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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, map makers will insert
    fake places onto their maps,
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    in order to protect their copyright,
    because then,
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    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 G. Alpers and Otto 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 called
    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,
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    expecting there
    to be a place called Agloe,
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    someone built a place
    called Agloe, New York.
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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
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    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
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    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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    "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 4th, 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.
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    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.
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    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,
  • 14:13 - 14:15
    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 - 16:13
    You also see young people using the tools
  • 16:13 - 16:17
    and the sort of genres of the Internet
    in order to create places
  • 16:17 - 16:20
    for intellectual engagement
    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:

more » « less
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.

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