The New York Times looked at every athlete who’s won an Olympic medal in the 100-meter sprint since 1896, drew them all on the same track, and studied the wonderful history of sprinting. You can see just how much faster athletes are today than even a few years ago — and how often records are broken. You’ll leave for new respect for today’s athletes, and a profound sense that you will never compete anywhere near that level.
The Times also took on the 100-meter freestyle and the long jump, with each yielding a different and fascinating view of athletic history.
Surely the exact opposite of Minute Physics is the Richard Feynman’s hours-long (and entirely engaging) talks given for the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Here’s the first hour:
The whole series isn’t available from a single source, but it all seems to be available (following YouTube’s “related videos”, or just searching for “The Character of Physical Law”).
Possibly my favorite thing anybody’s ever said comes in the seventh part, Seeking New Laws:
Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process:
First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what (if this law that we guessed is right) it would imply. Then we compare the computation results to nature — or we say compare to experiment or experience.
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.
In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.
He goes on to talk about how once we had confidence in the law of gravitation we were able to derive new laws (and calculate for the first time the speed of light), and in that way describes how each new discovery in science leads to exponentially more new discoveries in turn. Another gem: “We’re trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible because only in that way do we find progress.”
I’ve always been particularly drawn to excellent student performances, like this one from The Treble Makers (later called Kaleidoscope):
When expectations for a student concert necessarily start lower than for a professional performer, it’s all the more impressive to see a group so entirely excel. I also like Mr. Sandman by the same quartet. I sang in my high school’s choir, and I’m absolutely certain I never attained anywhere near this level of musicality.
YouTube not only brings us pirated music and the stream of consciousness narratives of teenagers around the world; it also brings us MinutePhysics!
Each video tackles a big Physics topic in just a few minutes using drawings, basic animations, and occasionally more elaborate multimedia. Here’s one of my favorites: “Why the solar system can exist” (i.e., why the planets don’t simply crash into the sun:
I also particularly like Why is it dark at night? — the answer to that simple question gets intensely elaborate over the course of three minutes.
The only trouble is that the videos are so short you really can’t watch just one. As with a good bag of potato chips, you’ll find yourself saying “just one more…” for a good hour.
FAILblog this week brought us film of the Upper Austrian Youth Orchestra performing a bit titled Cyber Conductor:
It’s a cute concept, and I suspect is even more demanding on the musicians than it appears. The musical performance is ultimately what’s interesting. I’m reminded of the (even better) Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra, a full hour performance:
Bailey is at once entertaining and legitimately informative about music, and the whole thing is worth seeing. (Give the first few minutes a try; you’ll get hooked.)
Richard Dawkins presented a series of five lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1991 titled Growing Up in the Universeexplaining in glorious detail the process of Darwinian natural selection and how people (and other animals) came to exist. The entire series is available to watch in full on YouTube.
Each lecture is a full hour, but the investment is well worthwhile. This is how education with apparently unlimited resources might look. Dawkins seems to want for nothing as he presents each day. Dogs, insects, parrots, a famous author, fireworks, an enormous model of an immunoglobulin molecule, an autonomous robot, first editions of some of science’s best known publications, and limitless other props, tools, and visual aids parade through the lecture hall.
Children from the audience volunteer to run computer simulations, operate a scanning electron microscope, engage in a virtual reality simulation, and show their own eyes and faces in demonstrations in front of the camera.
The material is still entirely relevant after 21 years (though of course if presented today the series may have had more to say about DNA sequencing or other modern advancements in the field). I did enjoy that whenever a volunteer came to the dais to operate a computer simulation Dawkins was motivated to ask, “Have you ever used a computer with a mouse before?”
Ultimately the presentation is at once both a spectacular explanation of Darwinian natural selection and an awe-inspiring look into what education can do with the proper resources. I tried watching it in the background while doing other work, and frequently found myself quite entirely drawn in. At least give the first video a try, and see if you’re not compelled to take on the remaining four:
This sounds mediocre, but is in fact just excellent. Adam Ladd showed his daughter some well-known logos (Pepsi, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Nike) and recorded her description of them. Any kindergartner would probably give similar responses, and that’s precisely what’s interesting here.
Some she can name on sight (“that is the Disney”), some she recognizes but can’t name (“that is the coffee logo”), and others just get cute descriptions (“outside space — it looks like a shooting star with a planet”).
As much as adults protest that advertising must be a waste of money because nobody wants to read it, this sure suggests branding works.
Ballet Jörgen of Canada is responsible for perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful performance I have seen, and unfortunately I know it only through a brief clip on Google Video. The clip includes several scenes from Romeo and Juliet, each wonderfully choreographed and danced, showcasing the best and worst of human emotion. But the last minute or so, in which we see Romeo grieving over Juliet’s apparent death, is at once emotionally moving, athletically impressive, artistically insightful, and compellingly wonderful.
I stumbled upon this promotional snippet several years ago, and I’ve come back to it several times since. I may need to take a trip to Canada just to see this company perform. (They’re dancing Anastasia at the moment; if you’re in or near Canada, find out if they’re performing anywhere near your area.)