non se·qui·tur

ˌnän ˈsekwədər/

plural noun: non sequiturs

a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.

Origin: Latin, literally ‘it does not follow.’

Face to face

When Sherry Turkle came into the studio for her interview with NPR's Scott Simon, she left her cell phone outside. "I gave my iPhone to someone ... out of my line of vision," she says, "because research shows that the very sight of the iPhone anywhere in your line of vision actually changes the conversation."

Turkle, a professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, is interested in how all sorts of new technologies — not just iPhones — are changing our conversations. Her new book is called Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. She is also the author of the books The Second Self and Alone Together.

What's Opera, Doc?

There's a reason that, in 1994, 1,000 animation professionals named Chuck Jones's 1957 masterpiece "What's Opera, Doc?" the greatest cartoon of all time. It's astounding how much story and comedy is covered in such a short time. Parodying Richard Wagner's operas (not to mention Disney's Fantasia and arguably Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd's whole relationship), it essentially tells all of the 15+ hour long "Ring Cycle" in less than seven minutes. Its density influenced, and will continue to influence, all cartoons that came after it.

1984

"1984" is an American television commercial which introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time. It was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott. Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother. Its only U.S. daytime televised broadcast was on January 22, 1984, during and as part of the telecast of the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. 

The estate of George Orwell and the television rights holder to the novel 1984 considered the commercial to be a flagrant copyright infringement and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple and Chiat/Day in April 1984. The commercial was never televised as a commercial after that.

Real fake news: the Borowitz Report

Like George Carlin, Jon Stewart, Bill Mahr, and Steven Colbert, best selling author and political commentator Andy Borowitz is a national comedic treasure. His biting and satiric writings are so believable that several foreign media outlets, including China's national wire service Xinwa have on more than one occasion reported his posts as actual news.

Of his many brilliant and poignant reports, the August 28, 2014, post, Nation Debates Extremely Complex Issue of Children Firing Military Weapons, reflects on the absurdness of the tragedy at Arizona's Bullets and Burgers Adventure shooting range where a nine-year old mishandled an Uzi and killed her instructor.

you who celebrate bygones

One of the best ways to learn about and enjoy history and the social sciences is to read poetry, but reading a poem is one thing, experiencing it is something else. And experiencing it fully depends not merely on your willingness but on your readiness to cope with a poem's richness, resonance, and complication. Following are a smattering of my favorite verses dealing with politics, war, love, and the many vagaries of the human condition. 

Included are works by Thomas Hardy, Nick Drake, Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Joni Mitchell, and Ogden Nash. Enjoy!

GURRUMUL & Mariza 

Hands down the best concerts I have ever attended in my life, and believe me I've attend many, have been the Portuguese fado singer Mariza at the Krannert Center in Illinois and the Australian Aboriginal artist Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu at the Sydney Opera House.

Mariza was born to a Portuguese father and a mother of African heritage. At age three, her family moved to Portugal, where she was raised in Lisbon's historic quarters of Mouraria and Alfama. While very young she began singing in a wide variety of musical styles, including gospel, soul, and jazz. Her father strongly encouraged her to adopt fado. Mariza began in the clubs of Lisbon, has sold over 1,000,000 records worldwide, and is now an international sensation!

Gurrumul grew up as a member of the Gumatj clan on Elcho Island off the coast of Arnhem Land and sings in his native Yolngu language. He was born blind, has never learned Braille, does not have a guide dog or use a white cane, and is acutely shy. He plays the drums, keyboards, guitar (a right-hand-strung guitar played left-handed) and didgeridoo, but it is the clarity of his angelic singing voice that distinguishes his artistry. I was Dean of the Sydney Conservatorium when we awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2013. Sadly, Gurrumul passed away in 2017.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning"

As a child of the 70’s, I graduated high school in 1975 and a newfangled gadget was being introduced called the home computer; you had to build it from a kit and nobody was very interested. You could buy your gasoline either leaded or unleaded. America was finally pulling out of Vietnam, and most of Richard Nixon’s White House was going to prison. Steven Spielberg made a movie about a big shark with a bad attitude, and no one wanted to swim in the ocean anymore. Tiger Woods was born, but Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. My music was truly great, certainly not like today’s. My lyrics had transcendent meaning. I will never forget Lady Marmalade declaring, “Gitchy Gitchy ya ya dada, Gitchy Gitchy ya ya dee.”

In 2007, The American Film Institute in Los Angeles, California, honored its "definitive selection of the 100 greatest American movies of all time" as determined by more than 1,500 leaders from the American film community, and in 2015 BBC Culture polled 62 international film critics to determine their 100 greatest American films of all time. The 1970’s was the most represented decade with 20 and 21 entries respectively. One could infer from this that the 70’s was indeed the greatest decade in American film. I don’t disagree.

the mindset list

The Mindset List is an annual compilation of the values that shape the worldview of 18-year-olds entering college and, to a lesser extent, adulthood. It is co-authored by Ron Nief, Public Affairs Director Emeritus, and Tom McBride, Professor of English and Keefer Professor of Humanities, both at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. The Mindset List began as a cute way of reminding colleagues on the faculty to "watch their references" with freshmen. The list appears every August as American first-year students enter college. It has received widespread public attention as a feature on the NBC Nightly News. In 2009, Time declared "mindset list" a new phrase in the American lexicon.

 The danger of a single story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria. While the family's ancestral hometown is Abba in Anambra State, Chimamanda grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Chimamanda's father, worked at the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka.

Chimamanda completed her secondary education at the University's school, receiving several academic prizes. She went on to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University's Catholic medical students.

At the age of nineteen, Chimamanda left for the United States. She was awarded a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she also wrote articles for the university journal, the Campus Lantern.

In this TED Talk, Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

The Golden section

Closely related to the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Ratio describes the perfectly symmetrical relationship between two proportions. Approximately equal to a 1:1.61 ratio, the Golden Ratio can be illustrated using a Golden Rectangle: a large rectangle consisting of a square (with sides equal in length to the shortest length of the rectangle) and a smaller rectangle.

If you remove this square from the rectangle, you'll be left with another smaller Golden Rectangle. This will continue infinitely, like Fibonacci numbers which work in reverse. Adding a square equal to the length of the longest side of the rectangle gets you increasingly closer to a Golden Rectangle and the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio exists everywhere in nature and is believed to have been in use for at least 4,000 years in music and art and design, but it may be even longer than that – some people argue that the Ancient Egyptians used the principle to build the pyramids, while others think the whole concept is simply an urban myth. Do some investigating, then you decide.

Radio Garden

Radio Garden, funded with public money from the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, allows users to spin a virtual globe and click on live radio around the world. Its main idea is to help radio makers and listeners connect with distant cultures and re-connect with family and friends thousands of miles away. So far, some 8,000 stations have signed on.

The whole experience of tuning into stations on Radio Garden is exactly like the analog radio used to tune stations several decades ago. Even the crackle and interference of other stations sounds the same. The only difference is that you’re using the track pad of your laptop, not the radio dial!

Where's George?: the trail of $1 bills across the world

When you hear the words "social network" you probably think of Facebook or Twitter. But years before either of those websites — when most of us weren't using the Internet at all — a smaller, stranger community was emerging around something called WheresGeorge.com, a 20-year-old subculture that's dedicated to the $1 bill. It's called Georging. And typical Georgers log in religiously to enter their dollars' serial numbers and ZIP codes before they stamp and spend them. 

Part of the attraction for a segment of users is the math and data. By analyzing the Where's George? data,  theories have tested networks, modeled infectious diseases, and mapped the flow of currency in the U.S. It turns out that what started as a "silly game" resulted in massive scientific data — it was the first measurement of human mobility on a grand scale!

polygraph

Polygraph is an internet publication started by Matthew Daniels that stimulates water cooler discussion about complex topics. Polygraph avoids long-winded essays at all costs, using code, visuals, and animation to construct a different sort of story, one that's often reader-driven, embeddable, and open-source. Polygraph projects have been covered by pretty much every major publication on the Internet.

Daniels writes, “Instead of reporting on my 'theory', I wagered that readers would get more out of an elegant presentation of the data, not an analysis of it. It’s a completely different approach to storytelling.”

Daniels and other creative coders have turned their sights from media art to journalism. They’re writing software about ideas that have eluded traditional news organizations, either because they were too complex to explain in prose or they were trapped in a spreadsheet/academic paper. And that’s what Polygraph is doing…liberating those trapped ideas.

21 Charts - who are we

The US is a big, complicated place that has undergone some big changes over its 238 years, and even in the last few decades. Here are 21 charts that explain what life is like today in the US — who we are, where we live, how we work, how we have fun, and how we relate to each other.

The Nobel Prize

Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist, who invented dynamite and other, more powerful explosives, founded the Nobel Prize. In the will he drafted in 1895, Nobel instructed that most of his fortune be set aside as a fund for the awarding of five annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” These prizes, as established by his will, are the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1969, a sixth Nobel Prize for Economics was added. The first distribution of the prizes took place on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award given for intellectual achievement in the world.

Music from earth

Any wise person on Earth would stand to reason that if aliens should chance upon a contraption of ours flying through deep space, they would be quick to wonder, perhaps before all else: "What kind of music do these things called ‘humans’ listen to?" It would be a matter of simple curiosity and intergalactic importance, maybe even with the potential – who knows? – to bond us across extra dimensions or warring worlds.

It is also a subject that the American space program took up, with at least some degree of seriousness, in the 1970s. Back then, to go along with plans for launching a pair of probes as part of the Voyager program, NASA embarked on a project to create a Golden Record. The result would be just that: a shiny record, like so many others on more boring and ordinary black vinyl, coated in 24ct gold and pressed with sounds from the planet Earth into its grooves. It would be attached to a probe and shot up into space, waiting for a chance to strike up a tune in the whirring cosmic jukebox.

gilder lehrman institute of american history

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a New York-based national nonprofit devoted to the teaching and learning of American history. Gilder Lehrman draws on top scholars, an unparalleled collection of original historical documents, and a national network of affiliate schools to create and provide a broad range of innovative resources, help new generations of students learn about American history in a way that is engaging and memorable, and promotes critical thinking and excellent writing.