Sometimes one can actually get somewhere with requests to journals.
I was reading an issue of SIAM News a few months back and notice that a video of Doug Arnold (from University of Minnesota) on Moebius transformations had achieved an astounding level of popularity on YouTube. (I had also heard at undergraduate research conferences about various math professors who used YouTube for teaching purposes.)
This is a great way to get more science out to the public, so I e-mailed David Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Chaos, which publishes the Nonlinear Science Gallery every year. This gallery includes video entries, which would be absolutely perfect for YouTube. I have also known David for a few years, and in fact am writing an expository article on the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem with him and a couple of other people, and I figured he would be receptive to the idea. The key hurdle would be the thoughts of the publisher (American Institute of Physics).
David got back to me while I was visiting Caltech last week to give me the news that AIP supported the endeavor, and now I'm writing this entry to announce that Chaos's YouTube page has gone live.
Among the videos is one that I coauthored with Caltech undergrad Tom Mainiero. It's currently the 2nd most watched video among the Chaos collection and perhaps with your help it can become #1. It even has a catchy tune in the background. (Though I am a bit perplexed that YouTube lists an Adolf Hitler speech as a related video.)
1 day ago
3 comments:
A couple of thoughts about your [coauthored] video:
1. I suspect that a certain member of my family will probably not be watching this (at least not more than once) due to an aversion to the score
2. Nice graphics and all...
3. I don't know why this is related to the Hitler video, either, and I hesitate to link to it (to try to figure out why the link) from your video in case that would encourage the correlation! Maybe they used the same music as background for the speech?
I strongly suspect the link to the Hitler video is just small sample size.
(For some reason, I am blanking out on my id/password at the moment, and the computer I'm on doesn't seem to have it in its keychain.)
Two theories, neither of which seems to be satisfactory, but I'll share anyway.
First, it could be a connection through Wagner. I know, tenuous at best.
Second, there has been a meme going around lately, where a video clip of Hitler, usually actually from a movie from a few years back depicting him (forget which one), is re-dubbed with completely unrelated/mundane/nonsensical dialog. I didn't watch the "related video", but I doubt it's one of these. It could, however, be due to indirect influence from the meme, causing videos of Hitler to be wrongly associated with all kinds of topics.
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