FYI, I was interviewed about romantic attraction and other things, for Honi Soit, a newspaper for the University of Sydney.  I like the article a lot, although I hope it’s not too dense, haha.

Summer of Math Exposition 2 | 3Blue1Brown (video and article series) – SoME2 is a contest to produce math explanation articles and videos.  I am all over this–although I’m also judgmental so I will say that the quality can be mixed.  The winners are a good place to start.

I’ve written quite a number of math explanations in the past myself, and this makes me want to write more.  Gosh it sure takes a lot of work though.  Maybe I could revamp my really old explanations, like the one about the Banach-Tarski paradox, or the ant & rubber band problem (the rubber band is the universe).

Was Helen Keller A Fraud? | Soup Emporium (video, 1:22 hours) – No, and the accusations against her are ableist and lack substance.  Although, many people, including myself, were taught a storybook version of Helen Keller, which presents her story as miraculous, while eliding the vast majority of her lifetime.  After reaching a certain age, if you ever look back at the storybook version, you realize that can’t have been the whole truth.  It’s interesting to learn how Helen Keller’s story was not miraculous, and made use of common pedagogical methods.  Apparently, some contemporary disability activists saw her vocal socialism as a liability, and that might be why Helen Keller’s later life gets papered over by history.

Can octave sound dissonant? | Objective Harmony (video, 22 min) – This video covers similar ground to my series on xenharmonic music theory.  Contrary to popular belief, musical consonance does not arise from nice integer ratios between frequencies, and in the right context, even a 2:1 ratio can sound dissonant.  One thing I learned from this video, is that pianos are deliberately detuned to compensate for the inharmonicity in the lower register.  This creator also has a video explaining why it makes sense that Gamelan has a different tuning system–because many of the traditional instruments are inharmonic.