The inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded … finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his(her) powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.
— Nikola Tesla
All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.
Yes, this! The absolute lack of this in my education (so many antiseptic cell diagrams...) is why, as soon as I could, I avoided science classes.
As a person who now spends much of his time re-enchanting the microverse, I'll just add that one way of deepening this experience is to play with suites of different feelings for the same phenomenon. Harvard Biovisions, for example, really broke new ground when they followed up their famous "Inner Life of a Cell" video (the one that went viral, got a TED talk, & made kinesin cute) with another version that seems to have taken pointers from H. P. Lovecraft — the cell as eldritch entropy, the proteins as unwilling actors: https://youtu.be/uHeTQLNFTgU
Obviously, it's a different take than the one you suggest here! But they're both on the side of making people FEEL things, and grounding emotion in understanding.
I'm working on a new approach to the K-12 science curriculum. Anyone know other folks who are already doing this?
haha yeah I really hated that one actually! or rather - I loved the visuals but felt like the pacing was off in the video / they made some artistic choices of accuracy in the first inner life video that they were trying to make up for here and it kinda meant that overall it’s 100x less compelling - no heroic arc, soundtrack doesn’t clearly map to the action, etc. but yeah I love and agree w the idea of doing videos w vastly different themes
I usually think in information theory sense, and sometimes I see humans as these beautiful baysian information processing engines that work like some kind of clockwork that runs on gears of information and that's kind of happy, and also gives me a "there's a sense that this is what people actually are and that makes them immortal in a sense". But seeing people as literal giant clockwork machines full of attogears is so nice and crowded, like some kind of enormous crowded Ghibli moving castle.
Love this. Reminds me of a passage from The Path, by Chet Raymo:
“Even as I stand motionless and attentive at the edge of the water meadow, a flurry of activity is going on in every cell of my body. Tiny protein-based motors crawl along the strands of DNA, transcribing the code into single-strand RNA molecules, which in turn provide templates for building the many proteins that are my bodies warp and weft. Other proteins help pack DNA neatly into the nuclei of cells and maintain the tidy chromosome structures. Still other protein-based motors are busy at work untying knots that form in DNA as it is unpacked in the nucleus of a cell and copied during cell division. Others are in charge of quality control, checking for accuracy and repairing errors. Working, spinning, weaving, winding, unwinding, patching, repairing--each cell is like a bustling factory of a thousand workers. A trillion cells in my body are humming with the business of life. And not just in my body. The frogs singing from their hiding places--their cells are in a flurry, too. The mallards paddle-wheeling through the flooded grass. The gelatinous scum of frog eggs at the water’s edge. All of it invisibly astir. “ (p. 136-137)
What a time to be alive—when so many fields are starting to merge and so many voices are exploring life at different scales.
The thing I am more curious about is a word that you mentioned many times here, "love". Love is so beautiful to me. How love can actually influence the physiological. Where does it come from? Are we in control of our emotions, or anything for that matter? These are questions I often wonder.
You are welcome. I went for a similar idea in Flash animation years ago but their version both looks better (because it's real!) and makes the central point more directly.
Beautifully written and comforting.
The inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded … finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his(her) powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment, so much that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.
— Nikola Tesla
All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence ... there is an enormous amount of information about the world.
¬— Richard P. Feynman
Yes, this! The absolute lack of this in my education (so many antiseptic cell diagrams...) is why, as soon as I could, I avoided science classes.
As a person who now spends much of his time re-enchanting the microverse, I'll just add that one way of deepening this experience is to play with suites of different feelings for the same phenomenon. Harvard Biovisions, for example, really broke new ground when they followed up their famous "Inner Life of a Cell" video (the one that went viral, got a TED talk, & made kinesin cute) with another version that seems to have taken pointers from H. P. Lovecraft — the cell as eldritch entropy, the proteins as unwilling actors: https://youtu.be/uHeTQLNFTgU
Obviously, it's a different take than the one you suggest here! But they're both on the side of making people FEEL things, and grounding emotion in understanding.
I'm working on a new approach to the K-12 science curriculum. Anyone know other folks who are already doing this?
haha yeah I really hated that one actually! or rather - I loved the visuals but felt like the pacing was off in the video / they made some artistic choices of accuracy in the first inner life video that they were trying to make up for here and it kinda meant that overall it’s 100x less compelling - no heroic arc, soundtrack doesn’t clearly map to the action, etc. but yeah I love and agree w the idea of doing videos w vastly different themes
I usually think in information theory sense, and sometimes I see humans as these beautiful baysian information processing engines that work like some kind of clockwork that runs on gears of information and that's kind of happy, and also gives me a "there's a sense that this is what people actually are and that makes them immortal in a sense". But seeing people as literal giant clockwork machines full of attogears is so nice and crowded, like some kind of enormous crowded Ghibli moving castle.
oh, that's cool too! and I love the Ghibli analogy!!
Thank you for this! What an absolute delight to read. I wish more learning was visuospatial first
Love this. Reminds me of a passage from The Path, by Chet Raymo:
“Even as I stand motionless and attentive at the edge of the water meadow, a flurry of activity is going on in every cell of my body. Tiny protein-based motors crawl along the strands of DNA, transcribing the code into single-strand RNA molecules, which in turn provide templates for building the many proteins that are my bodies warp and weft. Other proteins help pack DNA neatly into the nuclei of cells and maintain the tidy chromosome structures. Still other protein-based motors are busy at work untying knots that form in DNA as it is unpacked in the nucleus of a cell and copied during cell division. Others are in charge of quality control, checking for accuracy and repairing errors. Working, spinning, weaving, winding, unwinding, patching, repairing--each cell is like a bustling factory of a thousand workers. A trillion cells in my body are humming with the business of life. And not just in my body. The frogs singing from their hiding places--their cells are in a flurry, too. The mallards paddle-wheeling through the flooded grass. The gelatinous scum of frog eggs at the water’s edge. All of it invisibly astir. “ (p. 136-137)
What a time to be alive—when so many fields are starting to merge and so many voices are exploring life at different scales.
oh thank you, what a lovely reference!
The thing I am more curious about is a word that you mentioned many times here, "love". Love is so beautiful to me. How love can actually influence the physiological. Where does it come from? Are we in control of our emotions, or anything for that matter? These are questions I often wonder.
I always find those 'powers of ten' videos that zoom in and zoom out to be kind of dry.
This one, though, despite its smooth, low-grade creepy voice, is sad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0
Or maybe, like listening to HAL regress in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the creepiness adds to the sadness.
thank you for the rec! I'm happy to find this channel
You are welcome. I went for a similar idea in Flash animation years ago but their version both looks better (because it's real!) and makes the central point more directly.
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/at-what-moment-are-you-dead-randall-hayes
Definitely going to show theirs to my students in January instead.