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The nerd's guide to learning everything online

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    This is a map of New York State
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    that was made in 1937
    by the General Drafting Company.
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    It's an extremely famous map
    among cartography nerds,
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    because down here at the bottom
    of the Catskill Mountains,
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    there is a little town called Roscoe --
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    actually, this will go easier
    if I just put it up here --
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    There's Roscoe, and then right
    above Roscoe is Rockland, New York,
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    and then right above that
    is the tiny town of Agloe, New York.
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    Agloe, New York, is very famous
    to cartographers,
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    because it's a paper town.
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    It's also known as a copyright trap.
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    Mapmakers -- because my map of New York
    and your map of New York
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    are going to look very similar,
    on account of the shape of New York --
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    often, mapmakers will insert
    fake places onto their maps,
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    in order to protect their copyright.
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    Because then, if my fake place
    shows up on your map,
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    I can be well and truly sure
    that you have robbed me.
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    Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials
    of the two guys who made this map,
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    Ernest Alpers and Otto [G.] Lindberg,
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    and they released this map in 1937.
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    Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map
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    with Agloe, New York, on it,
    at the same exact intersection
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    of two dirt roads
    in the middle of nowhere.
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    Well, you can imagine the delight
    over at General Drafting.
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    They immediately call
    Rand McNally, and they say,
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    "We've caught you!
    We made Agloe, New York, up.
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    It is a fake place. It's a paper town.
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    We're going to sue your pants off!"
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    And Rand McNally says,
    "No, no, no, no, Agloe is real."
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    Because people kept going
    to that intersection of two dirt roads --
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    (Laughter)
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    in the middle of nowhere, expecting
    there to be a place called Agloe --
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    someone built a place
    called Agloe, New York.
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    (Laughter)
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    It had a gas station, a general store,
    two houses at its peak.
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    (Laughter)
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    And this is of course a completely
    irresistible metaphor to a novelist,
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    because we would all like to believe
    that the stuff that we write down on paper
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    can change the actual world
    in which we're actually living,
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    which is why my third book
    is called "Paper Towns".
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    But what interests me ultimately more
    than the medium in which this happened,
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    is the phenomenon itself.
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    It's easy enough to say that the world
    shapes our maps of the world, right?
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    Like the overall shape of the world
    is obviously going to affect our maps.
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    But what I find a lot more
    interesting is the way
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    that the manner in which we map
    the world changes the world.
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    Because the world would truly be
    a different place if North were down.
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    And the world would be
    a truly different place
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    if Alaska and Russia weren't
    on opposite sides of the map.
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    And the world would be a different place
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    if we projected Europe
    to show it in its actual size.
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    The world is changed
    by our maps of the world.
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    The way that we choose -- sort of,
    our personal cartographic enterprise,
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    also shapes the map of our lives,
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    and that in turn shapes our lives.
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    I believe that what we map
    changes the life we lead.
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    And I don't mean that in some, like,
    secret-y Oprah's Angels network, like,
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    you-can-think-your-way-
    out-of-cancer sense.
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    But I do believe that while maps don't
    show you where you will go in your life,
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    they show you where you might go.
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    You very rarely go to a place
    that isn't on your personal map.
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    So I was a really terrible student
    when I was a kid.
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    My GPA was consistently in the low 2s.
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    And I think the reason that I was
    such a terrible student
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    is that I felt like education
    was just a series of hurdles
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    that had been erected before me,
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    and I had to jump over
    in order to achieve adulthood.
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    And I didn't really want
    to jump over these hurdles,
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    because they seemed completely
    arbitrary, so I often wouldn't,
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    and then people would
    threaten me, you know,
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    they'd threaten me with this
    "going on [my] permanent record,"
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    or "You'll never get a good job."
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    I didn't want a good job!
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    As far as I could tell at eleven
    or twelve years old,
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    like, people with good jobs woke up
    very early in the morning,
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    (Laughter)
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    and the men who had good jobs,
    one of the first things they did
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    was tie a strangulation item
    of clothing around their necks.
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    They literally put nooses on themselves,
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    and then they went off to their jobs,
    whatever they were.
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    That's not a recipe for a happy life.
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    These people -- in my, symbol-obsessed,
    twelve year-old imagination --
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    these people who are strangling themselves
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    as one of the first things
    they do each morning,
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    they can't possibly be happy.
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    Why would I want to jump
    over all of these hurdles
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    and have that be the end?
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    That's a terrible end!
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    And then, when I was in tenth grade,
    I went to this school,
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    Indian Springs School,
    a small boarding school,
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    outside of Birmingham, Alabama.
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    And all at once I became a learner.
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    And I became a learner,
    because I found myself
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    in a community of learners.
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    I found myself surrounded by people
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    who celebrated intellectualism
    and engagement,
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    and who thought that my ironic
    oh-so-cool disengagement
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    wasn't clever, or funny,
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    but, like, it was a simple
    and unspectacular response
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    to very complicated
    and compelling problems.
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    And so I started to learn,
    because learning was cool.
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    I learned that some infinite sets
    are bigger than other infinite sets,
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    and I learned that iambic pentameter is
    and why it sounds so good to human ears.
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    I learned that the Civil War
    was a nationalizing conflict,
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    I learned some physics,
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    I learned that correlation shouldn't be
    confused with causation --
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    all of these things, by the way,
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    enriched my life
    on a literally daily basis.
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    And it's true that I don't use
    most of them for my "job,"
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    but that's not what it's about for me.
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    It's about cartography.
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    What is the process of cartography?
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    It's, you know, sailing
    upon some land, and thinking,
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    "I think I'll draw that bit of land,"
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    and then wondering, "Maybe there's
    some more land to draw."
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    And that's when learning
    really began for me.
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    It's true that I had teachers
    that didn't give up on me,
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    and I was very fortunate
    to have those teachers,
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    because I often gave them cause to think
    there was no reason to invest in me.
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    But a lot of the learning
    that I did in high school
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    wasn't about what happened
    inside the classroom,
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    it was about what happened
    outside of the classroom.
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    For instance, I can tell you
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    that "There's a certain Slant of light,
    Winter Afternoons --
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    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes --"
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    not because I memorized
    Emily Dickinson in school
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    when I was in high school,
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    but because there was a girl
    when I was in high school,
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    and her name was Amanda,
    and I had a crush on her,
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    and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry.
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    The reason I can tell you
    what opportunity cost is,
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    is because one day when I was playing
    Super Mario Kart on my couch,
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    my friend Emmet walked in, and he said,
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    "How long have you been playing
    Super Mario Kart?"
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    And I said, "I don't know,
    like, six hours?" and he said,
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    "Do you realize that if you'd worked
    at Baskin-Robbins those six hours,
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    you could have made 30 dollars,
    so in some ways,
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    you just paid thirty dollars
    to play Super Mario Kart."
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    And I was, like, "I'll take that deal."
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    (Laughter)
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    But I learned what opportunity cost is.
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    And along the way, the map
    of my life got better.
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    It got bigger; it contained more places.
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    There were more things that might happen,
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    more futures I might have.
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    It wasn't a formal, organized
    learning process,
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    and I'm happy to admit that.
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    It was spotty, it was inconsistent,
    there was a lot I didn't know.
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    I might know, you know, Cantor's idea
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    that some infinite sets are larger
    than other infinite sets,
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    but I didn't really understand
    the calculus behind that idea.
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    I might know the idea of opportunity cost,
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    but I didn't know the law
    of diminishing returns.
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    But the great thing about imagining
    learning as cartography,
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    instead of imagining it
    as arbitrary hurdles
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    that you have to jump over,
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    is that you see a bit of coastline,
    and that makes you want to see more.
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    And so now I do know
    at least some of the calculus
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    that underlies all of that stuff.
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    So, I had one learning community
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    in high school, then I went
    to another for college,
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    and then I went to another,
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    when I started working
    at a magazine called "Booklist,"
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    where I was an assistant, surrounded
    by astonishingly well-read people.
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    And then I wrote a book.
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    And like all authors dream of doing,
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    I promptly quit my job.
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    (Laughter)
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    And for the first time since high school,
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    I found myself without a learning
    community, and it was miserable.
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    I hated it.
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    I read many, many books
    during this two-year period.
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    I read books about Stalin,
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    and books about how the Uzbek people
    came to identify as Muslims,
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    and I read books about
    how to make atomic bombs,
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    but it just felt like I was
    creating my own hurdles,
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    and then jumping over them myself,
    instead of feeling the excitement
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    of being part of a community of learners,
    a community of people
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    who are engaged together
    in the cartographic enterprise
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    of trying to better understand
    and map the world around us.
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    And then, in 2006, I met that guy.
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    His name is Ze Frank.
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    I didn't actually meet him,
    just on the Internet.
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    Ze Frank was running, at the time,
    a show called "The Show with Ze Frank,"
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    and I discovered the show,
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    and that was my way back
    into being a community learner again.
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    Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas:
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    (Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built
    in the middle of a huge, hot desert.
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    Almost everything here was brought
    from somewhere else --
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    the sort of rocks, the trees,
    the waterfalls.
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    These fish are almost as out of place
    as my pig that flew.
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    Contrasted to the scorching desert
    that surrounds this place,
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    so are these people.
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    Things from all over the world have been
    rebuilt here, away from their histories,
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    and away from the people
    that experience them differently.
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    Sometimes improvements were made --
    even the Sphinx got a nose job.
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    Here, there's no reason to feel
    like you're missing anything.
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    This New York means the same to me
    as it does to everyone else.
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    Everything is out of context, and that
    means context allows for everything:
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    Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef.
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    This fabrication of place could be one
    of the world's greatest achievements,
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    because no one belongs here;
    everyone does.
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    As I walked around this morning,
    I noticed most of the buildings
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    were huge mirrors reflecting
    the sun back into the desert.
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    But unlike most mirrors,
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    which present you with an outside view
    of yourself embedded in a place,
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    these mirrors come back empty.
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    John Green: Makes me
    nostalgic for the days
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    when you could see
    the pixels in online video.
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    (Laughter)
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    Ze isn't just a great public intellectual,
    he's also a brilliant community builder,
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    and the community of people
    that built up around these videos
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    was in many ways a community of learners.
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    So we played Ze Frank at chess
    collaboratively, and we beat him.
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    We organized ourselves to take a young man
    on a road trip across the United States.
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    We turned the Earth into a sandwich,
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    by having one person hold a piece of bread
    at one point on the Earth,
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    and on the exact opposite
    point of the Earth,
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    have another person
    holding a piece of bread.
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    I realize that these are silly ideas,
    but they are also "learny" ideas,
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    and that was what was so exciting to me,
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    and if you go online, you can find
    communities like this all over the place.
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    Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr,
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    and yes, you will see people
    complaining about calculus,
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    but you'll also see people
    re-blogging those complaints,
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    making the argument that calculus
    is interesting and beautiful,
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    and here's a way in to thinking about
    the problem that you find unsolvable.
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    You can go to places like Reddit,
    and find sub-Reddits,
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    like "Ask a Historian" or "Ask Science,"
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    where you can ask people
    who are in these fields
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    a wide range of questions,
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    from very serious ones to very silly ones.
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    But to me, the most interesting
    communities of learners
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    that are growing up on the Internet
    right now are on YouTube,
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    and admittedly, I am biased.
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    But I think in a lot of ways,
    the YouTube page resembles a classroom.
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    Look for instance at "Minute Physics,"
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    a guy who's teaching
    the world about physics:
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    (Video) Let's cut to the chase.
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    As of July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson
    is the last fundamental piece
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    of the standard model of particle physics
    to be discovered experimentally.
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    But, you might ask,
    why was the Higgs boson
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    included in the standard model,
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    alongside well-known particles
    like electrons and photons and quarks,
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    if it hadn't been discovered
    back then in the 1970s?
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    Good question. There are two main reasons.
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    First, just like the electron
    is an excitation in the electron field,
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    the Higgs boson is simply a particle
    which is an excitation
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    of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field.
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    The Higgs field in turn
    plays an integral role
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    in our model for the weak nuclear force.
  • 12:11 - 12:14
    In particular, the Higgs field
    helps explain why it's so weak.
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    We'll talk more about this
    in a later video,
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    but even though weak nuclear theory was
    confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations,
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    the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled
    with the weak force, that until now
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    we've been unable to confirm
    its actual and independent existence.
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    JG: Or here's a video that I made
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    as part of my show "Crash Course,"
    talking about World War I:
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    (Video) The immediate cause was
    of course the assassination in Sarajevo
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    of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
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    on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb
    nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.
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    Quick aside: It's worth noting
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    that the first big war
    of the twentieth century began
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    with an act of terrorism.
  • 12:47 - 12:49
    So Franz Ferdinand
    wasn't particularly well-liked
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    by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph --
    now that is a mustache!
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    But even so, the assassination led Austria
    to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,
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    whereupon Serbia accepted some,
    but not all, of Austria's demands,
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    leading Austria to declare
    war against Serbia.
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    And then Russia, due to its alliance
    with the Serbs, mobilized its army.
  • 13:06 - 13:08
    Germany, because it had
    an alliance with Austria,
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    told Russia to stop mobilizing,
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    which Russia failed to do, so then Germany
    mobilized its own army,
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    declared war on Russia,
    cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,
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    and then declared war on France,
    because, you know, France.
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    (Laughter)
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    And it's not just physics
    and world history
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    that people are choosing
    to learn through YouTube.
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    Here's a video about abstract mathematics.
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    (Video) So you're me, and you're
    in math class yet again,
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    because they make you go every single day.
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    And you're learning about, I don't know,
    the sums of infinite series.
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    That's a high school topic, right?
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    Which is odd, because it's a cool topic,
    but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway.
  • 13:48 - 13:51
    So I guess that's why they allow
    infinite series in the curriculum.
  • 13:51 - 13:54
    So, in a quite understandable need
    for distraction, you're doodling
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    and thinking more about what
    the plural of "series" should be
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    than about the topic at hand: "serieses,"
    "seriese," "seriesen," and "serii?"
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    Or is it that the singular should be
    changed: one "serie," or "serum,"
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    just like the singular of "sheep"
    should be "shoop."
  • 14:06 - 14:08
    But the whole concept of things
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    like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on
    approaches one, is useful if, say,
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    you want to draw a line of elephants,
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    each holding the tail of the next one:
  • 14:15 - 14:18
    normal elephant, young elephant,
    baby elephant, dog-sized elephant,
  • 14:18 - 14:21
    puppy-sized elephant, all the way
    down to Mr. Tusks and beyond.
  • 14:21 - 14:23
    Which is at least a tiny bit awesome,
  • 14:23 - 14:26
    because you can get an infinite number
    of elephants in a line,
  • 14:26 - 14:28
    and still have it fit across
    a single notebook page.
  • 14:28 - 14:31
    JG: And lastly, here's Destin,
    from "Smarter Every Day,"
  • 14:31 - 14:33
    talking about the conservation
    of angular momentum,
  • 14:33 - 14:35
    and, since it's YouTube, cats:
  • 14:35 - 14:38
    (Video) Hey, it's me, Destin.
    Welcome back to "Smarter Every Day."
  • 14:38 - 14:41
    So you've probably observed that cats
    almost always land on their feet.
  • 14:41 - 14:43
    Today's question is: why?
  • 14:43 - 14:46
    Like most simple questions,
    there's a very complex answer.
  • 14:46 - 14:48
    For instance, let me reword this question:
  • 14:48 - 14:53
    How does a cat go from feet-up
    to feet-down in a falling reference frame,
  • 14:53 - 14:56
    without violating the conservation
    of angular momentum?
  • 14:56 - 14:57
    (Laughter)
  • 14:57 - 15:01
    JG: So, here's something all four
    of these videos have in common:
  • 15:01 - 15:05
    They all have more than half
    a million views on YouTube.
  • 15:05 - 15:08
    And those are people watching
    not in classrooms,
  • 15:08 - 15:11
    but because they are part
    of the communities of learning
  • 15:11 - 15:13
    that are being set up by these channels.
  • 15:14 - 15:16
    And I said earlier that YouTube
    is like a classroom to me,
  • 15:16 - 15:19
    and in many ways it is,
    because here is the instructor --
  • 15:19 - 15:22
    it's like the old-fashioned classroom:
    here's the instructor,
  • 15:22 - 15:25
    and then beneath the instructor
    are the students,
  • 15:25 - 15:27
    and they're all having a conversation.
  • 15:27 - 15:31
    And I know that YouTube comments
    have a very bad reputation
  • 15:31 - 15:32
    in the world of the Internet,
  • 15:32 - 15:35
    but in fact, if you go on comments
    for these channels,
  • 15:35 - 15:38
    what you'll find is people engaging
    the subject matter,
  • 15:38 - 15:43
    asking difficult, complicated questions
    that are about the subject matter,
  • 15:43 - 15:45
    and then other people
    answering those questions.
  • 15:45 - 15:50
    And because the YouTube page is set up so
    that the page in which I'm talking to you
  • 15:50 - 15:54
    is on the exact -- the place where I'm
    talking to you is on the exact same page
  • 15:54 - 15:55
    as your comments,
  • 15:55 - 16:01
    you are participating in a live and real
    and active way in the conversation.
  • 16:01 - 16:05
    And because I'm in comments usually,
    I get to participate with you.
  • 16:05 - 16:07
    And you find this
    whether it's world history,
  • 16:07 - 16:10
    or mathematics, or science,
    or whatever it is.
  • 16:10 - 16:16
    You also see young people using the tools
    and the sort of genres of the Internet
  • 16:16 - 16:19
    in order to create places
    for intellectual engagement,
  • 16:19 - 16:20
    instead of the ironic detachment
  • 16:20 - 16:25
    that maybe most of us associate with memes
    and other Internet conventions --
  • 16:25 - 16:28
    you know, "Got bored. Invented calculus."
  • 16:28 - 16:31
    Or, here's Honey Boo Boo
    criticizing industrial capitalism:
  • 16:31 - 16:34
    ["Liberal capitalism is not at all
    the Good of humanity.
  • 16:34 - 16:37
    Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle
    of savage, destructive nihilism."]
  • 16:38 - 16:40
    In case you can't see
    what she says ... yeah.
  • 16:40 - 16:44
    I really believe that these spaces,
  • 16:44 - 16:49
    these communities, have become
    for a new generation of learners,
  • 16:49 - 16:53
    the kind of communities,
    the kind of cartographic communities
  • 16:53 - 16:58
    that I had when I was in high school,
    and then again when I was in college.
  • 16:58 - 17:01
    And as an adult, re-finding
    these communities
  • 17:01 - 17:05
    has re-introduced me
    to a community of learners,
  • 17:05 - 17:10
    and has encouraged me to continue
    to be a learner even in my adulthood,
  • 17:10 - 17:14
    so that I no longer feel like learning
    is something reserved for the young.
  • 17:14 - 17:17
    Vi Hart and "Minute Physics" introduced me
  • 17:17 - 17:19
    to all kinds of things
    that I didn't know before.
  • 17:20 - 17:21
    And I know that we all hearken back
  • 17:21 - 17:25
    to the days of the Parisian salon
    in the Enlightenment,
  • 17:25 - 17:27
    or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish,
  • 17:27 - 17:29
    "Oh, I wish I could have been
    a part of that,
  • 17:29 - 17:32
    I wish I could have laughed
    at Dorothy Parker's jokes."
  • 17:32 - 17:36
    But I'm here to tell you that these places
    exist, they still exist.
  • 17:36 - 17:41
    They exist in corners of the Internet,
    where old men fear to tread.
  • 17:41 - 17:42
    (Laughter)
  • 17:42 - 17:49
    And I truly, truly believe that when
    we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s,
  • 17:49 - 17:53
    when we made Agloe real,
    we were just getting started.
  • 17:53 - 17:54
    Thank you.
  • 17:54 - 17:57
    (Applause)
Title:
The nerd's guide to learning everything online
Speaker:
John Green
Description:

Some of us learn best in the classroom, and some of us ... well, we don't. But we still love to learn, to find out new things about the world and challenge our minds. We just need to find the right place to do it, and the right community to learn with. In this charming talk, author John Green shares the world of learning he found in online video.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
18:10
  • There are no paragraph marks.
    http://www.ted.com/talks/john_green_the_nerd_s_guide_to_learning_everything_online/transcript?language=en

  • Thank you for pointing that out, Yasushi! The paragraph markers have been added.

English subtitles

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