Simulations Plus

I recently stumbled on a website called TED: Ideas worth spreading, and I apologize in advance for sharing this most addicting site with you.

I stumbled upon the remarkable autobiography of Henry Adams by accident while reading a history of the end of the 19th century. When Adams’ autobiography was published after his death in 1918, it became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize. Adams is remarkable for his ability to speak to us more than 90 years later with a message that is both relevant and moving.

I found that I was getting into a musical rut and had a hard time finding new music I liked. Then I stumbled on Pandora Internet Radio. On Pandora, you create your own “radio station” by naming a favorite song or artist. Pandora scans thousands of pieces of music that have been analyzed by something called the Music Genome Project to identify those with similar attributes to the one you named. Voilà! New music for you to enjoy.

Languages, even seldom-used languages, can tell us a great deal about how a group of people categorize the natural and mental world, says Jeff Good, a linguistics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1). Languages are rich in the history and taxonomy of a place, reflecting subtleties that can be lost in translation, says Greg Anderson, an ethnographer who directs Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute (2). When the last keepers of a language die off, so does the fluent understanding of that particular environment.

Jazz had a largely unappreciated role in hastening the arrival of the civil rights movement, according to veteran jazz writer Nat Hentoff. As early as the 1920s, white and black jazz musicians played together in after-hours jam sessions. But it was not until the 1940s, Hentoff said in the January 15, 2009, issue of the Wall Street Journal, that jazz musicians and their audiences mixed publicly in clubs—tentatively at first, but then freely and openly, in violation of local laws and mores. As jazz captured more and more avid listeners, white Americans started to understand the effect of segregation in all aspects of American culture.

In Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts, the past is twisted and turned upside down in novel and intriguing ways. Dan Carlin, a veteran journalist and radio talk show host, emphasizes the drama of past events and personalities to reveal why history matters today.