Links for 2011-07-19

"As a mathematician, I expect that people at parties will tell me that they're no good at math. I'm used to my fellow professors confessing their ignorance of my subject. I understand that many of my students think math is hard and scary. That's why I was so eager to do drawing -- something I figured would be easy and approachable -- in my math classes.

But to my great surprise, I found that it is the art, not the math, that makes people nervous. As my co-author Marc Frantz told me, most college graduates have a bit of math in college, and almost all have had a math class their senior year of high school. But few adults have had an art class since 6th grade. Carra's drawing below is typical of what I see at the beginning of the semester in my course. My students enter college drawing like children, and they are understandably embarrassed by this."

"We always knew computer networks would destroy the world, we just thought they'd get super-intelligent first. Instead, we got social networks, which act as a stupidity X-ray: You suddenly see through the intelligent people your friends pretend to be to the LOLing Farmville players underneath. Some smart people decided to study these networks, and found that they're a bigger threat to society than Skynet. At least the rise of those machines forced us to band together and do things."

"I don't think it's a coincidence that shared-universe superhero comics in their published serial form are struggling with a crisis of viability at the same cultural moment that television soap operas are fighting for their life. They have the same problem of a dwindling audience whose intense loyalty to long-established genre norms both threatens and sustains what life is left in the form."

"The thing about a huge pop-culture phenomenon is that it seems so obvious after the fact. It's impossible to imagine people not going wild for something like Star Wars. But at the time, when the checks were being written and not a single ticket had been sold? Yeah, it was a different story. In fact, a lot of the biggest hits in Hollywood history sounded absolutely ridiculous in concept."