Week 7

Since there was no post last week, I'll post two that (I think) involve mathematical thinking.  The first clip is from the 1951 movie, Ma & Pa Kettle Back on the Farm.   What makes Ma and Pa so convincing, yet it's wrong, maybe, surely.

There were 10 Ma & Pa Kettle films during the 1940s and 1950s, and their popularity is said to have saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy.  Henry Shapiro explains that the invention of America's idea of Appalachia was in response to an ``otherness'' of these mountain people.  Elsewhere, the dominant theme was the homogeneity of American culture.

Week 6

Prof Morehouse shared memories of the mathematical culture of preparing documents.  He tried to explain how docs were typed on an electric typewriter (the IBM Selectric) which had removeable heads.  Just to help you imagine, here's an image of a Selectric (mine was green not red).

YouTube has quite a few videos showing how this machine worked:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOIPN70f_-I.  They were nothing if not noisy.