Stephen Fry - Classical Music Is NOT Irrelevant to Youth

Apparently there was some sort of debate in Cambridge recently in which the motion was that "classical music is irrelevant to today's youth." The first question a philosopher might ask at the outset is to explain what we mean by the word "irrelevant." Are we saying that young people don't care about classical music? That it's irrelevant to their aesthetic preferences? Are we saying that, whether young people enjoy classical music or not, it has no direct influence or benefit on their lives?

Well, primarily taking the last definition above, one of the people who opposed the motion, and fabulously at that, was Stephen Fry. As you may or may not know, the man is a great rhetorician, and he's got a fascinating, ironic and irreverent way of looking down at people who look down on others (like that time he delivered this fascinating essay on the importance, use and abuse, and beauty of language). I won't get started on whether his argument constitutes a paradox like that of the barber of Seville, so just enjoy this rhetorical tour-de-force:

And apropos of this topic, the New York Times Philosophy Column just posted this interesting article on the intersection between philosophy, science, art and language.

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Einstein Mask Optical Illusion

In our everyday experience, it seems as though perception is simply a matter of information hitting your sense organs and going straight to our brain. In reality, however, perception turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated and complex concatenation of various brain modules actively trying to interpret and synthesize the disparate information sent by the different senses. The reason perception may seem to be a passive phenomenon is that it's effortless, but that doesn't mean that there's not a hell of a lot of stuff going on in the brain. It just means that our brains have evolved to do all this amazing work without making us consciously aware of what it's doing.

But how do we know that perception is an active process of interpretation, synthesis and recognition? Well, a great place to start would be the lessons we get from the study of optical illusions, such as the following spooky Einstein illusion because even if you understand why you experience the illusion, you can't not experience it. Feel your brain fooling you:

For a great introduction to perception and optical illusions, check out Beau Lotto's TEDTalk.

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Friction - A Christmas Party Trick

If you need to entertain your holiday guests, especially those with a competitive streak, and you have a couple of old phone books laying around, Stephen Fry and his QI guests are here to teach you a simple and inexpensive party trick you can use on them while simultaneously teaching them a simple lesson on the physics of friction.

I cannot be held responsible for any objects that get broken in the process :)

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Crop Circles

One of the most prevalent and insidious informal logical fallacies is the argument from personal incredulity: I personally can't explain x, therefore the explanation must be y (and y usually takes the form of God or aliens or ghosts, or some other arbitrarily chosen being). You should never take your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations as evidence of anything other than your own epistemic, cognitive and imaginative limitations...

When people can't imagine how ancient Egyptians could have built the pyramids, for instance, their minds almost immediately go to aliens. It's worth remembering, however, that monuments like Stonehenge could be built by a single person with some primitive tools and lots of ingenuity, so when you have thousands of slaves, pyramids are a piece of cake.

So, when during the 70's, crop circles started appearing in rural England (and subsequently in other parts of the world), it should come as no surprise that many people took them to be proof of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting us (because when civilizations advanced enough to travel through the vastness of time-space need to communicate important messages to us, they do in wheat while no one can see them).

Tellingly, no messages actually appeared (other than a few vague passages about world peace and nuclear disarmament). When people thought that aliens would use the language of mathematics to communicate with us, the mathematical symbols drawn never superseded any mathematical knowledge that wasn't already available to human mathematicians, and only after mathematicians made new discoveries would such discoveries 'magically' start appearing. In the following clip, Stephen Fry gets into the silliness of this phenomenon.

What people don't get is that it wasn't aliens... it was the chupacabra :)

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Stephen Fry vs. Ann Widdecombe On Whether the Catholic Church Is a Force for Good

It seems that in an effort to attract a larger audience to their already impressive intellectual and rhetorical displays, Intelligence Squared, the Oxford-style debate house, is taking a page from the RSA Animate playbook and animating some highlights from one of their most popular debates: whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.

The clip below features animated excerpts from Ann Widdecombe, who favors the motion, as well as from Stephen Fry, who's not exactly the biggest fan of the church :)

If that got your attention, you won't want to miss the entire debate, which also includes a spectacular performance by Chrisopher Hitchens.

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The Unluckiest (and Cutest) Man in the World

Hey dear readers, I won't be around for a couple of days, so there may be no entries until next week. In the meantime, though, you've got to get a load of this:

Imagine that your name is Tsutomu Yamaguchi: you live in, let's say Japan around 1945, and then one day in August you go on a little business trip to Hiroshima. Yeah, you can imagine what happens next. Not good.

But here's where the story gets interesting: probably thinking "holy shit, I'd better get the hell out of this apocalyptic nightmare," Mr. Yamaguchi decided to take the first train home, which is in... Nagasaki. And now you can imagine what happened next.

The odd thing is that the man survived, and just passed away last year. Anyway, here's Stephen Fry and friends relating the story and adding a little humor to it

The great thing about him was that he wasn't embittered by the experience, or even against the people who dropped the bombs.

Instead, he spent a considerable part of his later years advocating for international nuclear disarmament "because of what it does to the dignity of human beings."

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