WEBVTT

00:00:08.621 --> 00:00:11.015
So, this is a map of New York State

00:00:11.015 --> 00:00:14.417
that was made in 1937
by the General Drafting Company.

00:00:14.417 --> 00:00:17.767
It's an extremely famous map
among cartography nerds,

00:00:17.767 --> 00:00:20.519
because down here at the bottom
of the Catskill Mountains

00:00:20.519 --> 00:00:22.576
there is a little town called Roscoe

00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:25.500
- actually, this will go easier
if I just put it up here -

00:00:27.626 --> 00:00:31.105
There's Roscoe, and then,
right above Roscoe, is Rockland, New York,

00:00:31.105 --> 00:00:35.058
and then right above that
is the tiny town of Agloe, New York.

00:00:35.058 --> 00:00:38.182
Agloe, New York,
is very famous to cartographers,

00:00:38.182 --> 00:00:40.078
because it's a paper town.

00:00:40.078 --> 00:00:43.078
It's also known as a copyright trap.

00:00:43.078 --> 00:00:46.470
Because my map of New York
and your map of New York

00:00:46.470 --> 00:00:49.714
are going to look very similar,
on account of the shape of New York.

00:00:49.714 --> 00:00:54.355
Often, map makers will insert
fake places onto their maps,

00:00:54.355 --> 00:00:56.969
in order to protect their copyright,
because then,

00:00:56.969 --> 00:00:59.599
if my fake place shows up on your map,

00:00:59.599 --> 00:01:02.848
I can be well and truly sure
that you have robbed me.

00:01:02.848 --> 00:01:08.110
Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials
of the two guys who made this map

00:01:08.110 --> 00:01:11.007
Ernest G. Alpers and Otto Lindberg,

00:01:11.007 --> 00:01:13.478
and they released this map in 1937.

00:01:13.478 --> 00:01:17.464
Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map

00:01:17.464 --> 00:01:21.620
with Agloe, New York, on it,
at the same exact intersection

00:01:21.620 --> 00:01:24.662
of two dirt roads
in the middle of nowhere.

00:01:24.662 --> 00:01:28.126
Well, you can imagine the delight
over at General Drafting.

00:01:28.126 --> 00:01:31.126
They immediately called
Rand McNally, and they say,

00:01:31.126 --> 00:01:34.872
"We've caught you!
We made Agloe, New York, up.

00:01:34.872 --> 00:01:37.036
It is a fake place. It's a paper town.

00:01:37.036 --> 00:01:39.226
We're going to sue your pants off!"

00:01:39.226 --> 00:01:43.856
And Rand McNally says,
"No, no, no, no, Agloe is real."

00:01:45.113 --> 00:01:49.082
Because people kept going
to that intersection of two dirt roads

00:01:49.082 --> 00:01:50.802
(Laughter)

00:01:50.819 --> 00:01:52.102
in the middle of nowhere,

00:01:52.102 --> 00:01:55.247
expecting there
to be a place called Agloe,

00:01:55.643 --> 00:01:58.716
someone built a place
called Agloe, New York.

00:01:59.798 --> 00:02:02.974
It had a gas station, a general store,
two houses at its peak.

00:02:02.974 --> 00:02:05.244
(Laughter)

00:02:06.205 --> 00:02:10.595
And this is of course a completely
irresistible metaphor to a novelist,

00:02:10.595 --> 00:02:15.293
because we would all like to believe
that the stuff that we write down on paper

00:02:15.293 --> 00:02:18.158
can change the actual world
in which we're actually living -

00:02:18.158 --> 00:02:20.596
which is why my third book
is called "Paper Towns".

00:02:20.596 --> 00:02:24.493
But what interests me ultimately more
than the medium in which this happened

00:02:24.493 --> 00:02:27.195
is the phenomenon itself.

00:02:28.256 --> 00:02:32.284
It's easy enough to say that the world
shapes our maps of the world, right?

00:02:32.284 --> 00:02:36.546
Like the overall shape of the world
is obviously going to affect our maps.

00:02:37.110 --> 00:02:40.339
But what I find a lot
more interesting is the way

00:02:40.339 --> 00:02:43.880
that the manner in which we map
the world changes the world.

00:02:44.369 --> 00:02:48.676
Because the world would truly be
a different place if North were down.

00:02:48.676 --> 00:02:52.175
And the world would be a truly
different place if Alaska and Russia

00:02:52.175 --> 00:02:54.461
weren't on opposite sides of the map.

00:02:54.461 --> 00:02:56.411
And the world would be a different place

00:02:56.411 --> 00:03:00.047
if we projected Europe
to show it in its actual size.

00:03:00.659 --> 00:03:04.320
The world is changed
by our maps of the world.

00:03:04.760 --> 00:03:09.390
The way that we choose to, sort of,
our personal cartographic enterprise

00:03:09.717 --> 00:03:12.330
also shapes the map of our lives,

00:03:12.330 --> 00:03:14.780
and that in turn shapes our lives.

00:03:14.780 --> 00:03:19.088
I believe that what we map
changes the life we lead.

00:03:19.670 --> 00:03:23.539
And I don't mean that in some, like,
secrecy Oprah's Angels network, like,

00:03:23.539 --> 00:03:26.578
you-can-think-your-way-out
-of-cancer sense.

00:03:26.578 --> 00:03:29.597
But I do believe that while maps
don't show you

00:03:29.597 --> 00:03:32.597
where you will go in your life,

00:03:33.116 --> 00:03:35.168
they show you where you might go.

00:03:35.168 --> 00:03:39.743
You very rarely go to a place
that isn't on your personal map.

00:03:40.016 --> 00:03:43.304
So I was a really terrible
student when I was a kid.

00:03:43.304 --> 00:03:46.161
My GPA was consistently in the low 2s,

00:03:46.482 --> 00:03:49.267
and I think the reason
that I was such a terrible student

00:03:49.267 --> 00:03:52.177
is that I felt like education
was just a series of hurdles

00:03:52.177 --> 00:03:55.177
that had been erected before me,

00:03:55.177 --> 00:03:58.873
and I had to jump over
in order to achieve adulthood.

00:03:58.873 --> 00:04:01.368
And I didn't really want
to jump over these hurdles,

00:04:01.368 --> 00:04:04.333
because they seemed completely arbitrary,
so I often wouldn't,

00:04:04.333 --> 00:04:06.474
and then people would threaten me,
you know,

00:04:06.474 --> 00:04:09.467
they'd threaten me with
"this going on my permanent record",

00:04:09.467 --> 00:04:11.363
or "you'll never get a good job".

00:04:11.363 --> 00:04:13.296
I didn't want a good job!

00:04:13.296 --> 00:04:16.112
As far as I could tell
at eleven or twelve years old, like,

00:04:16.112 --> 00:04:19.296
people with good jobs woke up
very early in the morning,

00:04:19.296 --> 00:04:21.022
(Laughter)

00:04:21.022 --> 00:04:25.211
and the men who had good jobs,
one of the first things they did

00:04:25.211 --> 00:04:29.765
was tie a strangulation item
of clothing around their necks.

00:04:30.301 --> 00:04:32.493
They literally put nooses on themselves,

00:04:32.493 --> 00:04:35.403
and then they went off to their jobs,
whatever they were.

00:04:35.403 --> 00:04:38.226
That's not a recipe for a happy life.

00:04:38.226 --> 00:04:42.455
These people - in my, symbol-obsessed,
twelve-year-old imagination,

00:04:42.455 --> 00:04:44.670
these people who are strangling themselves

00:04:44.670 --> 00:04:47.321
as one of the first things
they do each morning,

00:04:47.321 --> 00:04:49.246
they can't possibly be happy.

00:04:49.246 --> 00:04:51.541
Why would I want to jump over
all these hurdles

00:04:51.541 --> 00:04:53.801
and have that be the end?

00:04:53.801 --> 00:04:55.823
That's a terrible end!

00:04:55.823 --> 00:04:58.726
And then, when I was in tenth grade,
I went to this school,

00:04:58.726 --> 00:05:01.758
Indian Springs School,
a small boarding school,

00:05:01.758 --> 00:05:03.458
outside of Birmingham, Alabama,

00:05:03.458 --> 00:05:06.775
and all at once I became a learner.

00:05:06.952 --> 00:05:09.195
And I became a learner,
because I found myself

00:05:09.195 --> 00:05:11.329
in a community of learners.

00:05:11.329 --> 00:05:13.728
I found myself surrounded by people

00:05:13.728 --> 00:05:16.728
who celebrated intellectualism
and engagement,

00:05:16.728 --> 00:05:20.313
and who thought that my ironic
oh-so-cool disengagement

00:05:20.313 --> 00:05:22.383
wasn't clever, or funny,

00:05:22.383 --> 00:05:25.757
but, like, it was a simple
and unspectacular response

00:05:25.757 --> 00:05:28.757
to very complicated
and compelling problems.

00:05:28.757 --> 00:05:31.604
And so I started to learn,
because learning was cool.

00:05:31.604 --> 00:05:34.894
I learned that some infinite sets
are bigger than other infinite sets,

00:05:34.894 --> 00:05:39.151
and I learned what iambic pentameter is
and why it sounds so good to human ears.

00:05:39.151 --> 00:05:42.617
I learned that the Civil War
was a nationalizing conflict,

00:05:42.617 --> 00:05:44.013
I learned some physics,

00:05:44.013 --> 00:05:47.143
I learned that correlation
shouldn't be confused with causation -

00:05:47.143 --> 00:05:49.071
all of these things, by the way,

00:05:49.071 --> 00:05:52.541
enriched my life
on a literally daily basis.

00:05:53.081 --> 00:05:56.413
And it's true that I don't use
most of them for my "job",

00:05:56.413 --> 00:05:58.629
but that's not what it's about for me.

00:05:58.629 --> 00:06:00.184
It's about cartography.

00:06:00.184 --> 00:06:03.089
What is the process of cartography?

00:06:03.089 --> 00:06:05.719
It's, you know, sailing upon some land,
and thinking

00:06:05.719 --> 00:06:08.199
"I think I'll draw that bit of land",

00:06:08.199 --> 00:06:11.546
and then wondering,
"Maybe there's some more land to draw".

00:06:11.546 --> 00:06:13.777
And that's when learning
really began for me.

00:06:13.777 --> 00:06:16.437
It's true that I had teachers
that didn't give up on me,

00:06:16.437 --> 00:06:18.867
and I was very fortunate
to have those teachers,

00:06:18.867 --> 00:06:22.996
because I often gave them cause to think
there was no reason to invest in me.

00:06:22.996 --> 00:06:26.551
But a lot of the learning
that I did in high school

00:06:26.551 --> 00:06:29.779
wasn't about what happened
inside the classroom,

00:06:29.779 --> 00:06:32.294
it was about what happened
outside of the classroom.

00:06:32.294 --> 00:06:34.047
For instance, I can tell you that,

00:06:34.047 --> 00:06:36.836
"There's a certain slant of light,
[On] winter afternoons,

00:06:36.836 --> 00:06:39.712
That oppresses, like the heft [weight]
Of cathedral tunes",

00:06:39.712 --> 00:06:42.113
not because I memorized
Emily Dickinson in school,

00:06:42.113 --> 00:06:43.763
when I was in high school,

00:06:43.763 --> 00:06:46.433
but because there was a girl,
when I was in high school,

00:06:46.433 --> 00:06:47.849
and her name was Amanda,

00:06:47.849 --> 00:06:51.290
and I had a crush on her,
and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry.

00:06:51.290 --> 00:06:53.745
The reason I can tell you
what opportunity cost is,

00:06:53.745 --> 00:06:57.503
is because one day when I was playing
Super Mario Kart on my couch,

00:06:57.503 --> 00:06:59.573
my friend Emmet walked in, and he said,

00:06:59.573 --> 00:07:02.170
"How long have you been playing
Super Mario Kart?",

00:07:02.170 --> 00:07:05.361
and I said, "I don't know,
like, six hours?", and he said,

00:07:05.361 --> 00:07:08.632
"You realize that if you'd worked
at Baskin-Robbins those six hours,

00:07:08.632 --> 00:07:11.243
you could have made thirty dollars,
so in some ways,

00:07:11.243 --> 00:07:13.893
you just paid thirty dollars
to play Super Mario Kart",

00:07:13.893 --> 00:07:16.839
and I was, like, "I'll take that deal."
(Laughter)

00:07:18.458 --> 00:07:21.733
But I learned what opportunity cost is,

00:07:22.749 --> 00:07:24.606
and along the way,

00:07:24.606 --> 00:07:29.224
the map of my life got better,
it got bigger, it contained more places.

00:07:29.695 --> 00:07:34.429
There were more things that might happen,
more futures I might have.

00:07:35.037 --> 00:07:38.470
It wasn't a formal
organized learning process,

00:07:38.470 --> 00:07:40.400
and I'm happy to admit that.

00:07:40.400 --> 00:07:43.558
It was spotty, it was inconsistent,
there was a lot I didn't know.

00:07:43.558 --> 00:07:45.699
I might know, you know,
that Cantor's idea

00:07:45.699 --> 00:07:48.611
that some infinite sets are larger
than other infinite sets,

00:07:48.611 --> 00:07:51.477
but I didn't really understand
the calculus behind that idea.

00:07:51.477 --> 00:07:53.651
I might know the idea of opportunity cost,

00:07:53.651 --> 00:07:55.955
but I didn't know the law
of diminishing returns.

00:07:55.955 --> 00:07:58.757
But the great thing about imagining
learning as cartography,

00:07:58.757 --> 00:08:00.867
instead of imagining it
as arbitrary hurdles

00:08:00.867 --> 00:08:02.484
that you have to jump over

00:08:02.484 --> 00:08:06.046
is that you see a bit of coast line,
and that makes you want to see more.

00:08:06.046 --> 00:08:08.495
And so now I do know
at least some of the calculus

00:08:08.495 --> 00:08:10.135
that underlies all of that stuff.

00:08:10.135 --> 00:08:12.505
So, I had one learning community
in high school,

00:08:12.505 --> 00:08:14.575
then I went to another for college,

00:08:14.575 --> 00:08:17.025
and then I went to another,
when I started working

00:08:17.025 --> 00:08:18.556
at a magazine called "Booklist",

00:08:18.556 --> 00:08:19.796
where I was an assistant

00:08:19.796 --> 00:08:21.947
surrounded by astonishingly
well-read people,

00:08:21.947 --> 00:08:25.152
and then I wrote a book,
and like all authors dream of doing,

00:08:25.152 --> 00:08:27.500
I promptly quit my job.

00:08:28.753 --> 00:08:30.941
And for the first time since high school,

00:08:30.941 --> 00:08:33.941
I found myself
without a learning community,

00:08:33.941 --> 00:08:35.520
and it was miserable.

00:08:35.520 --> 00:08:37.232
I hated it.

00:08:37.232 --> 00:08:40.541
I read many, many books
during this two-year period.

00:08:40.541 --> 00:08:42.578
I read books about Stalin,

00:08:42.578 --> 00:08:45.882
and books about how the Uzbek people
came to identify as Muslims,

00:08:45.882 --> 00:08:48.306
and I read books about
how to make atomic bombs,

00:08:48.306 --> 00:08:50.946
but it just felt like
I was creating my own hurdles,

00:08:50.946 --> 00:08:54.859
and then jumping over them myself,
instead of feeling the excitement

00:08:54.859 --> 00:08:58.089
of being part of a community of learners,
a community of people

00:08:58.089 --> 00:09:01.208
who are engaged together
in a cartographic enterprise

00:09:01.208 --> 00:09:04.988
of trying to better understand
and map the world around us.

00:09:04.988 --> 00:09:08.360
And then, in 2006, I met that guy.

00:09:08.360 --> 00:09:09.952
His name is Ze Frank.

00:09:09.952 --> 00:09:12.650
I didn't actually meet him,
just on the Internet.

00:09:12.952 --> 00:09:17.432
Ze Frank was running, at the time,
a show called "The Show with Ze Frank",

00:09:17.979 --> 00:09:22.181
and that was my way back
into being a community learner again.

00:09:22.735 --> 00:09:25.267
Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas:

00:09:26.006 --> 00:09:29.523
(Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built
in the middle of a huge hot desert,

00:09:29.523 --> 00:09:32.582
almost everything here
was brought from somewhere else -

00:09:32.583 --> 00:09:34.736
the sort of rocks,
the trees, the waterfalls.

00:09:34.736 --> 00:09:37.816
These fish are almost as out of place
as my pig that flew.

00:09:37.816 --> 00:09:40.706
Contrasted to the scorching desert
that surrounds this place,

00:09:40.706 --> 00:09:41.836
so are these people.

00:09:41.836 --> 00:09:44.337
Things from all over the world
have been rebuilt here,

00:09:44.337 --> 00:09:45.730
away from their histories,

00:09:45.730 --> 00:09:47.984
and the people
that experience them differently.

00:09:47.984 --> 00:09:49.618
Sometimes, improvements were made.

00:09:49.618 --> 00:09:51.206
Even the Sphinx got a nose job.

00:09:51.206 --> 00:09:52.935
Here, what you see is what you get,

00:09:52.935 --> 00:09:55.752
and there's no reason to feel
like you're missing anything.

00:09:55.752 --> 00:09:58.716
This New York means the same to me
as it does to everyone else.

00:09:58.716 --> 00:10:00.239
Everything is out of context,

00:10:00.239 --> 00:10:02.373
and that means
context allows for everything.

00:10:02.373 --> 00:10:04.281
Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef.

00:10:04.281 --> 00:10:07.914
This fabrication of place could be one
of the world's greatest achievements,

00:10:07.914 --> 00:10:10.016
because no one belongs here,
everyone does.

00:10:10.016 --> 00:10:13.130
As I walked around this morning,
I noticed most of the buildings

00:10:13.130 --> 00:10:15.847
were huge mirrors reflecting
the sun back into the desert.

00:10:15.847 --> 00:10:18.833
But unlike most mirrors,
which present you with an outside view

00:10:18.833 --> 00:10:21.847
of yourself embedded in a place,
these mirrors come back empty.

00:10:21.847 --> 00:10:24.057
John Green:
It makes me nostalgic for the days

00:10:24.057 --> 00:10:26.757
when you could see
the pixels in online video. (Laughter)

00:10:26.757 --> 00:10:30.678
Ze isn't just a great public intellectual,
he's also a brilliant community builder,

00:10:30.678 --> 00:10:32.686
and the community of people that built up

00:10:32.686 --> 00:10:35.552
around these videos was in many ways
a community of learners,

00:10:35.552 --> 00:10:38.700
so we played Ze Frank at chess
collaboratively, and we beat him.

00:10:38.700 --> 00:10:42.654
We organized ourselves to take a young man
on a road trip across the United States.

00:10:42.654 --> 00:10:45.222
We turned the Earth into a sandwich

00:10:45.222 --> 00:10:48.762
by having one person hold a piece of bread
at one point on the Earth,

00:10:48.762 --> 00:10:51.056
and on the exact opposite point
of the Earth

00:10:51.056 --> 00:10:53.416
having another person
holding a piece of bread.

00:10:53.416 --> 00:10:58.809
I realize that these are silly ideas,
but they are also 'learny' ideas,

00:11:00.240 --> 00:11:02.211
and that was what was so exciting to me,

00:11:02.211 --> 00:11:05.793
and if you go online, you can find
communities like this all over the place.

00:11:05.793 --> 00:11:08.177
Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr,
and yes,

00:11:08.177 --> 00:11:10.497
you will see people complaining
about calculus,

00:11:10.497 --> 00:11:13.165
but you'll also see people
re-blogging those complaints,

00:11:13.165 --> 00:11:16.164
making the argument that calculus
is interesting and beautiful,

00:11:16.164 --> 00:11:19.925
and here's a way in to thinking about
the problem that you find unsolvable.

00:11:19.925 --> 00:11:22.534
You can go to places like Reddit,
and find sub-Reddits,

00:11:22.534 --> 00:11:25.034
like 'Ask a Historian', or 'Ask Science',

00:11:25.034 --> 00:11:28.247
where you can ask people
who are in these fields

00:11:28.247 --> 00:11:29.817
a wide range of questions,

00:11:29.817 --> 00:11:31.998
from very serious ones to very silly ones.

00:11:31.998 --> 00:11:35.471
But to me, the most interesting
communities of learners

00:11:35.471 --> 00:11:38.566
that are growing up on the Internet
right now are on YouTube,

00:11:38.566 --> 00:11:39.978
and admittedly I am biased.

00:11:39.978 --> 00:11:43.943
But I think in a lot of ways,
the YouTube page resembles a classroom.

00:11:44.567 --> 00:11:46.459
Look for instance at "Minute Physics",

00:11:46.459 --> 00:11:48.889
a guy who's teaching
the world about physics.

00:11:48.889 --> 00:11:50.944
(Video) Let's cut to the chase.

00:11:50.944 --> 00:11:54.224
As of July 4th, 2012, the Higgs Boson
is the last fundamental piece

00:11:54.224 --> 00:11:57.680
of the standard model of particle physics
to be discovered experimentally.

00:11:57.680 --> 00:11:59.690
But, you might ask,
why was the Higgs Boson

00:11:59.690 --> 00:12:01.200
included in the standard model,

00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:04.543
alongside well-known particles
like electrons and photons and quarks,

00:12:04.543 --> 00:12:07.038
if it hadn't been discovered
back then in the 1970s?

00:12:07.038 --> 00:12:09.273
Good question.
There are two main reasons.

00:12:09.273 --> 00:12:12.516
First, just like the electron
is an excitation in the electron field,

00:12:12.516 --> 00:12:15.306
the Higgs Boson is simply a particle
which is an excitation

00:12:15.306 --> 00:12:17.426
of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field.

00:12:17.426 --> 00:12:19.677
The Higgs field in turn
plays an integral role

00:12:19.677 --> 00:12:21.817
in our model for the weak nuclear force.

00:12:21.817 --> 00:12:24.854
In particular, the Higgs field
helps explain why it's so weak.

00:12:24.854 --> 00:12:26.977
We'll talk more about this
in a later video,

00:12:26.977 --> 00:12:29.947
but even though weak nuclear theory
was confirmed in the 1980s,

00:12:29.947 --> 00:12:31.557
in the equations, the Higgs field

00:12:31.557 --> 00:12:33.862
is so inextricably jumbled
with the weak force,

00:12:33.862 --> 00:12:35.975
that until now we've been unable
to confirm

00:12:35.975 --> 00:12:37.875
its actual and independent existence.

00:12:37.875 --> 00:12:39.512
JG: Or here's a video that I made

00:12:39.512 --> 00:12:42.790
as part of my show "Crash Course",
talking about World War I:

00:12:42.790 --> 00:12:46.292
(Video) The immediate cause was of course
the assassination in Sarajevo

00:12:46.292 --> 00:12:49.210
of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
on June 28, 1914,

00:12:49.210 --> 00:12:52.450
by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist
named Gavrilo Princip.

00:12:52.450 --> 00:12:55.128
Quick aside: it's worth noting
that the first big war

00:12:55.128 --> 00:12:57.858
of the twentieth century
began with an act of terrorism.

00:12:57.858 --> 00:13:00.188
So Franz Ferdinand
wasn't particularly well-liked

00:13:00.188 --> 00:13:02.388
by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph

00:13:02.388 --> 00:13:03.880
- now that is a moustache! -

00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:07.469
but even so, the assassination led Austria
to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,

00:13:07.469 --> 00:13:10.634
whereupon Serbia accepted some,
but not all, of Austria's demands,

00:13:10.635 --> 00:13:13.004
leading Austria to declare
war against Serbia.

00:13:13.004 --> 00:13:16.440
And then Russia, due to its alliance
with the Serbs, mobilized its army.

00:13:16.440 --> 00:13:18.958
Germany, because it had an alliance
with Austria,

00:13:18.958 --> 00:13:21.038
told Russia to stop mobilizing,

00:13:21.038 --> 00:13:24.265
which Russia failed to do,
so then Germany mobilized its own army,

00:13:24.265 --> 00:13:27.354
declared war on Russia,
cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,

00:13:27.354 --> 00:13:30.458
and then declared war on France,
because, you know - France!

00:13:30.458 --> 00:13:33.780
(Laughter)

00:13:33.780 --> 00:13:36.203
And it's not just physics
and world history

00:13:36.203 --> 00:13:39.203
that people are choosing to learn
through YouTube.

00:13:39.203 --> 00:13:41.737
Here's a video about abstract mathematics.

00:13:43.766 --> 00:13:46.468
(Video) So you're me,
and you're in math class yet again,

00:13:46.468 --> 00:13:48.862
because they make you go,
like, every single day.

00:13:48.862 --> 00:13:52.231
And you're learning about, I don't know,
the sums of infinite series.

00:13:52.231 --> 00:13:54.915
That's a high school topic, right?
Which is odd, because

00:13:54.915 --> 00:13:57.775
it's a cool topic, but they
somehow manage to ruin it anyway.

00:13:57.775 --> 00:14:00.996
So I guess that's why they allow
infinite series in the curriculum.

00:14:00.996 --> 00:14:03.536
So, in a quite understandable need
for distraction,

00:14:03.536 --> 00:14:05.429
you're doodling and thinking more about

00:14:05.429 --> 00:14:08.536
what the plural of "series" should be
than about the topic at hand.

00:14:08.536 --> 00:14:10.728
"Serieses," "seriese,"
"seriesen," and "serii?"

00:14:10.728 --> 00:14:12.868
Or is it that the singular
should be changed?

00:14:12.868 --> 00:14:14.677
One "serie," or "serus," or "serum?"

00:14:14.677 --> 00:14:17.258
Just like the singular
of "sheep" should be "shoop."

00:14:17.258 --> 00:14:19.145
But the whole concept of things like

00:14:19.145 --> 00:14:21.495
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on,
approaching one,

00:14:21.495 --> 00:14:24.145
is useful if, say, you want
to draw a line of elephants

00:14:24.145 --> 00:14:26.121
each holding the tail of the next one:

00:14:26.121 --> 00:14:28.311
normal elephant, young elephant,
baby elephant,

00:14:28.311 --> 00:14:30.463
dog-sized elephant,
puppy-sized elephant...

00:14:30.463 --> 00:14:32.553
All the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond.

00:14:32.553 --> 00:14:34.540
Which is at least a tiny bit awesome,

00:14:34.540 --> 00:14:37.483
because you can get an infinite number
of elephants in a line

00:14:37.483 --> 00:14:40.033
and still have it fit across
a single notebook page.

00:14:40.033 --> 00:14:42.696
JG: And lastly, here's Destin,
from "Smarter Every Day",

00:14:42.696 --> 00:14:45.110
talking about the conservation
of angular momentum

00:14:45.110 --> 00:14:46.730
and, since it's YouTube, cats:

00:14:46.730 --> 00:14:49.875
(Video) Hey, it's me, Destin.
Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day".

00:14:49.875 --> 00:14:53.283
So you've probably observed that cats
almost always land on their feet.

00:14:53.283 --> 00:14:54.813
Today's question is why?

00:14:54.813 --> 00:14:57.684
Like most simple questions,
there's a very complex answer.

00:14:57.684 --> 00:14:59.844
For instance, let me
reword this question:

00:14:59.844 --> 00:15:03.592
How does a cat go from feet up
to feet down in a falling reference frame

00:15:03.592 --> 00:15:06.592
without violating the conservation
of angular momentum?

00:15:08.402 --> 00:15:11.630
JG: So, here's something
all of these videos have in common:

00:15:11.631 --> 00:15:14.630
they all have more than
half a million views on YouTube.

00:15:14.630 --> 00:15:18.130
And those are people
watching not in classrooms,

00:15:18.130 --> 00:15:21.123
but because they are part
of the communities of learning

00:15:21.135 --> 00:15:23.734
that are being set up
by these channels.

00:15:23.734 --> 00:15:26.706
And I said earlier that YouTube
is like a classroom to me,

00:15:26.706 --> 00:15:29.396
and in many ways it is,
because here is the instructor

00:15:29.396 --> 00:15:32.687
- it's like the old-fashioned classroom -
here's the instructor,

00:15:32.687 --> 00:15:35.157
and then beneath the instructor
is the students,

00:15:35.157 --> 00:15:37.164
and they're all having a conversation.

00:15:37.164 --> 00:15:39.070
And I know that YouTube Comments

00:15:39.070 --> 00:15:42.168
have a very bad reputation
in the world of the Internet,

00:15:42.168 --> 00:15:45.436
but in fact, if you go
on comments for these channels,

00:15:45.437 --> 00:15:48.436
what you'll find is people
engaging the subject matter,

00:15:48.436 --> 00:15:53.018
asking difficult, complicated questions
that are about the subject matter,

00:15:53.018 --> 00:15:55.492
and then other people
answering those questions.

00:15:55.492 --> 00:15:58.231
And because the YouTube page is set up

00:15:58.231 --> 00:16:00.763
so that the place
in which I'm talking to you

00:16:03.172 --> 00:16:04.633
is on the exact same page

00:16:04.633 --> 00:16:07.581
as your comments,
you are participating in a live

00:16:07.581 --> 00:16:11.080
and real and active way
in the conversation.

00:16:11.080 --> 00:16:15.018
And because I'm in comments usually,
I get to participate with you,

00:16:15.018 --> 00:16:17.544
and you find this
whether it's world history,

00:16:17.544 --> 00:16:20.544
or mathematics, or science,
or whatever it is.

00:16:20.544 --> 00:16:24.012
You also see young people using the tools

00:16:24.012 --> 00:16:28.096
and the sort of genres of the Internet
in order to create places

00:16:28.096 --> 00:16:30.997
for intellectual engagement
instead of the ironic detachment

00:16:30.997 --> 00:16:35.374
that maybe most of us associate
with memes and other Internet conventions,

00:16:35.374 --> 00:16:38.368
you know "Got bored - Invented calculus",

00:16:38.368 --> 00:16:41.741
or here's Honey Boo Boo
criticizing industrial capitalism

00:16:41.741 --> 00:16:44.431
["Liberal capitalism is not at all
the Good of humanity.

00:16:44.431 --> 00:16:47.805
Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle
of savage destructive nihilism"].

00:16:47.805 --> 00:16:50.104
In case you can't see what she says...
Yeah.

00:16:50.717 --> 00:16:55.000
I really believe that
these spaces, these communities

00:16:55.882 --> 00:16:59.171
have become, for a new generation
of learners,

00:16:59.171 --> 00:17:03.578
the kind of communities,
the kind of cartographic communities

00:17:03.578 --> 00:17:07.828
that I had when I was in high school,
and then again when I was in college.

00:17:08.425 --> 00:17:11.643
And as an adult,
re-finding these communities

00:17:11.643 --> 00:17:14.643
has re-introduced me
to a community of learners,

00:17:14.643 --> 00:17:19.665
and has encouraged me to continue
to be a learner even in my adulthood,

00:17:20.065 --> 00:17:24.419
so that I no longer feel like learning
is something reserved for the young.

00:17:24.419 --> 00:17:27.157
Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me

00:17:27.157 --> 00:17:29.708
to all kinds of things
that I didn't know before.

00:17:29.708 --> 00:17:31.545
And I know that we all hearken back

00:17:31.545 --> 00:17:34.545
to the days of the Parisian salon
in the Enlightenment,

00:17:34.545 --> 00:17:36.816
or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish,

00:17:36.816 --> 00:17:39.266
"Oh, I wish I could have been
a part of that,

00:17:39.266 --> 00:17:42.013
I wish I could have laughed
at Dorothy Parker's jokes".

00:17:42.013 --> 00:17:46.823
But I'm here to tell you
that these places exist, they still exist.

00:17:46.823 --> 00:17:52.356
They exist in corners of the Internet,
where old men fear to tread. (Laughter)

00:17:53.093 --> 00:17:58.969
And I truly, truly believe that when
we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s,

00:17:58.969 --> 00:18:03.519
when we made Agloe real,
we were just getting started.

00:18:03.519 --> 00:18:05.108
Thank you.

00:18:05.109 --> 00:18:07.500
(Applause)