Example lessons
Drugs? Opioids columbine
poverty, toilets, romer electricity
Patrick Collison
8.2 from last leg
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
Jessica Jackley
https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_jackley_poverty_money_and_love?language=en
0 to 2.30 stories we tell about each other/ourselves “I was pretty psyched”
2.30 to 3.58 the poor/Jesus/help God
3.58 to 5.22 Mohammed Yunus Grameen bank, Bangladesh,Nobel prize,
In March 2011, the Bangladesh government fired Yunus from his position at Grameen Bank, citing legal violations and an age limit on his position
5.22 to 7.08 mosquito nets, sugar
7.08 to 9.23 And then that first year, October '05 through '06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. The second year, it was a total of 15 million. The third year, the total was up to around 40. The fourth year, we were just short of 100. And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs -- more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries.
15.45 to 17.00
Today 1.5 bn
1.2 sandel
Consequential or categorical morality?
United Airlines Flight 93 was a domestic scheduled passenger flight that was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists on board, as part of the September 11 attacks. It crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, during an attempt by the passengers and crew to regain control. All 44 people on board were killed, including the four hijackers.
https://6abc.com/911-timeline-anniversary-memorial/6411796/
8:37 a.m. - Boston air traffic control alerts the military. Air National Guard jets in Massachusetts are mobilized to follow Flight 11.
8:42 a.m. San Francisco-bound United Airlines Flight 93 takes off at Newark following a delay. Seven crew members, 33 passengers, and four hijackers are on board.
8:46 a.m. - Flight 11 crashes into floors 93 through 99 of the North Tower.
8:50 a.m. - President George W. Bush is alerted. His advisors assume this is a tragic accident.
8:55 a.m. - The South Tower is declared secure.
8:59 a.m. - Port Authority police order the evacuation of both towers. A minute later, the order is expanded to the entire World Trade Center complex.
9:00 a.m. - A flight attendant aboard Flight 175 alerts air traffic control that a hijacking is underway.
9:03 a.m. - Flight 175 crashes into floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower.
9:05 a.m. - President Bush learns that a second plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Twenty-five minutes later, he addresses Americans, saying that "terrorism against our nation will not stand."
9:05 a.m. - Flight 77 passenger Barbara Olson calls her husband, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who alerts other federal officials of the hijacking.
9:36 a.m. - Secret Service agents evacuate Vice President Dick Cheney to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House.
9:37 a.m. - American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon. The crash and fire kill 59 on the plane and 125 on the ground.
9:42 a.m. - The FAA grounds all flights.
9:45 a.m. - The White House and U.S. Capitol are evacuated.
9:59 a.m. - The South Tower collapses in 10 seconds after burning for 56 minutes. More than 800 people in and around the building are killed.
10:03 a.m. - United Airlines Flight 93 crashes near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers and crew storm the cockpit. Forty passengers and crew on board perish.
25.1 Eagleman https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans
https://neosensory.com/
18.1
Harari https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans
Sapiens
The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species.
Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling. But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon. For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.
We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms – such as wheat, rice and potatoes – became staples of our diet thanks to cooking.
You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.
The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage.
11.1.21
Why is France different?
Girlpower?
Equality?
fraternity?
Steve jobs at stanford, live every day as if it’s your last
Whisper
Education story of the country, personalities
Steve Jobs at Stanford
You are going to watch the first part of the Commencement Address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.
1. Preparation
Listen to the opening of the speech.00 TO 00.54
https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/
What is a Commencement Speech?
Why is it called a ‘Commencement’ speech?
What is the aim of this kind of speech? What possible messages would you expect it to contain?
2. Interest
a) Steve Jobs says he is going to tell three stories from his life. At the start of each he tells us what they are about: ‘The first story is about connecting the dots.’ 00.52 ‘My second story is about love and loss.’ 5.34
‘My third story is about death.’ 9.06
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
You are now going to listen to just one of the stories. Which of these would you like to hear most?
b) Story 2 – Love and Loss
David Packard and Bob Noyce- importance of mentors
See Tom Wolfe on Bob Noyce (link below)
Listen to the second story. What is the overall message or learning point the speaker wants to communicate through his story?
3. Global Understanding and Skills Study – taking notes
Read through the comprehension questions that follow. Then listen to the second story again and make brief notes next to the questions.
When the story has finished go back and make your notes more complete. Then talk these through with a partner to produce your finished answers.
a) In what way did Steve Jobs think he was lucky?
b) Where did Steve and Woz start the company ‘Apple’?
c) How old was Steve when he was fired?
d) Why was he fired?
e) How did he feel at first?
f) He says that after he was fired he didn’t know what to do, he felt he had made a big mistake and was a very public failure and he felt like running away. What did he then realize was still positive about his situation?
g) What were the three very important things he did during the 5 years after he was fired?
h) What does Steve Jobs think you should do if you haven’t yet found what you love?
4. Interacting TO HERE
Discussion questions
Make notes on the following and be ready to discuss.
Do you think the main message of this story is good advice to students who have just finished their studies? What advantages/disadvantages are there to following this advice?
A graduation speaker is chosen to inspire. Would Steve Jobs or another top businessman be your choice? Why? Why not? What other person/type of person would you choose for a graduation ceremony?
If you were to choose your career on the basis that it was something you loved, what would you do? Is this the same as what you do/think you will do in the future?
5. Exploring
Listen to the speech one more time, using the subtitles to help. Ask your teacher to stop whenever you have a doubt or question, or if a word, phrase or structure is preventing you from understanding or enjoying parts of the speech.
6. Related topic
Giving, getting, losing and doing well at work.
Group the following words and phrases into the categories below.
to hire, to sack, to quit, , to leave, to be fired, to be laid off, to be promoted, to be made redundant, to take on, to employ, to fire, to become unemployed, to get a raise, to hand in your resignation, to be taken on, to dismiss, to resign
Giving work
Getting work
Losing work
Doing well at work
For those words or phrases in the same category can you explain the difference? Some have a different meaning, others have the same meaning but would be used in a different context.
7. Activating – Telling stories and anecdotes to illustrate a point
Telling personal stories and anecdotes has been used by many speakers to illustrate a point. What reasons can you think of that make this an effective way to communicate a message to an audience?
Choose one of the following:
a) What advice have you been given by relatives, teachers or older people you have known?
Has this advice ever been useful? Have you used it to help me make a decision? Is there some advice you don’t agree with? Why?
Did the person use a story or anecdote to illustrate their advice? Write the story, including the advice and be ready to give this as a very short speech.
or
b) ‘I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple’ Steve Jobs, Commencement Speech, Stanford 2005.
Think about a change in your life that would not have happened without another event taking place. What is the story behind it? How did the change come about? Write the story and be ready to tell others about it.
Vocabulary, dorm, dormitory room to sleep in, priceless, beyond cost, a falling out, a disagreement, settle, accept second best
People Woz, Steve Wozniak (one of the Apple co-founders)
Extra reading
Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/the-tweaker
“We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’
It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing.
“Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:
Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.
Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Jobs persuaded the head of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to join Apple as C.E.O., in 1983, by asking him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”
More on Steve Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/feels-good-rediscovering-isaacsons-steve-jobs-guillemot/
My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atomic bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was but that's what I aspired to do.”
And what was the name of a talented young physicist recruited by Oppenheimer? Full marks if you got Feynman
Mentors. Bob Noyce https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html
More on Bob Noyce by one of America's greatest writers, Tom Wolfe.
Great story about how he nearly ruined it all as a teenager, wasn't included in the original group to leave Shockley for Fairchild, and culture: East Coasters with chauffeurs, West coasters with Porsches. And the Fairchild leavers, the equivalent of today's Paypal Mafia.
Education. His dissertation was a “Photoelectric Study of Surface States on Insulators,” In this area MIT was far behind Grinnell College.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Shockley was magnetic, he was a genius, and he was a great research director—the best, in fact. His forte was breaking a problem down to first principles. With a few words and a few lines on a piece of paper he aimed any experiment in the right direction. When it came to comprehending the young engineers on his Ph.D. production line, however, he was not so terrific. It never seemed to occur to Shockley that his twelve highly educated employees just might happen to view themselves the same way he had always viewed himself:
Shockley was interested in developing a so-called four-layer diode. Noyce and two of his colleagues, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, favored transistors. But at bottom it was dissatisfaction with the boss and the lure of entrepreneurship that led to what happened next.
At Fairchild any engineer, even someone just out of Caltech, could make any purchase he wanted, no matter how enormous, unless someone else objected strongly enough to try to stop it. Noyce called this the Short Circuit Paper Route. There was only one piece of paper involved, the piece of paper the engineer handed somebody in the purchasing department.
Defectors from Fairchild started up more than fifty companies, all making or supplying microchips.
Only the existence of a miniature computer two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches thick—exactly three thousand times smaller than the old ENIAC and far faster and more reliable—made the flight of Apollo 8 possible. And there would have been no miniature computer without the integrated circuits invented by Noyce and Kilby and refined by Noyce at Fairchild.
In creating Intel, Noyce took great pleasure in going through none of the steps in corporate formation that the business schools talked about. He and Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law) didn’t even write up a proposal. They merely told Rock what they wanted to do and put up $500,000 of their own money, $250,000 each.
Don't just milk the same old cow! At the end of Intel’s first year in business, which had been devoted almost exclusively to research, sales totaled less than three thousand dollars and the workforce numbered forty-two. In 1972, thanks largely to the 1103 chip, sales were $23.4 million and the workforce numbered 1,002. In the next year sales almost tripled, to $66 million, and the workforce increased two and a half times, to 2,528. So Noyce had the chance to run a new company from start-up to full production precisely the way he thought Shockley should have run his in Palo Alto back in the late 1950s. From the beginning Noyce gave all the engineers and most of the office workers stock options. He had learned at Fairchild that in a business so dependent upon research, stock options were a more powerful incentive than profit sharing. People sharing profits naturally wanted to concentrate on products that were already profitable rather than plunge into avant-garde research that would not pay off in the short run even if it was successful. But people with stock options lived for research breakthroughs.
When they first moved into the building, Noyce worked at an old, scratched, second hand metal desk. As the company expanded, Noyce kept the same desk, and new stenographers, just hired, were given desks that were not only newer but bigger and better than his. Everybody noticed the old beat-up desk, since there was nothing to keep anybody from looking at every inch of Noyce’s office space. Noyce enjoyed this subversion of the Eastern corporate protocol of small metal desks for underlings and large wooden desks for overlords. At Intel, Noyce decided to eliminate the notion of levels of management altogether.
In a single decade, 1973–1983, Intel’s sales grew from $64 million a year to almost one billion. Noyce’s own holdings were worth an estimated four billion dollars.
If Noyce called a meeting, then he set the agenda. But after that, everybody was an equal.
That was the word people used to describe his approach, “ethical”; that and “moral.”
In a single decade, 1973–1983, Intel’s sales grew from $64 million a year to almost one billion. Noyce’s own holdings were worth an estimated four billion dollars.
4.1.21 Netflix
1968 riot, Borat,ALI G (to do clip), students, Black Panther, hippies
The trial of the chicago 7
A beautiful day in the neighbourhood, Tom Hanks
Gerund ing infinitive
Going… to go
Ing adj this is boring, gerund,
Smoking is dangerous for the health.
Continuous or progressive form I am smoking
I look forward to hear/hearing from you
I look forward to meeting you
Before leaving the house, I…
Starting is easy
Stopping is difficult
How to stop?
I want to give up smoking
My 11am cigarette, replace it with something else or alone. V powerful, relax and concentrate
I’m going to stop buying cigarettes (Matthieu half) Gwen, envie desire,
I want to stop smoking
I stopped PLUS inf = start
I stopped eating cake to lose weight
I stopped (smoking my cigarette) to say happy new year to all my friends
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/
Fun funny Jazz/soul, (chinese-Mulan) Rapunzel
Love doing the things you do, not do the thing you love
Number 22, loved breathe, eat pizza, leaf, you don’t need a passion,
Live each day as if it’s your last day, Steve jobs at stanford (next time)
Amusing
Funny you must laugh,
Borrow money, the bank lends, deposit,
2021 THINKING
3 priorities, Before School, During School, After School
Tony
10 seconds
Vocab in English for babies/toddlers
https://bookauthority.org/books/best-education-books
Continuous Education Ongoing Education
Douglas Murray “educate yourself”, “do your own damned learning”, “Learn for yourself”
BLM underground railway, reconstruction,, Chicago 7,
Links
Dellinger
Pacifist
Freedom riders, married to Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden
Trial of the chicago 7
Real abbie hoffman
Contempt
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallup%27s_List_of_Widely_Admired_People
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham
Full docs
Oct 3rd 2020
NEW YORK
The rugrat race
Like many children around the age of two, Madison has decided not to do what her mother wants. She will not speak above a whisper. She does not want to read “Big Red Barn”. She will not identify her colours or her shapes, even though she knows them. So, for half an hour, her mother patiently cajoles, persuades, distracts and redirects. “You want me to read to you? What kind of sound does the cow make? Are you going to sing? What’s this?”
It would be a familiar scene in a pushy, upper-middle-class home. But this is a working-class black family in a poor district of Long Island, east of New York City. The careful cultivation of Madison reflects a change in her household. Her mother, Joy, says that she did little to prepare her two older children for school, assuming that they would be taught everything they needed to know. She is determined not to make the same mistake again.
Across the rich world, working-class parents have reached the same conclusion. They expect more of their children than in the past, and treat them differently. Gradually, they have adopted child-raising habits normally associated with middle-class parents. That largely unheralded change has probably mitigated the harm done to poorer children by covid-19 and the school closures it prompted. Unfortunately, some damage has been done anyway.
In 2003 Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, published an astonishing book about child-raising. “Unequal Childhoods” showed that working-class parents—whether they were white or black, poor and welfare-dependent or with steady jobs—thought and behaved differently from middle-class ones. Most assumed that their children would develop naturally, and that their job was to keep them happy and safe. Middle-class parents, by contrast, engaged in what Ms Lareau called “concerted cultivation”, stimulating, stretching and scheduling their progeny to within an inch of their lives.
Middle-class child-raising habits such as endlessly pointing out new things and answering children’s questions with other questions are easily mocked. They are also highly effective. Jill Gilkerson is the chief researcher at lena, an organisation that measures children’s and adult’s speech using small digital recorders. By controlling for social class, she finds that 14% of the variance in adolescents’ iq scores can be explained by the frequency of “conversational turns” in their speech at 18-24 months—a measure of their interactions with adults. The effect of toddler talk on adolescents’ verbal comprehension was stronger: it explained 27% of the variance.
Fortunately, the ideal of concerted cultivation seems to have spread. In 2018 Patrick Ishizuka of Cornell University presented American parents with domestic vignettes and asked what they thought of them. In one vignette, a girl who complains about being bored after school is told to go outside and play with her friends; in another, the bored girl is pushed into music lessons and sport. Mr Ishizuka found that highly educated and thinly educated parents differed hardly at all in their responses to these scenarios. Almost all thought the pushy parent was better.
Poorer parents are putting in more time, too. Sociologists Giulia Maria Dotti Sani and Judith Treas have data for 11 Western countries. In all but one (France) mothers without university educations are spending more time caring for their children than in the past.
Girlpower?
Equality?
fraternity?
14.12 ban cars or ban guns? Forbid, make illegal, NRA, fresh food
though/through, threw, throw, truth, food desert, 26.5 m Americans, free economy, supply, demand,
Ron Finley drive by/drive through, https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerrilla_gardener_in_south_central_la
0 to 3.00, 9.13 to end,
Pam warhurst https://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes
0 to 1.00; 9.24 to 11.17
Incredible edible,
http://lesincroyablescomestibles.fr/
To do 538 school swops
Say her name Kimberlé Crenshaw
Eton, forbidden,
Doerr
https://www.ted.com/talks/john_doerr_why_the_secret_to_success_is_setting_the_right_goals
0 to 2.54
7.23 to 8.12
Romer https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_why_the_world_needs_charter_cities
00 to 4.55
7.12
BLM, steroids, road rage, outrage, outrageous, 5 year marriage, Adama Traoré,
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/do-all-black-lives-matter-or-just-79b?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxODIyNjQ0MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MjE5MzM5NjUsIl8iOiJLMEpDVCIsImlhdCI6MTYwNzMzMTcxMSwiZXhwIjoxNjA3MzM1MzExLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.H2Pvo1gmM3z70qZnbSUvJgQ0RHCyO1KHKi8KyWL2dSM
1.12
Peter diamandis, https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future
Immigration
Not yet
Dilbert
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-11-19
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-11-23
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-11-24
https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-11-26
23.11
29.00 to 34
37 to 39.18
https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win
4.40
Frates https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_frates_meet_the_mom_who_started_the_ice_bucket_challenge
0 to 4
9.10 to 10.33
Bill gates
Matt Damon
Trump
https://www.vexplode.com/en/tedx/using-sound-waves-to-destroy-cancer-christine-gibbons-tedxdetroit/
16.11
Shatter glass
More Aaron
Wiki aaron
White food
Change
2 mins poc, founded or co founded
Do we need more Aarons?
How do we get more Aarons?
White food?
00 to end of talk 5.22
Aaron organizations, terrorism, intercept, open source
9.11
https://www.reddit.com/
Aaron swartz
2.11
Netflix (the search for the next Aristotle starts here) not Greta
https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/2-Netflix_CultureFreedom_Responsibility2
https://www.ted.com/talks/reed_hastings_how_netflix_changed_entertainment_and_where_it_s_headed
2.11
lockdown/ Xmas/ Brexit/ trump/ 77 years old
AOC
https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/vanity-fair-aoc-cover-shoot-fashion.html
The squad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Squad_(United_States_Congress)
Skiing
https://www.amazon.fr/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/dp/1451628978
Steve jobs in sweden
26.10
Magic and electro magnetism
Have you been to a magic show? Been to the museum of magic? Like to know how the tricks are done? Most famous trick you know of? Famous magicians? Death? How does electricity work?
Reality tv?
Feynman Why?
Izzie simpson magic
To 3.37
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Eug%C3%A8ne_Robert-Houdin
The number of tricks he invented for his theatre was extensive, but his most remarkable one was the "Light and Heavy Chest". He took advantage of the infancy of the usage of electricity, especially the then-novelty of Hans Christian Ørsted's discovery of electromagnetism, to his advantage. Robert-Houdin brought on a small wooden box about a foot wide. He said that he had found a way to protect it from thieves. He asked a spectator to lift it, usually a small child. The child lifted it with ease. Then, he brought an adult male up from the audience and asked him to lift the same box. The adult male was unable to lift the box.
Magic mission to Algeria[edit]
In 1856, he was asked by Louis-Napoleon to pacify the tribes in French Algeria. During this period, the French Army commanders maintained order in the newly pacified region. They supervised local Muslim administrations and the "bureaux arabes". These areas were closed off to colonization by the Europeans.
Napoleon III was worried about religious leaders called Marabouts. The Marabouts were able to control their tribe with their faux magical abilities.[6] They advised their leaders to break ranks with the French.[2] Napoleon wanted Robert-Houdin to show that French magic was stronger.[6]
The magical mission began with an informal show at the Bab Azoun Theatre in Algeria, where he would give performances twice weekly.[2] He also gave many special galas before the country's tribal chiefs. He used The Light and Heavy Chest during these performances, but instead of playing it for comedy as he had in Paris, here he played it straight. Robert-Houdin once invited the strongest tribesman on stage and asked the Arabian to pick up the wooden chest placed on stage. The Arabian picked it up with no problem. Then Robert-Houdin announced that he was going to sap his strength. He waved his wand and declared: "Contemplez! Maintenant vous êtes plus faible qu'une femme; essayez de soulever la boîte." ("Behold! Now you are weaker than a woman; try to lift the box.") The Arabian pulled on the handle of the chest, but it would not budge. He tried and tried until he tried to rip it apart. Instead, he screamed in pain, as Robert-Houdin had rigged the box to give the Arabian an electrical shock if he tried to rip the handles off. The Arabian let go of the handle, ran off into the aisle, and ran screaming out of the theatre.[3]
After his performances were done, he gave a special presentation for several chief men of their tribe. He was invited to the home of the head of the tribe of the desert interior, Bou-Allem. In dawn of the Arab desert, Robert-Houdin was challenged to do a special trick. He obliged by inviting one of the rebels to shoot at him with a marked bullet, which he caught between his teeth. He was given a certificate from Bou-Allem,[4] who wore a red robe symbolizing his loyalty to France. With this scroll praising his mysterious manifestations, Robert-Houdin went back to France with the mission accomplished.[2]
"The blow was struck", Robert-Houdin said, "... henceforth the interpreters and all those who had dealings with the Arabs received orders to make them understand that my pretended miracles were only the result of skill, inspired and guided by an art called prestidigitation, in no way connected with sorcery". He went on to say, "The Arabs doubtless yielded to these arguments, for henceforth I was on the most friendly terms with them."[4] He was rewarded for his services by the French government for suppressing any possible rebellion.[6]
In his book Hiding the Elephant, Jim Steinmeyer said that every magician of the 20th century was haunted by Robert-Houdin, "... who cast an enormous shadow over their generation".[6] American magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) was so impressed by Robert-Houdin that, after reading his autobiography in 1890, Ehrich adopted the stage name of "Houdini" in honour of Robert-Houdin. He incorrectly believed that an i on the end of a name meant "like" in French; but Houdini, his own career and reputation established by that time, later lost his youthful respect for Robert-Houdin, believing that he took undue credit for other magicians' innovations, and wrote The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin in 1908.[12]
Derren brown gorilla
Derren brown train
To 1.24
Is it entertainment or something worse?
Brown does not claim to possess any supernatural powers and his acts are often designed to expose the methods of those who do assert such claims, such as faith healers and mediums. In his performances, he often says that his effects are achieved through "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship".
Stuck to chair
Picking up women?
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/19/julien-blanc-barred-entering-uk-pick-up-artist
VAWG (violence against women and girls) campaigners have warned that areas of Blanc’s sales pitch veer into rape promotion, as he promises to teach men how to persuade women to have sex with them who are reluctant.
19.10
Bbc, New york times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Wired,
Bonaventure, refactoring the code
Drudge
https://www.drudgereport.com/
Galloway
Alan
https://mailchi.mp/51dd46d97ca8/8ul985dp1v-4881782?e=9b08712d8c
Tech
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4805
538