out

straight and measure and you'll see that

they're exactly the same so the Talmud says we see things not as

they are but as we are and I'd really like to know what happened to the person

who made that statement in the Talmud because if you take it to its logical

conclusion it has some unsettling right

so so here's the way science looks at

the world this is a toughy and I'm gonna

spend a little time at it because it's one of the most important insights in

human history as a it's very simple in

one sense but it's very subtle in another it has to do with admitting that

we have three pounds of oatmeal inside of our head rather than an exact

duplicate of the entire universe so once

you once you work and this is it this is a tough one because it seems like we do

have something about the universe inside of our head but it's actually just a

representation so it's like something

written down in a book and you can write down almost anything in a book and that

we're talking at lunch about this movie A Beautiful Mind which is a very bad

movie about John Nash and a really bad movie about math but it's a pretty good

movie about schizophrenia but they missed their chance to point out that

everybody all of us are everyday both

awake and sleeping are dealing with hallucinations because that is how we

see the world the difference between us and a schizophrenic is how verifiable

the hallucinations are and they're less verifiable when you're dreaming

schizophrenia in part is doing things

while you're awake that are quite reasonable and natural

while you're while you're dreaming so and scientists have this problem too

they also have three pounds of oatmeal inside their head and what they try and

do a couple of hours each day is to remember that so here's the way science

thinks about out here in the world where

we can't go is something

some sort of phenomena and we don't know what it's part structure is we don't

know anything they don't even know what their parts mean anything but what we do

get to experience is some vastly reduced

shadow of this phenomena and we can look

at it more closely with specialized instruments like microscopes and telescopes so for example and then what

we try and do is we try and make a model in our brains that casts the same kind

of shadow and in science the criticize

the criticizing of this model both

intrinsically and compared to the shadow done by the real phenomena is what's

called knowledge so science is a relationship it's not knowledge itself

it's a relationship between the difficulties we have or with

representing things and what's out there

in the in the world that we can't get to directly so it's a lot like making Maps so let's suppose this is gravity the

bunny out there is gravity and our hand

puppet here is Newton's theory of gravity and it's pretty good we still

use it for space shots we used it to land on the moon and a little over 100

years ago they noticed that I'm the real bunny it had a round tail and when they

looked over here on newton's theory there's this arm sticking out

see how funny science is and they

realized that was going to really be a difficult thing to get that arm out of

his hand puppet and so they floundered around for a

while finally Einstein came up with a completely different way of putting the

tail on the bunny but he knew that he

wasn't finding the truth about the real bunny out there he was just putting a

tail on it so one of his beautiful short

lines is you must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real

and this is as good as any anything anybody's ever said about this because

what he meant is the stuff that can be true is stuff that we represent in

language so we can write things in

English that are true and we can write things in math that are true but they're

only true because they're hermetically sealed they're only about themselves

they're not about anything out there the

stuff that's real out there is a different category of things and he had a longer thing to say he said as far as

the laws of mathematics refer to reality if they are not certain and as far as

they are certain they do not refer to reality so the cool thing here is and

that I I think this is one of the coolest thing that's why science is one of the great art forms is by giving up

all conceptions of truth the absolute notions of truth we find in the Bible

and in Greek thought by giving up those

ideals for instance science admitting it

really can't get at the truth can nonetheless look at a 12 year old with

diabetes diagnosed it and actually create the molecules that this child

needs to live so no other belief system on earth can do that and it does it

because it's trying for something else what it's trying

or is a highly criticized abou map of

the best that we know of these shadows and that has worked out to be much much

more powerful than protestations about

ultimate and exact truths now a real

character that how many people in this room have ever read anything by Alfred

Korzybski count Alfred course--it well nobody knows

whether he is really account if you know about Alfred course of skating so he's

his great book which is oh I'll match

his if you want a book that's difficult to read I'll match science and sanity up

against this any day of the week but

this is a great statement he said one measure of sanity is how closely ones

and journal representations of the world really resemble the world and by this

measure humans are at least quite unsane so this is a very useful word we are all

unsane just like we are all hallucinating now here's a here's

another idea which is that math is

probably the most dangerous thing to get good at if you don't also get good at science if you remember Socrates is

complained about this office anybody

here remember what that was so remember

he's complained about the Sophists as the Sophists taught the youth of Athens

to be able to win arguments regardless of whether they are true so this office

are probably an early form of lawyer and

and in fact learning how to reason brilliantly in a hermetically sealed

system like language is one of the most dangerous things we could ever get to do

because we like to rationalize everything we do and the better we get

at rationalization the more dangerous we are so math desperately needs science

reasoning deficit desperately needs science which this reminder that we have to keep on

checking out reality to see whether our brilliant inferences actually have any

kind of currency in the in the real world math is useful though because it

is so precise that it gives you a way of thinking about things that are

unthinkable in English for instance no scientist worries about whether a photon

is a particle or a wave probably everybody here has seen discussions

about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics but you have to realize that two

scientists they aren't paradoxical at all because scientists think of them

entirely in terms of mathematics and there's nothing paradoxical about the

mathematics I once heard Steven Weinberg trying to explain this to an audience

and I'm not gonna go any further with it

anyway deep Zen so when you think about this

and you've gotten through understanding media all of a sudden the realization I

had anyway was gee Montessori is maybe the smartest people person I've ever

heard of connected with education certainly in this century because her

notion was that children are set up by nature to learn through play and what

you if you want them to learn the 20th century through play then you have to give them 20th century environments and

this seemed like the best idea I'd ever heard and so she spent 20 years

designing toys that were designed to be treated as toys by the children but that

she thought would have powerful cognitive side effects on their common

sense and so we can ask the question is what should these thinker toys be in the

21st century but along with Montessori we have to

realize that the important thing for children to learn in their earliest

years is not a stencil knowledge the way most schools try to teach them and try

to test them the most important thing is for the kids to learn the uncommon sense

the new epistemologies for the new ways of thinking that have appeared

just in the last few hundred years this is what education is failing miserably on beyond miserably totally backwards

from what's actually important and so you get thousands and millions of

stories of children who have been through years and years of school being

taught facts and tested on the facts not having any kind of foundation to hang

these ideas on so right around this time

was when I first met Neil postman through one of his earliest books

teaching as a subversive activity and he

was one of the first people people to actually start proposing that teachers

set up contexts and teachers not try and lecture and teachers not try and do this

and not try and do that but to actually

change the internal foundations of the way students think by getting them to

think so it Xerox PARC looking at ideas

for childhood development one of the

things we looked at was PJs stages in which in early childhood a child makes

things with their hands and learns by doing and then there's a visual stage

where the child thinks there's more water in the tall thin glass and so

forth and then a symbolic stage which towards the end of PJ's life he wrote an

essay for UNESCO where he he said in the

essay that he believed more than 90% of all Europeans never got to the stage

someone that was wonderful and we got

attracted to Gerry Bruner who had written this marvelous book called

towards the theory of instruction and Bruner had retested some of the Piaget

experiments and he discovered for example that he could get the child to change their mind on the water pouring

experiment by just blocking the tall thin glass or taking it away and he

could get the child to say yeah there's the same amount of water in the glass because where would

it you know where were the extra water come from if he couldn't see the tall

thin glass and he'd change over if he could see it and so Brynner had this

idea that oh there's actually multiple men multiple mentalities existing and at

any given time and in any given stage of development you have many ways about

thinking about the world that was you know why this was even controversial I

don't know but Gerry did the experiments

and his personality was forceful enough to get people to start thinking about combining these mentalities so for

example you can get a child who's theoretically in the visual thinking

stage and by blocking their view like Patrick did when he wanted the kids to

make a circle with their body you can get them to revert to a kinesthetic way

of thinking or even leap ahead to the

symbolic type thinking that children are not supposed to be able to do with that age so this to us was a very powerful

model and we thought boy what we want to do is really combine these three ways of

communicating and we made up a slogan called doing with images make symbols

that you're basically leading by grappling with things kinesthetically

your understanding by configuration and

you're generalizing using using symbols

so at Xerox PARC we use these ideas and

came up with a lot of the technology that used today some of it was quite an

improvement on its successors because

the commercial world actually didn't care about why many of these ideas were

were done so the the overlapping window interface was designed for children to

learn in the space of a few minutes because we had some hard things we

wanted to teach them one of the supreme irony is that Microsoft Windows now

requires training courses in order to learn

now through these inventions from Adele Goldbergs and my point of view we just

gone to a lot of work to make computers that we could actually take down to

schools to see what the kids are actually doing now here's one where I

think Marshall didn't go far enough he wasn't hyper Berlocq this is a great

statement children are the messages we send to the future but not really they

are the future what does he mean by

messages there's nobody there to listen to them except the children of today so

they actually are the future we're sending to the future and so we have to

be very very careful about the kind of environments that we put children in

because it's the environment the environments that are absorbed into this

context that we're not aware of so for example television is the worst thing

that ever happened to higher-level education and parents should treat it

like a box full of loaded guns or a liquor cabinet and simply not have it in

the house this is an almost impossible proposition to put before people today

but because television is an incredible teacher but as Neil postman has pointed

out it can't carry the discourse of the

20th 21st century it can only carry the sum of its discourse and it's fantastic

at that and it's so pervasive it has

this way of creating an entirely new world in which people accommodate -

without even realizing it we can use that as a strength and I want to give

you a little sense of what this might be like so we've come into the present now

let's take a look at how a child might

play and learn advanced mathematics and

then maybe a little science so this will be the last part of this this talk here

now when I use the word play when I'm giving talks in front of educators they

are very upset because they and most

parents don't think education should be fun after all they

didn't enjoy it and look how successful

they are but the thing you realize is

and Montessori realized this is that she knew artists and scientists and

mathematicians and every single one of these as an adult professional was

having fun we still use the term playing music if you talk to a mathematician why

do you do it it's fun it's playful so many of these things that are the

hardest and least successful at being taught in school are being taught

because they're being taught as some sort of catechism of some new religion

rather than being taught through play like Montessori wanted so let's take a

look here from the child's point of view now so from the child's point of view

what we say is okay what would you like

to do if you could do anything and we found one of the things that they like

to do is they'd like to learn how to drive a car so we say okay dry yourself

a little car that you'd like to learn

how to drive and by the way once you do

that as looked at from the top so right away this gets them into a different

perspective than they ever had almost no children have ever looked at a car from

the top so it takes them a while to think about what it might look like and

both boys and girls have the same interest in this they both want to learn

how to drive and both boys and girls put on big off-road tires these day

because remember the the why or why do children want to do things no child

eighty thousand years ago he wanted to learn advanced mathematics and we have

the same genes as we did eighty thousand years ago as far as we can tell so so I

say okay that's that's good here's my little car it's been made from a

painting into a thing I can do things to this thing I can make it larger and

smaller so it's kind of a graphical object I can rotate it I can look inside

of it and now we see an interesting contrast the child's world is the

hand-eye world over here and math many

parts of math is best handled through symbols symbols are not the way what

they like to think of this looks cold and forbidding over here this looks hot

and interesting so our job in the true Montessori style is to keep them playing

and gradually let them see what the power of these guys are so you can think

of this as being like a trip to math land if you take a child to France they're gonna be much more interested in

learning French than they are sitting out in the middle of Idaho somewhere

right and as papri pointed out a long

time ago that when a when a child doesn't do well in math the schools

frequently say well this child is not math minded but if a child doesn't do

well in French they can't say this child is not French minded and if there's any

analogy between those then what the children need is a math land okay so the

first thing we do is get them to rename this so everything is has to do with

this car that they have get them to look at a property here's one called heading

I'll press down on this and the little number there is counting up and you can

see the car turning and look look right over here while I turn the car by hand

alright so this is the name of this property of where the car is heading and

I can influence it by changing these numbers here here's a little behavior

car forward by five click on it

over and over again the car goes forward car turn by five still pretty dull but

if you pull this out and drop it on the

desktop there it makes a little script for you car four by five car turn by

five and let's just start it ticking now by clicking on the clock

there and all of a sudden what have we

got well we've actually got a logo

turtle with a pin on it and a costume on

top of it so all of a sudden the child

has made the first step into differential geometry here

okay so I'll get rid of this but of

course the child wants to steer the car

so turning this down to zero the car goes straight negative numbers makes it

go in the other direction but this is not very exciting

real cars our lips come back here real cars are actually steered of the

steering wheel so we say to the kids okay paint yourself a steering wheel

and the steering wheel is the same kind of thing as a car so this is like old time Lego you can make anything out of

this stuff look inside it let's call it steer here

and it's got a heading and what do you

think will happen if we pick up the name of its heading and drop it right into

car turn by here well now we can steer

the car and the kid has just learned about variables something by the way

that most adults in America do not understand yet but here the variable is

actually doing work by standing in for all the numbers that are flowing out of

the steering wheel now it happens that the steering wheel is too sensitive so

it's hard to steer the car and the kid starts complaining after about 20

seconds of joy and this gives us a

chance in the classroom to give the kids a little bit advice but let's suppose the kid is not in a classroom where the

teacher doesn't understand this or the parents don't understand that the kid is

home what is the child going to do the child needs to get some advice from

somebody and the child can actually come over here and find a kid somewhere on

the Internet might be 5,000 miles away in Germany like Tommy is here and ask

Tommy some questions and I've got Tommy on this other computer here link through

the internet and so Sam who's our main

guy over there opens the chat to Tommy and says hi Tommy

and over the Internet it goes and shows

up on Tommy's machine so Tommy says hi

Sam they dialogue mocking back and forth and

this actually has this actually has

voice chat so they can talk back and forth while they're doing stuff and so

the complaint is what's how can I steer my car and Tommy says once you share

your screen with me and so Sam says

share down here and this allows Tommy over here to five thousand miles away

look at Sam's screen notices something

adults would like to do because adults work together with each others and if

you notice both of the kids cursors are

in here in both screens here so I'm not gonna be on Tommy's machine I'm gonna go

over here on Sam here and say okay now look inside here

once you try dividing that number coming out of the steering wheel by something

like three and Sam comes over here and

says oh yeah that's much better

and suddenly Sam for the first time in his ten-year-old life understands what

divide is good for I think about this as

a mathematician I view it as somewhere between obscene and a crime to not teach

math with understanding because its greatest virtue is that it's completely

understandable and so trying to teach a

concept that isn't pragmatically in the child's world there's a very ugly thing

that schools do and then finally it

would be nice if mcloon were here to see all this finally Tommy says okay let's

play and he just dumps his car onto the shared space 5,000 miles later it shows

up on Sam's machine and because it was

sent running it shows up running and

they can interact simultaneously this is always tricky for me because I have to

watch to Mission seems at once but and any number of

children can can do this so and the last

thing of course is to go to full go to

full screen so I'm going to

now what I'm going to do here is I think

now is a good time to make an ending and

I think what I'm yeah so I think what I think what I'll do here is just skip

ahead a little bit so I put in a whole

bunch of things that I of course wanted to show you but let's end with this so

here a bunch of little cars bouncing

around and you could do a lot of things with these cars you can pretend they're gas particles you can learn something

about kinetic theory of heat let's suppose they're people in a village and

what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn all of them blue but leave one red

infected one I'm going to let that in fact all the rest people always root for

the last blue one

hard to see what happened there so I'll get a little graph over time so you see

not a lot started at the beginning there let's try it this with a different time

constant and for the kids you can just change the kind of time concept by changing the little village that they

infect in so you see that had a very different thing I just changed it by a

factor of two and the infection here

what worked like this now here's the interesting thing that aids has this

curve typhoid and cholera have this curve this is the human pee hole of

human common sense and imagination cannot see that AIDS is a problem the

time constant is too long it's outside of our ability to assume danger whereas

we can easily see a typhoid or a cholera epidemic as something that needs drastic

attention science is an imagination amplifier so a

lot of different ways of thinking about science and I don't think teaching

children science in vocational training is a very good idea

the reason to teach science is it's an imagination amplifier the best one we've

ever come up with and it allows us to understand a disaster before it happens

most of the world however doesn't have that imagination amplifier and so this

graph was nineteen mill this was nineteen million when I first took this

article out is now up to twenty more four million people who have died and

most of these people who have died have died unnecessarily because they and

their politicians could not see what aids was before it happened to them now

five hundred years ago about a hundred

years before the printing press a much more interesting situation

happened where the bubonic plague came in from China through Venice and into

Europe and all told about a quarter million of the world's population died

but the interesting number here is that the hundred million people who died from

bubonic plague is about the number of people who are going to die from AIDS

because in many many cases if the best

things that could be possibly done in the world today we're done still about a

hundred million total people would die now these pictures of bubonic plague

were taken by a camera because plague is still with us but it's not dangerous in

this widespread non understood way

here's an irony for people who like irony's as the causes where the same

kind of causes that ignorant people have us been assigning for thousands of years

it was Satan the Jews enemies pointing poisoning wells remedies herbs aromatic

woods praying why I was praying a bad memory remedy because it got everybody

together in churches where the fleas could jump from person to person more

efficiently so now the point of this is

that five hundred years ago everybody in the world was in the same state with regard to dangerous things like this but

today large parts of the world almost a

billion people in the world one-sixth of the world's population actually has

defenses against this and understandings of it and the rest of the world doesn't

so if we're looking ahead to what the

biggies are in the 21st century the population problem aids this shows how

many people are infected now so on the order of 40 million people are infected

as of two years ago

if you ask a biologist what's the biggest health problem in the world he'll say drinkable water most people

don't have it and more people die from bad water in the world and all of the

wars that are going on right now and all

of the disease education of women is the key to most of these if you're looking

for a cause this is it and every single

one of these things can only be changed

by letting McLuhan be a presence to

remind us that it's not the things that

seem apparent to us that are the biggest problems it is the context that we

consistently overlook when we trying to

think about our problems so to invert our ways of looking at

things and look at context is the greatest gift that McLuhan gave us Thank

You Marshall and thanks all of you for coming

[Applause]

so questions yes

yes this this program which does lots

more is actually a 21st century version of the stuff we did at Xerox PARC

and it's free we gave it away to the

world starting about starting a 96 and

there are two sites if you're a hacker go to squeak it's called squeak go to

squeaked org and if you're a parent or

an educator go to squeak land dot org

yes not many

bill bill is enthusiastic but I don't

think that essay has a lot worthwhile to

be said in it actually yes

no I'm saying that the if you want to train the intellect you have to change

the heuristics that we use for dealing with knowledge we don't completely

understand so for example in after

Sputnik there was a lot of interest as

there is today and whether children are learning any modern knowledge so one of

the things they did after back then was to go to higher learning places like MIT

and Harvard and they discovered that if they took students who got straight A's

in science and asked them science

questions that they hadn't explicitly studied that their ability to answer

them was roughly the same as it would have been 40,000 years ago so in other

words they they were learning science in English but they were not learning any

deep ideas about how to think about the world this is generally true this is one

of the frightening things about the way we teach knowledge so the fact I have a

little video of it that shows

Harvard look to graduate some simple

questions in astronomy to test how a

lifetime of education affects our understanding of science we ask these

recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for example that

the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay

I think the seasons happens because as the earth travels around the Sun it gets

nearer to the Sun which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which

produces colder weather and thence and hence the seasons how hot it is or how

cold it is in any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the

earth to the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes around the Sun

and and it gets hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder

when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many of us think of

the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular

with distance producing virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us

the strong incorrect belief that changing distance is responsible for the

seasons I took physics and planetary

motion and relativity electromagnetism waves I've never really had a scientific

background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having it I had

quite a bit of science in high school yeah through physics want first year in

two years of chemistry regardless of their science education 21 of the 23

randomly selected students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed

misconceptions when asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the

Moon when it's further away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth

position interferes with the reflection of the Sun against the moon so there's

quite a bit more of this so this is this

is a part of a series called private universe you can type private a universe into

Google and you can get these video tapes

I think we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard must be confidence 101 because there's no way any of these

kids adults we're going to admit that they didn't know or couldn't remember

that it all been taught it I wanted one

interesting omission that in NSF made is there's an obvious next question to ask

anybody got a night what what question would you want to ask these kids is the

very next question yes exactly so so

what do you what he said is ask them about the southern hemisphere and that's

what I two weeks later I was giving a talk at UCLA and I found that the

audience was mostly seniors are going to be graduating and so I took about thirty

of them outside and went through these two questions and I I did ask the second

question which is to the ones you thought the proximity the proximity theory didn't have anything to do with

what they thought about the Earth's orbit it was actually the common sense

idea that as you get closer to a fire it gets hotter and as you get further away it gets so this is something it's almost

built into people's nervous system but it's a common-sense way of solving the

problem and of course I asked them well tell me this do you know you know when

it's summer up here in the northern hemisphere do you know what season it is in the southern hemisphere every single

one of the UCLA students knew it was winter and I believe by simple induction

that every one of the Harvard students knew it was winter I didn't know why

obviously but people tend to remember that because

it's odd and so they did remember that

and so every single one of these students that you saw here with

confusion about how this works was also

ignoring something that they had learned and knew and was unable to retrieve so

this problem was not a science problem at all the first problem was a kind of a math

problem they couldn't retrieve contradictory knowledge even though it's

indexed using the same terms and use it in their own theory I said they tried to

bullshit their way through and so so the

key thing if you want to teach science if you actually study a scientist and

try and understand what makes a difference about what how the scientist

does that scientists amongst a group of these Harvard kids probably didn't get

any higher grades in physics because

Harvard might not teach on real science but the difference between the

scientists and science type kid and the rest of the kids is the science type kid

can answer all manner of questions in the way any scientist would answer

including I don't know or I know how to find out or it's probably like this or

there's a whole set of rhetoric that goes along with the person who's

thinking that way these kids are not thinking that way so so they fail and

basically that would even be okay with me except that the the deep ideas about

how our country works are actually outside of the common sense of humanity

right let's just take a simple idea that does not appear in any traditional

society that we have ever known about on earth how about equal rights do you

think that's burned into our genes no way somebody had to invent that idea and

it's an idea that we try and learn and

teach and we're still not that good at it but it's an abstraction that's part

of this artificial structure we call civilization if you think about it civilization is a bunch of hard-won

inventions that go against normal human nature right let's not have

war let's not have crime let's let's not do this let's not do that let's not

discriminate let's let's be a different kind of person than people have been for

the last hundred thousand years that is an incredible thing and in order to get

it you have to get beyond normal common

sense or else you know you're on tenterhooks it's like being thrust out

on a pond on skates and not being able to skate yes yeah one of the earliest

ones I had was an encounter with a vacuum cleaner when I was about I think

10 or 11 my mother was truly wonderful

about letting me take things apart and I

cannot remember why I took apart the vacuum cleaner but I did and what was in

there wasn't what I thought was in there and I remember struggling with I don't

know what I said then because there's a vernacular of today that has worked its

way into this story right so I didn't I didn't say this but basically what I

said was vacuums don't suck because all

is in the all is in there as a fan and if you think about and the fan if you

look at the way the fan blades are set up they're bouncing air in one direction

and not in another and the direction

they're bouncing the air in is the exhaust of the thing where you have the

pressure coming out and so what the heck is hold your hand to the other end and I

suddenly realize there's if if there's no air molecules in there the only thing

you can be holding my hand there is air pressure from the outside

and I went holy shit and somebody my thought was wow the the air molecules

must be moving maybe as fast as a hundred miles an hour so when my father

came home my father was a physiologist

who and so I got him I said dad you know

the the air molecules might be moving as fast as 100 miles an hour so so so we

went and got one of his college physics books and looked it up and we discovered

that the every molecule in this room is traveling about 1,500 miles an hour and

so remember those scenes on movies when the somebody shoots the window out of a

plane everything gets sucked out they don't get sucked out they get blown out

because think about it as soon as the air pressure is out of the plane no

problem right so it's actually the air in the plane that is dangerous and

incredibly powerful and that absolutely blew my mom you know at 10 or 11 or so

just the realization that was exactly the opposite because vacuums by adults are always

talked about as sucking and no way they

don't and I think that was a that was a turning point for me when I suddenly the

world was totally upside down and then I

got used to it you know so I felt so by feeling about this new epistemology is

it's like when you go out in the ice and you can't skate so you're in worse shape

than you were when you're on land this is why most people go back to land but

the interesting thing about skating is if you get efficient at it it's incredibly more efficient than walking

and running and that's what science has been so if you can get past that awful

early stage it's like a violin is awful in the early stage and then it becomes

one of the greatest musical amplifiers that we've ever come up with for musical

impulse and so I think this is one of the dilemmas of model modern education

is that there is a real hump that often

has to do it because it's just at odds with everything that we believe in and

you somehow I have to get her get around that in one way or another and then once you

once you have gotten around a lot of other things become much easier so just

a couple of those hits so that for instance the San Francisco Exploratorium

was done by my friend Frank Oppenheimer who's the brother of Jay Robert Frank

was a physicist and he got a lot of flak

from the funders of the Exploratorium who would get they said we gave you

millions of dollars to make a science museum and you made a nosh pit because

if you ever been there it's just 500 exhibits and 2,000 children bouncing

around trying things out and and Frank said to them to the funders he said you

don't understand said the first thing you have to get to in order to do

science at all is to realize that the world is not as it seems and he said we

made 500 exhibits and each one teaches the world is not as it seems in its own

way and what we want to do is collide the right kid with the right exhibit so

they'll have that hit the world is not as it seems and once they've had a

couple of those they might start including that as their part of their

repertory of thinking about things then instead of just accepting things they might say well the world is not as it

seems let's maybe there's something behind the curtain so just the idea that

there is a curtain and that there's something behind it as one of the most

people take things on face value and they're taught to take things on face

value so for instance just the acceptance that you bring when you go to

a theatre beautiful looking people on

the stage music great words is exactly

the opposite of what you want to bring to it to a political rally but it's it's

held using exactly the same thing there's beautiful people on the stage

beautiful words and you want to be in the exact opposite posture when you go

to that political rally you want to be as mean and nasty and skeptical as you

can possibly be whereas in the theater you want to give yourself over to it so

if you we're talking about schizophrenia before so another metaphor that's nicer

than hallucination is that what we have in here is just a theater so we're

always presenting the world back to ourselves as a theatrical production

and that's the way the human mind works

and not only are we easy to fool we like to be fooled we go to shows to be fooled

and so politicians have easy time with us right so there's this thing of when

are you gonna be fooled when you're not going to be fooled I think is one of the most important simple ways of talking

about what I was talking tonight yes

well there we don't want them to learn about context when they're 10 we want to

give them a different context when they're 10 they can learn about context

later when they're in college and studying philosophy for young kids it's

not worth while explaining just what

you're doing to them when you're creating an educational thing basically

what you want to do is to have their

assumptions and their heuristics you know their ways of dealing with things

that they don't have strong knowledge about be different so when we watch you

know the way we assess children is to see how it because children are

basically at that at this age they're doers they're not philosophy so what we

do is to look to see how fluent they are just just as you would assess a child

musician so when you assess the child musician you don't worry about whether

they understand the theory of harmony because their brains aren't set up for

really understanding the theory of harmony but what you can assess is where are they in musical expression and how

do they think about music and you do it you don't ask them what they think

because there's that great quote talking

about music is like dancing about architecture

so so basically some musicians can talk

pretty deeply about music because they know what the words mean in English but

you can't talk very deeply about music to somebody who hasn't had a lot of

musical experiences because it's not clear what it's about same thing with

the physics that I was mentioning that the the language of nature as Galileo

pointed out as mathematics and so you just really can't talk about much

science without getting to the math and seeing what is actually being claimed by

science right so so for children our

belief is you just and this is a belief that Montessori I think was one of the

first to articulate was yeah don't worry don't worry about it if you can if you

can change the children's common sense into the uncommon sense that represents

these additions to thinking that the 21st 20th and 21st century have brought

with them you've done your job you don't have to worry about that child ever

again because they're going to be able to hang

this odd knowledge on trees that are

healthy see most scientists don't know even 1%

of their field so making lists of what

you should learn is it's complicated the

old theory of liberal education in the continent especially in England is if

you take four incompatible things and go deep on them simultaneously with some

mentoring you'll eventually get to the good stuff and it doesn't much matter which four things you pick because the

important thing is to get to the good stuff not not to worry about you know

whether it's yeah

well you don't because they just do it so the interesting thing it's like

Berlitz in the sense that what you don't do is

teach the children syntax and wait what you don't do is do this what they're

doing is talking this mathematical language to their little creations and

so they don't even know they don't even think of it as a language or anything

else but from their standpoint they're just making toys but in order to make

the toys they actually have to think in this new way and we can tell pretty

exactly how well they're thinking in this new way without ever bringing up the word math and without it because

just it's just a new thing for the kids it's like like Pokemon you know it's

just a new thing that they do if they like to do it if the play is good if if

they instead of going out to recess they like to stay in school during recess to

work on the stuff on their own if they want to take it home if they do projects

on their own it actually brought quite a few of them to show tonight but I got bogged down in

the in the front part of the talk but basically you can tell right away

whether the kids are doing real math or not and the whole point is the number

one thing you want the kids to be doing is real math regardless of what the math

is who cares when they're nine years old if they're doing real mathematical

thinking that's what you want because that's the context that's what most kids

never get to ever yes

huh well-read you know first I don't

know the answer to that but in my own life looking back on it was pretty

interesting that I loved kindergarten and I loved graduate school and then

there were 16 years in between that you

know where I had to make time in order to learn because the learning official

learning systems were not very good at it but the but I was incredibly

fortunate as a child because I learned how to read fluently before I ever got

to school and so I already knew they were lying to me in first grade and

that's most kids don't have that advantage right yes you're hoping let's

do a couple more yes

oh I don't think it had anything to do with what I invented I do understand

McLuhan I'm not sure you do

now I'm not using anybody here I'll tell

you just to I'll tell you what I don't

want to summarize summarize my own argument which is that the thing that

seemed important to me is that there are

two parts of it to it one is that as a

as a person who was a scientist achill II trained in science and mathematics

the there was a special thing that the computer could argue better than

conventional media it led to a new way of arguing about things that led to a

new way of knowing about things and the we knew that the making it pervasive

would set it up as an environment that

could be learned pervasively and it could have these long-term effects that the printing press had so I think that's

just pure McLuhan ISM and that's what the aim is yes

yeah that's what I've been saying all through the

good

yeah well I think I think the the way I

think about it as a TV doesn't exactly tell us how to think but it makes it

very hard to think about things that it doesn't tell us about so I think that's

a little more gobbledygook II but I think a little bit more more accurate

but I think I mean another way of looking at the medium is the message

thing and was one I discarded for tonight was was this notion that in

order to actually when you have a radio

in your car and you tuned it to some station the ability to actually get the

message that's being sent there it requires the station to have a model

requires your receiver to have a model of what the station is sending it has it

has to synthesize the carrier wave in order to demodulate out the the music

that you hear and that that was actually the first terms I thought of when I when

I thought I understood understanding media because he was saying yeah the interesting thing here is not the music

that's being sent on any particular occasion but what the radio set has to

be in order to get that thing at all in

other words it has to become the very thing that carries the messages and he

what he said about the about reading and writing was that the interesting thing

is not the particular writing on any particular occasion but what it means to

become a reader and a writer you become something qualitatively different than a

member of an oral Society that's well

maybe they have them okay good

[Applause]

[Music]

no no it's perfect

you

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@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 |id=CfSPCLM7las
 |alignment=left
-|autoresize=false
+|autoresize=true
 }}
+<subtitle id='00:00:00'> [Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:08'>well first of all we welcome all of you to the Marshall McLuhan lecture this is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:15'>the first year that's held at new school University we're very enthusiastic about it being held here our Media Studies</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:21'>program was started in 1975 who was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:25'>inspired by Marshall McLuhan and his</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:29'>teachings and his writings it is quite appropriate that this university that's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:33'>tried at its best to provide a forum for visionary thinkers to be a home for this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:39'>lecture series and to welcome Alan Kay who is one of the station's most</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:44'>preeminent visionaries to speak to all of us this evening my task is now completed which was to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:50'>welcome you here in the first place and now to do my second mission which is to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:55'>say that it is a pleasure to be co-hosting this event with the Canadian</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:00:59'>consul general who I will now welcome this podium please welcome Consul</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:04'>General Michael Phillips [Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:12'>it's my turn to say how delighted we are to be collaborating with the new school</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:16'>and organizing this lecture now this is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:20'>the fourth year that this annual lecture is is being held but the end but it's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:25'>first time that's being held with the new school we're very grateful for the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:29'>enthusiastic involvement of the new school and also grateful that the new</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:33'>school has lent its and prestige to to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:38'>honoring Marshall McLuhan the McLuhan lecture is a cornerstone of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:43'>consulates yearly program called the upper north side get it to celebrate</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:50'>Canadian achievement the lecture of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:54'>course is a yearly celebration of the intellectual heritage of our legendary</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:01:58'>Canadian media visionary our aim is to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:03'>draw on contemporary innovative thinkers from many disciplines to stimulate</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:08'>thought about how Marshall McLuhan's ideas continue to influence the global</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:13'>village his very his ideas are very much with us today of course the only the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:18'>other day I saw an article in The New York Times discussing the tribute and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:22'>light near the World Trade Center and it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:26'>referred to McLuhan's idea that light is a pure communication medium on behalf of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:33'>the consulate I want to thank dr. kay for agreeing to this lecture the first</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:37'>he's following in the footsteps of Tom Wolfe camille paglia</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:41'>and Jerry Brown and I also want to thank</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:45'>Terry McLuhan the daughter of Marshall McLuhan who's here tonight for her</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:50'>helpful support she brings insights as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:02:55'>only a member of his family could thank you too</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:01'>[Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:05'>my my job is now finished now called dr.</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:09'>Wilder Thank You president Kerry and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:18'>council Phillips in a book by Michael</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:24'>Hiltzik called dealers of lightning which Alan Kay actually coins a title to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:29'>it about Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Park as it's known in the trade the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:37'>chapter about Alan Kay is titled not your normal person more than anyone else</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:44'>at the core of the computer revolution Alan consistently dared to be different</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:48'>he dared to be ridiculed and eventually</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:52'>he dared to be great the day that he was interviewed it's reported for his job at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:03:57'>Parc he was asked what do you think your greatest achievement will be at Parc</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:02'>it'll be the personal computer he replied what's that once at Parc perhaps Alan's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:11'>quirkiest habit of many but was carrying around this contraption about so yeah</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:16'>big that he called the Dynabook sometimes the mini-com or the kitty comm</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:21'>it went by different names but generally that's called the Dynabook and for anybody who would listen he would flip</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:25'>it open and say well here will be the flat panel display in the keyboard and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:29'>you'll have all your music and mail and films and everything right in here now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:34'>people would smile indulgently but he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:39'>never backed down from his vision and as we know the rest is history</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:43'>not only did Allan have the idea of the personal computer but moreover he had</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:48'>the idea of the interface that would make it usable for real people he and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:54'>his colleagues did a great deal of their research and still do with children</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:04:58'>knowing that while adults will put up with almost anything they have to look</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:03'>at windows for instance</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:08'>he wrote if the medium is the message</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:12'>then the message for children of low-bandwidth time-sharing is bla they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:17'>simply won't pay attention now I'm proud to say that at the age of about six my</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:23'>daughter in the early 1970s was one of Alan's pioneering kid researchers that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:28'>parkour every Saturday she would go over there where Park employees would gather</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:32'>it seemed like it was in a basement somewhere between mr. wizard and Mister</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:36'>Rogers in this setup and and and these kids would do mysterious things all</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:41'>morning so I called my daughter last night and said what were you doing I know it's a Saturday morning she said</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:47'>well it was before there were mice was sort of like it was before dinosaurs</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:51'>when dinosaurs ruled the earth so we had big turtles on the floor and we could</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:05:56'>use the computer to make them move around and draw things so I guess instead of mice you know turtles we now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:01'>have mice so I guess I'd rather have turtles but in any case as you can read</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:08'>in your program subsequently after the dazzling years at Parc Allan went on to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:13'>become chief scientist at Atari a fellow at Apple Computer of VP of research and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:19'>development at Disney and he's currently president of viewpoints Research</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:24'>Institute still working on the cutting edge still working with children</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:30'>he's garnered many many awards and and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:34'>memberships and all the rest Academy kinds of memberships but one thing you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:39'>may not know about is and he's one of the most professional amateur pipe</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:43'>Organists you will ever you will ever meet Alan has spent his life promoting</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:49'>the notion that the computer is a means and not an end</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:53'>quoted in Hill six book he said he told</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:06:57'>me today there was a better book about this but people get trapped into</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:01'>thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:05'>it's part of the way our nervous system works but it's dangerous to take it as a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:10'>given because then it controls you rather than the other way around</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:14'>that's McLuhan insight he wrote one of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:18'>the bigger ones of the 20th century and on that note it is my great pleasure</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:22'>to present this year's Marshall McLuhan lecture dr. Alan Kay</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:28'>[Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:42'>thank you it's a real pleasure to be invited here and I brought a few toys</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:49'>along too to help with the talk but I'm</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:07:55'>reminded by this this lecture of a story</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:02'>that I that my old friend Neil postman told me Neil and his friend Charlie wine</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:09'>gardener actually followed McLuhan around when they were students and they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:15'>said McLuhan was a really dynamic lecturer but he never answered questions</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:22'>he was asked every time somebody had asked him a question he'd stop for a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:26'>second he'd say well how about this idea and somebody asked him a question about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:32'>that and he'd stop for a second you say well how about this idea so Marshall</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:37'>McLuhan was a generator of ideas and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:41'>although I've never had the pleasure of being at one of his talks I presume that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:45'>they just started and he went through</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:49'>one idea after another probably on somewhat similar to Buckminster Fuller</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:54'>and then at some point the talk stopped</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:08:58'>and that was the end of that flow I of ideas for that for the evening now in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:04'>this talk tonight I actually made up a beginning middle and end but we may</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:10'>never get to the end and I think that's fine my talk actually starts with this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:18'>book how many people remember this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:22'>little paperback book here this is the one original one I had this is now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:28'>yellowed and I was an undergraduate at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:34'>the University of Colorado when I first tried to read this book and I actually</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:38'>couldn't understand it and it was my I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:43'>read many books every year understood most of them but I couldn't understand</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:48'>this book but I didn't think anything of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:52'>it because there's a wonderful saying that Leon Lederman the Nobel</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:09:56'>prize-winning physicist once gave an advice to readers of one of his books</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:01'>which is if you don't understand it don't worry just keep on reading and the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:07'>next time you see these ideas they'll be hauntingly familiar so my my majors in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:22'>college were mathematics and I had another one in molecular biology and the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:27'>year after I failed to read understanding media this wonderful book</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:32'>came out by Jim Watson the co-discoverer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:36'>of the structure of DNA and it was mostly about tiny little bacteria that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:42'>exists in our gut ecoli and I was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:46'>fascinated because I was working also working my way through school as a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:51'>systems programmer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research so I'd</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:55'>been programming for about four years by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:10:59'>this time and molecular biology the gene</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:03'>was the first book that started really talking about the fundamentals of life</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:09'>as though there are a new kind of mechanism not the kind of mechanisms we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:15'>associate with meshing gears and clockwork and the normal mundane</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:20'>machines that we build but a new way of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:25'>propagating effects around complicated structures and I was fascinated to find</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:34'>out just what kinds of things are inside this tiny little bacterium and I knew</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:42'>that the cells in our body are about 2,000 times as large so we're a nee coli</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:49'>has about five million proteins cell in our body has about 60 billion proteins</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:55'>large molecules that do work and so in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:11:59'>any kind of computer terms even a single cell in our body was far</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:04'>beyond all of the computers that existed on earth back then and I also happen to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:11'>know that our thumb joints have about a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:15'>billion of these cells and in fact your</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:20'>thumb you'll never forget this now next</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:26'>time you look at your thumb you'll remember forever that it's about a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:30'>thousand cells wide so it's almost</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:34'>within the limit of being able to see those cells so it's about a thousand</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:39'>cells by 1,200 cells by about 800 cells hi and Jim Watson like all of us has</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:46'>about a hundred trillion of these cells in their body that has a lot of cells</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:52'>each one of them was 60 billion proteins and here's the most interesting thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:12:58'>that the atoms in our body don't persist</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:06'>so even in our bones which we think of as being rather permanent all of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:12'>atoms in our body are recycled about once every seven years think about that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:17'>for a second the blood set the red blood cells we have are recycled about every</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:23'>hundred days large parts of our body</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:27'>mass are recycled every few weeks and so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:32'>if you look at it if you ask what is a human being from the standpoint of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:38'>molecular biology we're actually a pattern we actually move through space</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:44'>sucking up energy and matter</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:48'>reformulating that into us continuously and leaving less organized stuff behind</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:13:54'>us as we move through time and space and so we persist as well as we do for our</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:02'>seven or eight or nine decades on this planet because we're constantly</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:07'>rebuilding ourselves every second of every day</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:12'>what does this have to do with this talk</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:16'>well it it's a new kind of context and this talk is all about context so when I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:21'>went to graduate school the computers</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:26'>were enormous on the outside and tiny on the inside and programming was actually</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:32'>a lot like making a clock with gears so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:37'>the programs were small you could do precision work on small programs and you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:42'>could get them to run but what was happening at that very same time was a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:48'>kind of expansion that we're still in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:52'>the middle of today so the invention of computer graphics by heavens Sutherland</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:14:57'>the invention I think of personal</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:02'>computing even though I made up the term I always think of when I think of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:08'>personal computing I think of these two images here's Ivan sitting in front of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:12'>display screen doing interactive computer graphics in 1962 here's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:17'>Engelbart in the mid-60s actually doing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:21'>the kind of networked computing we wish we could do today</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:26'>and here's West Clark with one of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:30'>first computers that where the human was higher than it was in fact one of his</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:36'>design goals was if you put it on a table and you sat down to it your head</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:40'>would be higher than it so he didn't like to have the idea of computers</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:44'>looming over you and so these three images were kind of the proto images of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:49'>personal computing and right around then</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:15:54'>Gordon Moore's law which I think everybody has heard of in this room which is the prediction that all good</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:00'>things in silicon were going to double</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:04'>somewhere between every year and every two years and he made a thirty-year</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:09'>prediction and that prediction was quite accurate so the doubling period for the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:14'>last 30 or 35 years now has been about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:19'>18 months and many other technologies that have doubled faster than that then</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:26'>finally the graduate school I went to as part of the ARPA Research community</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:31'>which was about 17 places some of them</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:35'>universities some of them companies that have been funded in the public domain by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:40'>the Department of Defense to essentially invent computing and one of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:47'>inventions that had was in the wind and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:51'>was the ARPANET which is what we call the Internet today and so as a graduate</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:16:57'>student there one of the things that we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:02'>were told that we had to do besides work on our thesis was to figure out how we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:07'>could make a computer network that could have more than a billion nodes and yet</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:14'>never break and of course I started</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:18'>thinking of biological organisms because we don't have the same 300 or 400</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:25'>million nodes on the internet as we did ten years ago but the Internet has that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:29'>never stopped and so what's happened is the Internet is I believe the only</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:36'>artifact of humans that we know of in history that has</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:41'>replaced all of its atoms and all of its bits at least twice now since it first</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:46'>started working in 1969 and has never</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:50'>had to be stopped so this is a new kind</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:17:54'>of machine context the only the closest</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:00'>thing to it may be the record holder could be the United States of America</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:05'>which if you think of it as a system run</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:10'>by the Constitution as its operating system has had this wonderful property</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:16'>of being able to renew itself over and over again generation after generation</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:21'>and has never failed completely has had</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:25'>some disastrous chapters but is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:29'>basically held together and the system has prospered so all of these things got</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:35'>me thinking about computing and I came up with a an idea that today is called</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:41'>object-oriented programming in which</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:46'>every little software thing that you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:50'>make things out of is kind of like a biological cell and you can control the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:18:56'>cells the cells are computing in parallel you can map them onto a vast</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:03'>worldwide network or you can have millions of them inside of a single</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:07'>machine and with that we thought we could do some nifty things like make a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:12'>desktop computer and this is the first</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:19'>personal computer I made we we called it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:23'>a personal computer at uni and this is a picture of it on its own display so you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:28'>can sort of see what it looked like kind of modern for 1967 it had a tablet for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:33'>drawing into and multiple windows and a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:37'>start of a graphical user interface and an object-oriented operating system</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:44'>and there was a pseudo semi professor at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:19:52'>Utah his name was Bob Barton and he was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:00'>there under duress he he was the world's greatest computer designer and was a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:07'>friend of the head of the department and he'd been talked out of out of industry</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:13'>basically to spend a couple of years as a professor at the University of Utah and he didn't really like graduate</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:18'>students he was a very mysterious character this is this isn't actually a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:25'>photograph of him I believe he's never been photographed so in order to depict</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:33'>him I I found somebody on the net that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:37'>that looked kind of like him and then blurred</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:46'>and he was really grumpy and the worst</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:52'>thing was he didn't he wouldn't talk to the graduate students so I really wanted</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:20:57'>to talk to him so I went and visited his</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:02'>home and talked to his wife and I got a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:07'>few things out of her but the main thing I found out was that he liked McLuhan and so I made my project the summer of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:14'>67 that by god I was going to read and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:20'>be able to talk to this guy about understanding media so this time I try</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:25'>to not quite a frontal attack I found the Gutenberg galaxy which may</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:31'>be Marshall McLuhan's greatest book many</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:35'>ways of thinking about it it's a fantastic book and through that I got a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:41'>much stronger idea of what McLuhan was talking about and that allowed me to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:46'>then reread understanding media and when I understood what McLuhan was talking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:52'>about in understanding media just blew my mind um having read the book a couple</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:21:59'>of times since then I believe only half the things in it are true but if you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:05'>consider the area that Marshall McLuhan was working in a 500 batting average is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:11'>incredible because and so reading the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:15'>reading the book is an interesting challenge you have to read it in it in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:20'>the way every book should be read but really are which is to try and sift</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:25'>through every statement and try and understand whether you know the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:32'>hyperbole was tuned into something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:36'>divine or was just a reverberation and I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:41'>believe that these books are the most among the most valuable books written in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:45'>the 20th century</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:50'>now here's a quote I really love and an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:22:59'>interesting thing about this quote is I'm sure it was by McLuhan I think I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:03'>might have heard it from Neil postman it has various attributions people have</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:08'>used this quote quite a bit if you look on the web there are various</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:12'>attributions to it I have not been able to find this quote myself and any</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:16'>written work of Marshall McLuhan so if somebody knows where this quote is I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:21'>would really love to track it down but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:27'>on the other hand you know this is like somebody once said if there weren't a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:31'>God we'd be forced to invent one and so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:35'>this is one of these quotes that if Marshall McLuhan didn't make it up so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:39'>what it's a perfect McLuhan type quote and it represents one of his main ideas</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:46'>which is that the context which is what's really important in our life is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:51'>essentially invisible we're the fish and this pink water that it's swimming</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:23:56'>around and isn't is something that the fish is not strongly aware of and once I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:01'>understood a bit about what McLuhan was saying it reminded me of a model of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:07'>creativity that Arthur Kessler had done in the act of creation also in the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:11'>mid-60s and I've colored it to make it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:15'>sink up with McLuhan idea so Kessler said yeah human thought is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:21'>kind of like a plane and with an ant</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:25'>wandering around on it and the ant can have the illusion that it's making</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:31'>progress that it's choosing goals and directions that it's solving problems</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:37'>getting around obstacles but in fact everything the ant does is pink but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:44'>every once in a while and there might be a little blue outlaw idea but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:52'>we've all been to school we've got parents we go to church we live in a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:24:59'>culture so there's a lot of mechanisms</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:04'>for doing this Chris flat in action as we'll see in a minute the kersplat is a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:09'>wonderful first order idea because most ideas are mediocre down to bad so you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:15'>absolutely want to have our kersplat and the reason that Chris flat has built</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:20'>into us and into our culture is because most of the 80,000 years humans have</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:25'>been around we have been a subsistence society and a subsistence society has to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:31'>be very careful about the experiments it makes so if you're living on the edge of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:37'>disaster finding out how your culture has learned how to live in this very</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:43'>chancy way of doing things and then committing to it wholeheartedly is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:47'>actually a very good first order strategy it turns out it's a terrible second order strategy and it's part of a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:54'>large collection of strategies in which the first order strategy and the second</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:25:59'>order strategy are both true but opposite but every once in a while when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:09'>you're waking up in the morning or out for a jog or taking a shower instead of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:15'>raucous splat you get a Kirpal how many people here have had a Kirpal so just</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:22'>just to help you the technical term for a kerpow is holy shit</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:27'>and how many people have had her Kirpal</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:32'>okay seems to come from the heavens we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:38'>aren't aware of how we arrived at this Kirpal and in fact in the old days when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:44'>people had your pals they went out and started religions on the basis of it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:50'>only sometimes was this a good idea because like all ideas their pals</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:26:56'>themselves are usually mediocre down to bad but they have this epiphany epifanov</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:06'>feeling attached to them that makes them seems so true so perfect so apt so much</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:13'>from God now today what we need to do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:17'>with when we have ideas like this is to use some of the methods of science to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:21'>try and deal with this new insight and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:25'>Cussler had a very interesting side comment they point out that the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:30'>emotional reaction connection connected</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:34'>with the kur powers range from laughter to the ah-ha of science to the long</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:40'>drawn-out sigh of art and so because he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:45'>pointed out that a joke is an example of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:50'>an act of creation where the purpose of the joke is to leave you lead you down</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:27:55'>the pink pathway and then suddenly reveal it's about something blue and you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:01'>have this emotional explosion in science the AHA is often accompanied by laughter</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:08'>and I wonder if anybody would be willing to I can barely see you out there but I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:14'>wonder if anybody has an idea about why scientists laugh when they make a discovery be so much more effective if</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:21'>somebody in the audience volunteered anybody just hi</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:32'>what's funny about it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:38'>yeah and it's I mean basically the ways scientists think about is the universe</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:42'>just because they had an insight doesn't mean the universe suddenly changed to be</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:46'>in accord with that insight and it was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:28:56'>always there that's what's cool about it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:00'>so science is all about dealing with stuff that's right in front of our noses</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:04'>except we can't see it and this long drawn-out sigh about art Kessler pointed</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:12'>out was that one of the great functions of art specially high art is to remind</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:16'>us that there are other contexts because we basically pull into simple little</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:22'>goldfish bowls for efficiency and we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:26'>need something to constantly remind us that there's a lot more perspectives on</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:30'>ideas and then of course the last thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:34'>is is that it really helps to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:39'>then that gives you a way of colliding contexts that are normally not thought</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:44'>to have any overlap at all and for the learning stuff that I've been interested</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:49'>in for so long the kicker for most modern knowledge most knowledge that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:29:55'>happened after 1600 generally requires</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:00'>an enormous amount of effort on the learner to understand it as indeed does</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:05'>McLuhan stuff because the greater the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:10'>invention the weirder the discovery the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:15'>more effort the learner has to make in order to escape from the air pink plane</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:20'>into the blue plane of the particular idea so I got one of these huge ones</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:28'>when I visited Seymour Papert</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:32'>he had been working with children he here's one of the first Turtles he had</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:37'>papper it was a mathematician who'd spent five years with Piaget in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:41'>Switzerland and he had come up with an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:48'>incredible idea and we'll see how it's related</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:52'>in a second so he had a turtle that could roll around on the floor and he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:30:56'>had one on the screen and so to get a child to write a little program to draw</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:03'>a circle with with the turtle seamer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:08'>would have the child acted out with his body close his eyes move his body in a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:14'>circle and then ask the child what are you doing the child said I'm going a little and turning a little over and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:18'>over and if you type that into logo here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:23'>forward five is going a little right five as turning a little repeat is over</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:28'>and over and if you say let's do that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:32'>then this turtle with its pen down draws</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:38'>us a perfect circle without now you may</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:42'>remember from school that you had to know something about x squared plus y</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:47'>squared equals R squared in order to do this and there's none of that here this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:51'>is something that a six-year-old can do and the reason is that Patrick knew</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:31:55'>mathematics and he was actually teaching children I was sitting there with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:00'>watching this with my jaw dropped he was actually teaching children the what is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:05'>called the differential geometry of vectors which happens to be the language</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:10'>mathematical language that most of modern science is actually represented</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:14'>in and I thought this was the greatest thing I'd ever seen</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:19'>anybody use computers for because it could actually transcend all of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:25'>algebra that normally is in the way in learning ideas like calculus and bring</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:30'>it home to being a toy the children</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:35'>didn't even know they were learning mathematics they were just playing with this turtle so on the flight back to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:42'>Utah I started thinking man forget about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:47'>that desktop machine we have to do a children's computer and this is what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:52'>Carroll was referring to as I made this cardboard model when I get back back to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:32:56'>Utah about what this machine should look</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:01'>like and I knew this machine was possible because of Moore's law</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:05'>so the interesting thing about being a prophet back then is it was easy if you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:10'>just paid attention to physics and people who understood physics so Gordon</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:17'>Moore was a solid-state physicist and he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:21'>backed up his Moore's Law assertion the problem was that most most people</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:26'>especially most business people did not understand his arguments and so they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:30'>were consistently wrong about computing for more than 30 years in fact still are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:35'>but if you actually follow this stuff you could plot out in time exactly when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:40'>you could build a machine like this they were already flat screen display so this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:44'>I don't think of this as much of a prediction but it was a great focuser of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:51'>romantic zeal because this is a very romantic thing the idea of children of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:33:56'>11 and 12 learning advanced physics by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:00'>programming up their own space wargames so they could play but basically in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:06'>using this notion of being in a world where math actually was a language that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:13'>made sense to talk was something that just completely gripped my imagination</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:18'>or reminding me of musical instruments and so I thought of this Dynabook as an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:23'>instrument whose music is ideas and then</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:27'>I realized that I might very well be dead by the time the computer has ever</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:32'>used this way because if you look at the history of printing you have manuscripts</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:37'>you have the printing press imitating the manuscripts as McLuhan pointed out</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:44'>you have the Aldous books about 50 years</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:48'>later cheap books that you could put in a saddlebag but the real printing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:34:54'>revolution trailed by more than a hundred years really started in the 17th</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:00'>century to produce what we call modern</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:04'>thought it's true there are important things deadly things life concerning</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:12'>things in the 16th century like the Reformation the Reformation was an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:17'>attempt to and deal with problems that were of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:21'>great concern back here from the 17th century on the way reforms and so forth</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:29'>were looked at was in a completely different direction forward so I had</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:34'>this image of there being these big expensive mainframes the inevitability</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:40'>of the desktop computer and then this Elvis like notebook computer and that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:47'>all of us would be long gone by the time stodgy humanity got around to using the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:54'>computer for what was good for so we actually talked about how people were</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:35:58'>going to use this thing for imitating paper for decades now we didn't think</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:04'>they're gonna use it to imitate paper for three decades so there was no way we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:12'>could be as cynical as what has actually happened now let's talk for a second</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:19'>about what we were interested in and I want to relate this to McLuhan's ideas</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:25'>because in thinking about what was going</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:31'>on the key thing for me was that McLuhan</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:37'>said no matter what else you think you're paying attention to just try and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:42'>invert figure and ground and try and see if you can pit parcel out what the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:48'>actual context is that's invisible while</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:52'>you're being distracted by all these things around and so the part of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:36:57'>invisible context of the printing revolution was the regularity of it so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:05'>it actually the regular area of it actually changed the kind of argument that people thought they could write</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:09'>about and it changed the argument from being allegorical which could survive</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:16'>many different slips of monks pens and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:20'>even telling the monks telling the stories differently to something where</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:27'>the very galleys that you proved as an author where</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:31'>guaranteed to be replicated thousands and thousands of times so this changed everything about the way</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:38'>we argued and it took a long time for that change but the change was probably</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:42'>the biggest change in human history now what were we concerned about so looking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:48'>ahead you have to ask questions about what is the invisible context that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:53'>computers could provide that could actually be beneficial from for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:37:59'>humankind and you also have to ask questions about what is the invisible context they could provide that will be</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:05'>anything but beneficial for us so one of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:09'>the things that concerned a lot of us back then was how easily fooled humans</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:15'>had been over their entire history and especially to us in the 60s and the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:20'>early seventies we thought pathetically</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:24'>fooled and so we're very concerned about this notion of being fooled now my</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:31'>friend Betty Edwards have teaches drawing I think everybody is familiar</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:35'>with her drawing on the right side of the brain books and she has a wonderful</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:41'>thing she shows her class</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:45'>on the first day of drawing class she points out that the reason they're</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:51'>having trouble drawing is not because they can't move their arm they're having</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:38:56'>trouble drawing because they are too</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:00'>quickly perceiving something about the objects in front of them the perceptions</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:07'>of what they are and the labelings of them are so acute and so fast that they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:14'>never get a chance to actually look at them and so one of the many examples she</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:20'>shows in that first day is this one where she shows these two tables and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:24'>says so for example the size and the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:28'>shape of these two tabletops is exactly the same and her class says no that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:35'>can't be possible she does this with cardboard but since I have a computer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:39'>here so I'll take that tabletop put it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:43'>right down there and then I'll rotate it and this is not</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:48'>a trick people have accused me of it but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:52'>in fact all of the table tops in this drawing were made from a single table</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:39:58'>top shape I've shown this hundreds of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:03'>times it's one of my favorite examples and talks and I still can't see that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:07'>they're the same shape however if you're</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:13'>curious about this the slide is not gonna be on long enough but the way to decide that they are is you take a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:18'>pencil and do just what artists do to avoid being fooled put your arm out</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:23'>straight and measure and you'll see that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:28'>they're exactly the same so the Talmud says we see things not as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:34'>they are but as we are and I'd really like to know what happened to the person</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:40'>who made that statement in the Talmud because if you take it to its logical</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:45'>conclusion it has some unsettling right</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:55'>so so here's the way science looks at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:40:59'>the world this is a toughy and I'm gonna</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:06'>spend a little time at it because it's one of the most important insights in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:12'>human history as a it's very simple in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:16'>one sense but it's very subtle in another it has to do with admitting that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:23'>we have three pounds of oatmeal inside of our head rather than an exact</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:29'>duplicate of the entire universe so once</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:36'>you once you work and this is it this is a tough one because it seems like we do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:41'>have something about the universe inside of our head but it's actually just a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:46'>representation so it's like something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:50'>written down in a book and you can write down almost anything in a book and that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:54'>we're talking at lunch about this movie A Beautiful Mind which is a very bad</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:41:58'>movie about John Nash and a really bad movie about math but it's a pretty good</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:05'>movie about schizophrenia but they missed their chance to point out that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:10'>everybody all of us are everyday both</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:16'>awake and sleeping are dealing with hallucinations because that is how we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:21'>see the world the difference between us and a schizophrenic is how verifiable</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:28'>the hallucinations are and they're less verifiable when you're dreaming</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:33'>schizophrenia in part is doing things</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:37'>while you're awake that are quite reasonable and natural</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:42'>while you're while you're dreaming so and scientists have this problem too</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:47'>they also have three pounds of oatmeal inside their head and what they try and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:52'>do a couple of hours each day is to remember that so here's the way science</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:42:57'>thinks about out here in the world where</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:02'>we can't go is something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:07'>some sort of phenomena and we don't know what it's part structure is we don't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:11'>know anything they don't even know what their parts mean anything but what we do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:16'>get to experience is some vastly reduced</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:27'>shadow of this phenomena and we can look</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:31'>at it more closely with specialized instruments like microscopes and telescopes so for example and then what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:38'>we try and do is we try and make a model in our brains that casts the same kind</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:44'>of shadow and in science the criticize</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:49'>the criticizing of this model both</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:53'>intrinsically and compared to the shadow done by the real phenomena is what's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:43:57'>called knowledge so science is a relationship it's not knowledge itself</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:03'>it's a relationship between the difficulties we have or with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:07'>representing things and what's out there</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:11'>in the in the world that we can't get to directly so it's a lot like making Maps so let's suppose this is gravity the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:17'>bunny out there is gravity and our hand</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:23'>puppet here is Newton's theory of gravity and it's pretty good we still</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:27'>use it for space shots we used it to land on the moon and a little over 100</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:33'>years ago they noticed that I'm the real bunny it had a round tail and when they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:38'>looked over here on newton's theory there's this arm sticking out</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:47'>see how funny science is and they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:44:56'>realized that was going to really be a difficult thing to get that arm out of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:03'>his hand puppet and so they floundered around for a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:07'>while finally Einstein came up with a completely different way of putting the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:12'>tail on the bunny but he knew that he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:16'>wasn't finding the truth about the real bunny out there he was just putting a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:21'>tail on it so one of his beautiful short</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:25'>lines is you must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:31'>and this is as good as any anything anybody's ever said about this because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:35'>what he meant is the stuff that can be true is stuff that we represent in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:40'>language so we can write things in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:45'>English that are true and we can write things in math that are true but they're</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:50'>only true because they're hermetically sealed they're only about themselves</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:54'>they're not about anything out there the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:45:58'>stuff that's real out there is a different category of things and he had a longer thing to say he said as far as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:03'>the laws of mathematics refer to reality if they are not certain and as far as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:08'>they are certain they do not refer to reality so the cool thing here is and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:16'>that I I think this is one of the coolest thing that's why science is one of the great art forms is by giving up</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:22'>all conceptions of truth the absolute notions of truth we find in the Bible</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:26'>and in Greek thought by giving up those</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:32'>ideals for instance science admitting it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:37'>really can't get at the truth can nonetheless look at a 12 year old with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:42'>diabetes diagnosed it and actually create the molecules that this child</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:47'>needs to live so no other belief system on earth can do that and it does it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:53'>because it's trying for something else what it's trying</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:46:57'>or is a highly criticized abou map of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:02'>the best that we know of these shadows and that has worked out to be much much</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:08'>more powerful than protestations about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:12'>ultimate and exact truths now a real</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:17'>character that how many people in this room have ever read anything by Alfred</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:22'>Korzybski count Alfred course--it well nobody knows</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:27'>whether he is really account if you know about Alfred course of skating so he's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:34'>his great book which is oh I'll match</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:38'>his if you want a book that's difficult to read I'll match science and sanity up</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:42'>against this any day of the week but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:48'>this is a great statement he said one measure of sanity is how closely ones</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:52'>and journal representations of the world really resemble the world and by this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:47:57'>measure humans are at least quite unsane so this is a very useful word we are all</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:03'>unsane just like we are all hallucinating now here's a here's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:12'>another idea which is that math is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:17'>probably the most dangerous thing to get good at if you don't also get good at science if you remember Socrates is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:24'>complained about this office anybody</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:29'>here remember what that was so remember</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:34'>he's complained about the Sophists as the Sophists taught the youth of Athens</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:39'>to be able to win arguments regardless of whether they are true so this office</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:44'>are probably an early form of lawyer and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:50'>and in fact learning how to reason brilliantly in a hermetically sealed</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:54'>system like language is one of the most dangerous things we could ever get to do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:48:58'>because we like to rationalize everything we do and the better we get</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:02'>at rationalization the more dangerous we are so math desperately needs science</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:08'>reasoning deficit desperately needs science which this reminder that we have to keep on</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:14'>checking out reality to see whether our brilliant inferences actually have any</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:21'>kind of currency in the in the real world math is useful though because it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:27'>is so precise that it gives you a way of thinking about things that are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:31'>unthinkable in English for instance no scientist worries about whether a photon</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:35'>is a particle or a wave probably everybody here has seen discussions</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:40'>about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics but you have to realize that two</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:44'>scientists they aren't paradoxical at all because scientists think of them</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:48'>entirely in terms of mathematics and there's nothing paradoxical about the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:52'>mathematics I once heard Steven Weinberg trying to explain this to an audience</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:49:56'>and I'm not gonna go any further with it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:03'>anyway deep Zen so when you think about this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:09'>and you've gotten through understanding media all of a sudden the realization I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:18'>had anyway was gee Montessori is maybe the smartest people person I've ever</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:23'>heard of connected with education certainly in this century because her</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:30'>notion was that children are set up by nature to learn through play and what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:39'>you if you want them to learn the 20th century through play then you have to give them 20th century environments and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:44'>this seemed like the best idea I'd ever heard and so she spent 20 years</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:48'>designing toys that were designed to be treated as toys by the children but that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:53'>she thought would have powerful cognitive side effects on their common</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:50:57'>sense and so we can ask the question is what should these thinker toys be in the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:03'>21st century but along with Montessori we have to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:08'>realize that the important thing for children to learn in their earliest</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:13'>years is not a stencil knowledge the way most schools try to teach them and try</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:18'>to test them the most important thing is for the kids to learn the uncommon sense</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:22'>the new epistemologies for the new ways of thinking that have appeared</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:27'>just in the last few hundred years this is what education is failing miserably on beyond miserably totally backwards</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:36'>from what's actually important and so you get thousands and millions of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:41'>stories of children who have been through years and years of school being</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:45'>taught facts and tested on the facts not having any kind of foundation to hang</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:50'>these ideas on so right around this time</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:51:56'>was when I first met Neil postman through one of his earliest books</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:00'>teaching as a subversive activity and he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:05'>was one of the first people people to actually start proposing that teachers</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:12'>set up contexts and teachers not try and lecture and teachers not try and do this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:16'>and not try and do that but to actually</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:20'>change the internal foundations of the way students think by getting them to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:25'>think so it Xerox PARC looking at ideas</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:32'>for childhood development one of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:36'>things we looked at was PJs stages in which in early childhood a child makes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:42'>things with their hands and learns by doing and then there's a visual stage</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:46'>where the child thinks there's more water in the tall thin glass and so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:50'>forth and then a symbolic stage which towards the end of PJ's life he wrote an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:54'>essay for UNESCO where he he said in the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:52:58'>essay that he believed more than 90% of all Europeans never got to the stage</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:07'>someone that was wonderful and we got</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:13'>attracted to Gerry Bruner who had written this marvelous book called</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:18'>towards the theory of instruction and Bruner had retested some of the Piaget</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:26'>experiments and he discovered for example that he could get the child to change their mind on the water pouring</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:31'>experiment by just blocking the tall thin glass or taking it away and he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:37'>could get the child to say yeah there's the same amount of water in the glass because where would</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:42'>it you know where were the extra water come from if he couldn't see the tall</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:46'>thin glass and he'd change over if he could see it and so Brynner had this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:51'>idea that oh there's actually multiple men multiple mentalities existing and at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:53:56'>any given time and in any given stage of development you have many ways about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:01'>thinking about the world that was you know why this was even controversial I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:05'>don't know but Gerry did the experiments</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:11'>and his personality was forceful enough to get people to start thinking about combining these mentalities so for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:17'>example you can get a child who's theoretically in the visual thinking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:22'>stage and by blocking their view like Patrick did when he wanted the kids to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:27'>make a circle with their body you can get them to revert to a kinesthetic way</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:33'>of thinking or even leap ahead to the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:37'>symbolic type thinking that children are not supposed to be able to do with that age so this to us was a very powerful</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:42'>model and we thought boy what we want to do is really combine these three ways of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:48'>communicating and we made up a slogan called doing with images make symbols</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:53'>that you're basically leading by grappling with things kinesthetically</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:54:59'>your understanding by configuration and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:05'>you're generalizing using using symbols</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:09'>so at Xerox PARC we use these ideas and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:17'>came up with a lot of the technology that used today some of it was quite an</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:23'>improvement on its successors because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:27'>the commercial world actually didn't care about why many of these ideas were</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:32'>were done so the the overlapping window interface was designed for children to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:37'>learn in the space of a few minutes because we had some hard things we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:41'>wanted to teach them one of the supreme irony is that Microsoft Windows now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:45'>requires training courses in order to learn</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:52'>now through these inventions from Adele Goldbergs and my point of view we just</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:55:57'>gone to a lot of work to make computers that we could actually take down to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:02'>schools to see what the kids are actually doing now here's one where I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:06'>think Marshall didn't go far enough he wasn't hyper Berlocq this is a great</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:10'>statement children are the messages we send to the future but not really they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:15'>are the future what does he mean by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:19'>messages there's nobody there to listen to them except the children of today so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:25'>they actually are the future we're sending to the future and so we have to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:29'>be very very careful about the kind of environments that we put children in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:33'>because it's the environment the environments that are absorbed into this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:40'>context that we're not aware of so for example television is the worst thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:46'>that ever happened to higher-level education and parents should treat it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:51'>like a box full of loaded guns or a liquor cabinet and simply not have it in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:56:56'>the house this is an almost impossible proposition to put before people today</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:02'>but because television is an incredible teacher but as Neil postman has pointed</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:07'>out it can't carry the discourse of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:11'>20th 21st century it can only carry the sum of its discourse and it's fantastic</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:17'>at that and it's so pervasive it has</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:21'>this way of creating an entirely new world in which people accommodate -</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:27'>without even realizing it we can use that as a strength and I want to give</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:35'>you a little sense of what this might be like so we've come into the present now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:39'>let's take a look at how a child might</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:43'>play and learn advanced mathematics and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:47'>then maybe a little science so this will be the last part of this this talk here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:51'>now when I use the word play when I'm giving talks in front of educators they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:57:56'>are very upset because they and most</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:01'>parents don't think education should be fun after all they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:08'>didn't enjoy it and look how successful</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:12'>they are but the thing you realize is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:18'>and Montessori realized this is that she knew artists and scientists and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:23'>mathematicians and every single one of these as an adult professional was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:28'>having fun we still use the term playing music if you talk to a mathematician why</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:35'>do you do it it's fun it's playful so many of these things that are the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:40'>hardest and least successful at being taught in school are being taught</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:44'>because they're being taught as some sort of catechism of some new religion</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:48'>rather than being taught through play like Montessori wanted so let's take a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:52'>look here from the child's point of view now so from the child's point of view</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:58:57'>what we say is okay what would you like</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:02'>to do if you could do anything and we found one of the things that they like</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:07'>to do is they'd like to learn how to drive a car so we say okay dry yourself</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:12'>a little car that you'd like to learn</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:17'>how to drive and by the way once you do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:22'>that as looked at from the top so right away this gets them into a different</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:27'>perspective than they ever had almost no children have ever looked at a car from</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:31'>the top so it takes them a while to think about what it might look like and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:36'>both boys and girls have the same interest in this they both want to learn</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:41'>how to drive and both boys and girls put on big off-road tires these day</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:50'>because remember the the why or why do children want to do things no child</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='00:59:57'>eighty thousand years ago he wanted to learn advanced mathematics and we have</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:01'>the same genes as we did eighty thousand years ago as far as we can tell so so I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:06'>say okay that's that's good here's my little car it's been made from a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:11'>painting into a thing I can do things to this thing I can make it larger and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:15'>smaller so it's kind of a graphical object I can rotate it I can look inside</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:20'>of it and now we see an interesting contrast the child's world is the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:25'>hand-eye world over here and math many</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:31'>parts of math is best handled through symbols symbols are not the way what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:36'>they like to think of this looks cold and forbidding over here this looks hot</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:40'>and interesting so our job in the true Montessori style is to keep them playing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:45'>and gradually let them see what the power of these guys are so you can think</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:51'>of this as being like a trip to math land if you take a child to France they're gonna be much more interested in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:00:56'>learning French than they are sitting out in the middle of Idaho somewhere</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:00'>right and as papri pointed out a long</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:04'>time ago that when a when a child doesn't do well in math the schools</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:09'>frequently say well this child is not math minded but if a child doesn't do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:14'>well in French they can't say this child is not French minded and if there's any</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:20'>analogy between those then what the children need is a math land okay so the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:25'>first thing we do is get them to rename this so everything is has to do with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:30'>this car that they have get them to look at a property here's one called heading</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:34'>I'll press down on this and the little number there is counting up and you can</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:39'>see the car turning and look look right over here while I turn the car by hand</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:46'>alright so this is the name of this property of where the car is heading and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:51'>I can influence it by changing these numbers here here's a little behavior</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:55'>car forward by five click on it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:01:59'>over and over again the car goes forward car turn by five still pretty dull but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:05'>if you pull this out and drop it on the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:09'>desktop there it makes a little script for you car four by five car turn by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:14'>five and let's just start it ticking now by clicking on the clock</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:18'>there and all of a sudden what have we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:22'>got well we've actually got a logo</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:26'>turtle with a pin on it and a costume on</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:37'>top of it so all of a sudden the child</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:41'>has made the first step into differential geometry here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:50'>okay so I'll get rid of this but of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:54'>course the child wants to steer the car</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:02:58'>so turning this down to zero the car goes straight negative numbers makes it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:03'>go in the other direction but this is not very exciting</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:12'>real cars our lips come back here real cars are actually steered of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:16'>steering wheel so we say to the kids okay paint yourself a steering wheel</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:28'>and the steering wheel is the same kind of thing as a car so this is like old time Lego you can make anything out of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:33'>this stuff look inside it let's call it steer here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:38'>and it's got a heading and what do you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:44'>think will happen if we pick up the name of its heading and drop it right into</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:49'>car turn by here well now we can steer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:54'>the car and the kid has just learned about variables something by the way</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:03:59'>that most adults in America do not understand yet but here the variable is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:06'>actually doing work by standing in for all the numbers that are flowing out of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:11'>the steering wheel now it happens that the steering wheel is too sensitive so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:18'>it's hard to steer the car and the kid starts complaining after about 20</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:22'>seconds of joy and this gives us a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:26'>chance in the classroom to give the kids a little bit advice but let's suppose the kid is not in a classroom where the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:31'>teacher doesn't understand this or the parents don't understand that the kid is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:35'>home what is the child going to do the child needs to get some advice from</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:40'>somebody and the child can actually come over here and find a kid somewhere on</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:46'>the Internet might be 5,000 miles away in Germany like Tommy is here and ask</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:04:53'>Tommy some questions and I've got Tommy on this other computer here link through</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:01'>the internet and so Sam who's our main</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:06'>guy over there opens the chat to Tommy and says hi Tommy</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:12'>and over the Internet it goes and shows</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:17'>up on Tommy's machine so Tommy says hi</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:22'>Sam they dialogue mocking back and forth and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:28'>this actually has this actually has</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:34'>voice chat so they can talk back and forth while they're doing stuff and so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:39'>the complaint is what's how can I steer my car and Tommy says once you share</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:43'>your screen with me and so Sam says</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:47'>share down here and this allows Tommy over here to five thousand miles away</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:05:56'>look at Sam's screen notices something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:00'>adults would like to do because adults work together with each others and if</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:05'>you notice both of the kids cursors are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:09'>in here in both screens here so I'm not gonna be on Tommy's machine I'm gonna go</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:14'>over here on Sam here and say okay now look inside here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:19'>once you try dividing that number coming out of the steering wheel by something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:23'>like three and Sam comes over here and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:28'>says oh yeah that's much better</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:32'>and suddenly Sam for the first time in his ten-year-old life understands what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:37'>divide is good for I think about this as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:41'>a mathematician I view it as somewhere between obscene and a crime to not teach</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:46'>math with understanding because its greatest virtue is that it's completely</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:51'>understandable and so trying to teach a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:06:55'>concept that isn't pragmatically in the child's world there's a very ugly thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:00'>that schools do and then finally it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:05'>would be nice if mcloon were here to see all this finally Tommy says okay let's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:11'>play and he just dumps his car onto the shared space 5,000 miles later it shows</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:21'>up on Sam's machine and because it was</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:25'>sent running it shows up running and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:30'>they can interact simultaneously this is always tricky for me because I have to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:34'>watch to Mission seems at once but and any number of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:40'>children can can do this so and the last</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:44'>thing of course is to go to full go to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:49'>full screen so I'm going to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:07:54'>now what I'm going to do here is I think</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:02'>now is a good time to make an ending and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:17'>I think what I'm yeah so I think what I think what I'll do here is just skip</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:21'>ahead a little bit so I put in a whole</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:27'>bunch of things that I of course wanted to show you but let's end with this so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:38'>here a bunch of little cars bouncing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:43'>around and you could do a lot of things with these cars you can pretend they're gas particles you can learn something</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:48'>about kinetic theory of heat let's suppose they're people in a village and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:54'>what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn all of them blue but leave one red</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:08:59'>infected one I'm going to let that in fact all the rest people always root for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:10'>the last blue one</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:17'>hard to see what happened there so I'll get a little graph over time so you see</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:23'>not a lot started at the beginning there let's try it this with a different time</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:31'>constant and for the kids you can just change the kind of time concept by changing the little village that they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:37'>infect in so you see that had a very different thing I just changed it by a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:42'>factor of two and the infection here</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:46'>what worked like this now here's the interesting thing that aids has this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:09:51'>curve typhoid and cholera have this curve this is the human pee hole of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:02'>human common sense and imagination cannot see that AIDS is a problem the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:10'>time constant is too long it's outside of our ability to assume danger whereas</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:17'>we can easily see a typhoid or a cholera epidemic as something that needs drastic</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:22'>attention science is an imagination amplifier so a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:29'>lot of different ways of thinking about science and I don't think teaching</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:34'>children science in vocational training is a very good idea</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:38'>the reason to teach science is it's an imagination amplifier the best one we've</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:42'>ever come up with and it allows us to understand a disaster before it happens</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:48'>most of the world however doesn't have that imagination amplifier and so this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:54'>graph was nineteen mill this was nineteen million when I first took this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:10:59'>article out is now up to twenty more four million people who have died and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:03'>most of these people who have died have died unnecessarily because they and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:09'>their politicians could not see what aids was before it happened to them now</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:16'>five hundred years ago about a hundred</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:20'>years before the printing press a much more interesting situation</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:31'>happened where the bubonic plague came in from China through Venice and into</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:36'>Europe and all told about a quarter million of the world's population died</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:43'>but the interesting number here is that the hundred million people who died from</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:48'>bubonic plague is about the number of people who are going to die from AIDS</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:53'>because in many many cases if the best</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:11:57'>things that could be possibly done in the world today we're done still about a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:01'>hundred million total people would die now these pictures of bubonic plague</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:07'>were taken by a camera because plague is still with us but it's not dangerous in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:14'>this widespread non understood way</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:18'>here's an irony for people who like irony's as the causes where the same</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:24'>kind of causes that ignorant people have us been assigning for thousands of years</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:28'>it was Satan the Jews enemies pointing poisoning wells remedies herbs aromatic</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:34'>woods praying why I was praying a bad memory remedy because it got everybody</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:39'>together in churches where the fleas could jump from person to person more</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:43'>efficiently so now the point of this is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:47'>that five hundred years ago everybody in the world was in the same state with regard to dangerous things like this but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:54'>today large parts of the world almost a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:12:59'>billion people in the world one-sixth of the world's population actually has</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:04'>defenses against this and understandings of it and the rest of the world doesn't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:09'>so if we're looking ahead to what the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:13'>biggies are in the 21st century the population problem aids this shows how</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:19'>many people are infected now so on the order of 40 million people are infected</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:24'>as of two years ago</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:29'>if you ask a biologist what's the biggest health problem in the world he'll say drinkable water most people</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:34'>don't have it and more people die from bad water in the world and all of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:40'>wars that are going on right now and all</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:44'>of the disease education of women is the key to most of these if you're looking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:50'>for a cause this is it and every single</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:54'>one of these things can only be changed</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:13:58'>by letting McLuhan be a presence to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:03'>remind us that it's not the things that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:07'>seem apparent to us that are the biggest problems it is the context that we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:12'>consistently overlook when we trying to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:17'>think about our problems so to invert our ways of looking at</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:21'>things and look at context is the greatest gift that McLuhan gave us Thank</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:25'>You Marshall and thanks all of you for coming</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:29'>[Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:14:59'>so questions yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:05'>yes this this program which does lots</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:10'>more is actually a 21st century version of the stuff we did at Xerox PARC</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:15'>and it's free we gave it away to the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:19'>world starting about starting a 96 and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:24'>there are two sites if you're a hacker go to squeak it's called squeak go to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:31'>squeaked org and if you're a parent or</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:35'>an educator go to squeak land dot org</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:39'>yes not many</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:51'>bill bill is enthusiastic but I don't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:15:56'>think that essay has a lot worthwhile to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:00'>be said in it actually yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:11'>no I'm saying that the if you want to train the intellect you have to change</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:19'>the heuristics that we use for dealing with knowledge we don't completely</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:23'>understand so for example in after</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:27'>Sputnik there was a lot of interest as</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:31'>there is today and whether children are learning any modern knowledge so one of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:36'>the things they did after back then was to go to higher learning places like MIT</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:45'>and Harvard and they discovered that if they took students who got straight A's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:50'>in science and asked them science</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:54'>questions that they hadn't explicitly studied that their ability to answer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:16:59'>them was roughly the same as it would have been 40,000 years ago so in other</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:05'>words they they were learning science in English but they were not learning any</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:12'>deep ideas about how to think about the world this is generally true this is one</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:19'>of the frightening things about the way we teach knowledge so the fact I have a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:27'>little video of it that shows</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:44'>Harvard look to graduate some simple</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:51'>questions in astronomy to test how a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:17:56'>lifetime of education affects our understanding of science we ask these</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:00'>recent graduates some simple questions in astronomy consider for example that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:04'>the causes of the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:08'>I think the seasons happens because as the earth travels around the Sun it gets</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:13'>nearer to the Sun which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:18'>produces colder weather and thence and hence the seasons how hot it is or how</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:22'>cold it is in any given time of the year has to do with the the closeness of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:27'>earth to the Sun during the seasonal periods the earth goes around the Sun</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:31'>and and it gets hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:36'>when we get further away from the Sun these graduates like many of us think of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:40'>the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse even though the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:45'>with distance producing virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:51'>the strong incorrect belief that changing distance is responsible for the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:55'>seasons I took physics and planetary</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:18:59'>motion and relativity electromagnetism waves I've never really had a scientific</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:05'>background whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having it I had</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:10'>quite a bit of science in high school yeah through physics want first year in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:16'>two years of chemistry regardless of their science education 21 of the 23</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:22'>randomly selected students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:27'>misconceptions when asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:32'>Moon when it's further away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:38'>position interferes with the reflection of the Sun against the moon so there's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:50'>quite a bit more of this so this is this</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:54'>is a part of a series called private universe you can type private a universe into</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:19:58'>Google and you can get these video tapes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:02'>I think we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard must be confidence 101 because there's no way any of these</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:13'>kids adults we're going to admit that they didn't know or couldn't remember</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:18'>that it all been taught it I wanted one</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:22'>interesting omission that in NSF made is there's an obvious next question to ask</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:27'>anybody got a night what what question would you want to ask these kids is the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:31'>very next question yes exactly so so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:39'>what do you what he said is ask them about the southern hemisphere and that's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:43'>what I two weeks later I was giving a talk at UCLA and I found that the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:47'>audience was mostly seniors are going to be graduating and so I took about thirty</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:53'>of them outside and went through these two questions and I I did ask the second</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:20:59'>question which is to the ones you thought the proximity the proximity theory didn't have anything to do with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:04'>what they thought about the Earth's orbit it was actually the common sense</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:08'>idea that as you get closer to a fire it gets hotter and as you get further away it gets so this is something it's almost</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:13'>built into people's nervous system but it's a common-sense way of solving the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:18'>problem and of course I asked them well tell me this do you know you know when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:23'>it's summer up here in the northern hemisphere do you know what season it is in the southern hemisphere every single</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:28'>one of the UCLA students knew it was winter and I believe by simple induction</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:34'>that every one of the Harvard students knew it was winter I didn't know why</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:39'>obviously but people tend to remember that because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:43'>it's odd and so they did remember that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:47'>and so every single one of these students that you saw here with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:51'>confusion about how this works was also</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:21:55'>ignoring something that they had learned and knew and was unable to retrieve so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:00'>this problem was not a science problem at all the first problem was a kind of a math</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:05'>problem they couldn't retrieve contradictory knowledge even though it's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:09'>indexed using the same terms and use it in their own theory I said they tried to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:13'>bullshit their way through and so so the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:20'>key thing if you want to teach science if you actually study a scientist and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:28'>try and understand what makes a difference about what how the scientist</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:32'>does that scientists amongst a group of these Harvard kids probably didn't get</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:37'>any higher grades in physics because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:42'>Harvard might not teach on real science but the difference between the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:47'>scientists and science type kid and the rest of the kids is the science type kid</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:51'>can answer all manner of questions in the way any scientist would answer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:22:55'>including I don't know or I know how to find out or it's probably like this or</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:00'>there's a whole set of rhetoric that goes along with the person who's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:04'>thinking that way these kids are not thinking that way so so they fail and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:08'>basically that would even be okay with me except that the the deep ideas about</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:15'>how our country works are actually outside of the common sense of humanity</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:20'>right let's just take a simple idea that does not appear in any traditional</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:25'>society that we have ever known about on earth how about equal rights do you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:31'>think that's burned into our genes no way somebody had to invent that idea and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:35'>it's an idea that we try and learn and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:39'>teach and we're still not that good at it but it's an abstraction that's part</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:44'>of this artificial structure we call civilization if you think about it civilization is a bunch of hard-won</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:51'>inventions that go against normal human nature right let's not have</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:23:58'>war let's not have crime let's let's not do this let's not do that let's not</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:02'>discriminate let's let's be a different kind of person than people have been for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:08'>the last hundred thousand years that is an incredible thing and in order to get</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:12'>it you have to get beyond normal common</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:16'>sense or else you know you're on tenterhooks it's like being thrust out</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:21'>on a pond on skates and not being able to skate yes yeah one of the earliest</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:32'>ones I had was an encounter with a vacuum cleaner when I was about I think</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:38'>10 or 11 my mother was truly wonderful</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:43'>about letting me take things apart and I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:48'>cannot remember why I took apart the vacuum cleaner but I did and what was in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:24:55'>there wasn't what I thought was in there and I remember struggling with I don't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:06'>know what I said then because there's a vernacular of today that has worked its</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:10'>way into this story right so I didn't I didn't say this but basically what I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:15'>said was vacuums don't suck because all</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:22'>is in the all is in there as a fan and if you think about and the fan if you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:27'>look at the way the fan blades are set up they're bouncing air in one direction</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:33'>and not in another and the direction</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:39'>they're bouncing the air in is the exhaust of the thing where you have the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:43'>pressure coming out and so what the heck is hold your hand to the other end and I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:50'>suddenly realize there's if if there's no air molecules in there the only thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:25:56'>you can be holding my hand there is air pressure from the outside</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:01'>and I went holy shit and somebody my thought was wow the the air molecules</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:06'>must be moving maybe as fast as a hundred miles an hour so when my father</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:11'>came home my father was a physiologist</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:15'>who and so I got him I said dad you know</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:19'>the the air molecules might be moving as fast as 100 miles an hour so so so we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:26'>went and got one of his college physics books and looked it up and we discovered</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:30'>that the every molecule in this room is traveling about 1,500 miles an hour and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:38'>so remember those scenes on movies when the somebody shoots the window out of a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:43'>plane everything gets sucked out they don't get sucked out they get blown out</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:47'>because think about it as soon as the air pressure is out of the plane no</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:51'>problem right so it's actually the air in the plane that is dangerous and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:26:57'>incredibly powerful and that absolutely blew my mom you know at 10 or 11 or so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:03'>just the realization that was exactly the opposite because vacuums by adults are always</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:09'>talked about as sucking and no way they</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:14'>don't and I think that was a that was a turning point for me when I suddenly the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:19'>world was totally upside down and then I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:23'>got used to it you know so I felt so by feeling about this new epistemology is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:28'>it's like when you go out in the ice and you can't skate so you're in worse shape</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:34'>than you were when you're on land this is why most people go back to land but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:39'>the interesting thing about skating is if you get efficient at it it's incredibly more efficient than walking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:44'>and running and that's what science has been so if you can get past that awful</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:48'>early stage it's like a violin is awful in the early stage and then it becomes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:54'>one of the greatest musical amplifiers that we've ever come up with for musical</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:27:58'>impulse and so I think this is one of the dilemmas of model modern education</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:03'>is that there is a real hump that often</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:07'>has to do it because it's just at odds with everything that we believe in and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:11'>you somehow I have to get her get around that in one way or another and then once you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:15'>once you have gotten around a lot of other things become much easier so just</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:20'>a couple of those hits so that for instance the San Francisco Exploratorium</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:24'>was done by my friend Frank Oppenheimer who's the brother of Jay Robert Frank</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:29'>was a physicist and he got a lot of flak</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:33'>from the funders of the Exploratorium who would get they said we gave you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:37'>millions of dollars to make a science museum and you made a nosh pit because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:41'>if you ever been there it's just 500 exhibits and 2,000 children bouncing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:45'>around trying things out and and Frank said to them to the funders he said you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:50'>don't understand said the first thing you have to get to in order to do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:28:54'>science at all is to realize that the world is not as it seems and he said we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:00'>made 500 exhibits and each one teaches the world is not as it seems in its own</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:04'>way and what we want to do is collide the right kid with the right exhibit so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:09'>they'll have that hit the world is not as it seems and once they've had a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:13'>couple of those they might start including that as their part of their</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:18'>repertory of thinking about things then instead of just accepting things they might say well the world is not as it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:22'>seems let's maybe there's something behind the curtain so just the idea that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:27'>there is a curtain and that there's something behind it as one of the most</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:31'>people take things on face value and they're taught to take things on face</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:35'>value so for instance just the acceptance that you bring when you go to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:40'>a theatre beautiful looking people on</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:45'>the stage music great words is exactly</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:49'>the opposite of what you want to bring to it to a political rally but it's it's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:53'>held using exactly the same thing there's beautiful people on the stage</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:29:57'>beautiful words and you want to be in the exact opposite posture when you go</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:02'>to that political rally you want to be as mean and nasty and skeptical as you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:07'>can possibly be whereas in the theater you want to give yourself over to it so</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:11'>if you we're talking about schizophrenia before so another metaphor that's nicer</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:15'>than hallucination is that what we have in here is just a theater so we're</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:20'>always presenting the world back to ourselves as a theatrical production</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:24'>and that's the way the human mind works</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:28'>and not only are we easy to fool we like to be fooled we go to shows to be fooled</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:33'>and so politicians have easy time with us right so there's this thing of when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:40'>are you gonna be fooled when you're not going to be fooled I think is one of the most important simple ways of talking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:44'>about what I was talking tonight yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:30:56'>well there we don't want them to learn about context when they're 10 we want to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:02'>give them a different context when they're 10 they can learn about context</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:07'>later when they're in college and studying philosophy for young kids it's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:12'>not worth while explaining just what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:16'>you're doing to them when you're creating an educational thing basically</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:20'>what you want to do is to have their</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:24'>assumptions and their heuristics you know their ways of dealing with things</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:28'>that they don't have strong knowledge about be different so when we watch you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:35'>know the way we assess children is to see how it because children are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:41'>basically at that at this age they're doers they're not philosophy so what we</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:46'>do is to look to see how fluent they are just just as you would assess a child</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:53'>musician so when you assess the child musician you don't worry about whether</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:31:57'>they understand the theory of harmony because their brains aren't set up for</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:02'>really understanding the theory of harmony but what you can assess is where are they in musical expression and how</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:08'>do they think about music and you do it you don't ask them what they think</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:12'>because there's that great quote talking</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:16'>about music is like dancing about architecture</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:22'>so so basically some musicians can talk</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:27'>pretty deeply about music because they know what the words mean in English but</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:32'>you can't talk very deeply about music to somebody who hasn't had a lot of</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:37'>musical experiences because it's not clear what it's about same thing with</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:41'>the physics that I was mentioning that the the language of nature as Galileo</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:46'>pointed out as mathematics and so you just really can't talk about much</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:51'>science without getting to the math and seeing what is actually being claimed by</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:32:55'>science right so so for children our</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:00'>belief is you just and this is a belief that Montessori I think was one of the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:05'>first to articulate was yeah don't worry don't worry about it if you can if you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:10'>can change the children's common sense into the uncommon sense that represents</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:15'>these additions to thinking that the 21st 20th and 21st century have brought</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:20'>with them you've done your job you don't have to worry about that child ever</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:25'>again because they're going to be able to hang</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:29'>this odd knowledge on trees that are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:33'>healthy see most scientists don't know even 1%</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:37'>of their field so making lists of what</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:42'>you should learn is it's complicated the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:46'>old theory of liberal education in the continent especially in England is if</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:51'>you take four incompatible things and go deep on them simultaneously with some</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:33:57'>mentoring you'll eventually get to the good stuff and it doesn't much matter which four things you pick because the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:03'>important thing is to get to the good stuff not not to worry about you know</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:07'>whether it's yeah</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:16'>well you don't because they just do it so the interesting thing it's like</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:21'>Berlitz in the sense that what you don't do is</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:25'>teach the children syntax and wait what you don't do is do this what they're</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:29'>doing is talking this mathematical language to their little creations and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:34'>so they don't even know they don't even think of it as a language or anything</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:38'>else but from their standpoint they're just making toys but in order to make</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:42'>the toys they actually have to think in this new way and we can tell pretty</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:48'>exactly how well they're thinking in this new way without ever bringing up the word math and without it because</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:54'>just it's just a new thing for the kids it's like like Pokemon you know it's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:34:59'>just a new thing that they do if they like to do it if the play is good if if</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:05'>they instead of going out to recess they like to stay in school during recess to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:10'>work on the stuff on their own if they want to take it home if they do projects</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:16'>on their own it actually brought quite a few of them to show tonight but I got bogged down in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:22'>the in the front part of the talk but basically you can tell right away</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:26'>whether the kids are doing real math or not and the whole point is the number</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:31'>one thing you want the kids to be doing is real math regardless of what the math</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:35'>is who cares when they're nine years old if they're doing real mathematical</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:40'>thinking that's what you want because that's the context that's what most kids</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:44'>never get to ever yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:53'>huh well-read you know first I don't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:35:59'>know the answer to that but in my own life looking back on it was pretty</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:05'>interesting that I loved kindergarten and I loved graduate school and then</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:09'>there were 16 years in between that you</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:14'>know where I had to make time in order to learn because the learning official</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:20'>learning systems were not very good at it but the but I was incredibly</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:24'>fortunate as a child because I learned how to read fluently before I ever got</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:28'>to school and so I already knew they were lying to me in first grade and</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:33'>that's most kids don't have that advantage right yes you're hoping let's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:36:40'>do a couple more yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:37:38'>oh I don't think it had anything to do with what I invented I do understand</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:37:45'>McLuhan I'm not sure you do</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:37:53'>now I'm not using anybody here I'll tell</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:37:57'>you just to I'll tell you what I don't</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:01'>want to summarize summarize my own argument which is that the thing that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:06'>seemed important to me is that there are</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:11'>two parts of it to it one is that as a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:15'>as a person who was a scientist achill II trained in science and mathematics</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:22'>the there was a special thing that the computer could argue better than</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:29'>conventional media it led to a new way of arguing about things that led to a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:33'>new way of knowing about things and the we knew that the making it pervasive</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:38'>would set it up as an environment that</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:43'>could be learned pervasively and it could have these long-term effects that the printing press had so I think that's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:38:48'>just pure McLuhan ISM and that's what the aim is yes</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:39:05'>yeah that's what I've been saying all through the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:39:34'>good</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:25'>yeah well I think I think the the way I</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:30'>think about it as a TV doesn't exactly tell us how to think but it makes it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:34'>very hard to think about things that it doesn't tell us about so I think that's</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:40'>a little more gobbledygook II but I think a little bit more more accurate</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:44'>but I think I mean another way of looking at the medium is the message</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:48'>thing and was one I discarded for tonight was was this notion that in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:54'>order to actually when you have a radio</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:40:58'>in your car and you tuned it to some station the ability to actually get the</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:03'>message that's being sent there it requires the station to have a model</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:10'>requires your receiver to have a model of what the station is sending it has it</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:15'>has to synthesize the carrier wave in order to demodulate out the the music</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:24'>that you hear and that that was actually the first terms I thought of when I when</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:29'>I thought I understood understanding media because he was saying yeah the interesting thing here is not the music</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:34'>that's being sent on any particular occasion but what the radio set has to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:38'>be in order to get that thing at all in</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:42'>other words it has to become the very thing that carries the messages and he</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:49'>what he said about the about reading and writing was that the interesting thing</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:53'>is not the particular writing on any particular occasion but what it means to</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:41:57'>become a reader and a writer you become something qualitatively different than a</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:01'>member of an oral Society that's well</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:06'>maybe they have them okay good</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:20'>[Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:31'>[Applause]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:36'>[Music]</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='01:42:40'>no no it's perfect</subtitle>
+<subtitle id='6203'>you </subtitle>