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Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

theguardian.com

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Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#131

Post by tpmoney »

InfiniteRand wrote: post #100
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New math was actually pretty successful at the lower grades. The issue was that when it came to rolling it out to middle and high schools, they just kind of said "here's the textbook, figure it out" instead of going through a coordinated process of teaching the teachers while helping them develop their new curricula (which they did for elementary school). So you had this really ugly failure of teachers not really nec…

I have a theory that the enthusiasm of teachers teaching the material is a far bigger factor in the effectiveness of learning than the methods. So much so that any advantage from better methods gets quickly nullified without teacher buy in

Every single teacher I remember as being influential on me in any significant was was hugely enthusiastic for their subject and the material. No matter how hard or easy the class was, that enthusiasm was definitely the biggest contributing factor to how much of an impact they had on me. One of the only classes I ever really struggled with was a government / civics class. The teacher assigned difficult work and graded hard. But they were enthusiastic, firmly convinced that the key to understanding US government and politics was understanding the sides and arguments in the major landmark Supreme Court cases. So convinced of this were they, that many classes were spent with them enthusiastically recreating oral arguments for various cases. Presenting both halves of them as if they were the lawyers, and leaving us to ask questions about the positions and the arguments.

To this day, that enthusiasm for those cases, for understanding both how each side of these cases is both convinced they’re in the right and how often the cases pivot on very narrow aspects of the law has carried over for me decades later. Those lessons and the insights have shaped not only my passing interests in law and politics, but how I approach day to day conflict and debate.

If they had been unenthusiastic and dry, like so many other teachers I’d had, theirs would have been just another boring US history class with a jerk of a “difficult” teacher.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#132

Post by noneeeed »

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious.

The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at something, and then going off and living a normal life sounds pretty great to me.

As much as I love the maths based songs, my favourites are still Oedipus Rex and The Vatican Rag.

Tom Lehrer and Flanders & Swann were the musical background to my childhood. If you enjoy Lehrer you might enjoy F&L too.

While they don't have the science/maths background that makes Lehrer an obvious win for the HN crowd, F&Ls songs were razor sharp satires of the time. One or two have not aged so well, but most are great, although knowing a bit of British history helps. Like Lehrer they wrote songs about the insanity of war, nuclear weapons, and prejudice (A Song of Patriotic Prejudice is an awkward listen because of the terms used, but a great representation of English exceptionalism in the post colonial era).

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#133

Post by mvkel »

walterbell wrote: post #22
walterbell wrote: post #10

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l... > This winter I'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra,…

Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in 1955. TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I realized that I would ha…

I always appreciate how rigorously truthful most mathematicians are.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#134

Post by EGreg »

walterbell wrote: post #10

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l... > This winter I'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra,…

Years ago, I recorded a series of videos to teach the fundamentals of math rigorously to beginners who may not know anything about it.

One of the episodes is called “Sets and Infinity”. Lots of my friends watched it and I got a lot of positive feedback, they subscribed to the channel! It takes one hour, not three months. Check it out.

https://youtu.be/xzaqERDWt9Q?si=cy1x9iVdem9KjdMM

If you watch it — please tell me what you thought! Anything good/bad etc.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#135

Post by cess11 »

davidgay wrote: post #114
cess11 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "the US defeated Nazi Germany"? As I understand it the US was preoccupied with Japan until the USSR had Berlin within reach. US racial policy being an inspiration for european fascists, like Hitler, kind of makes the affiliation with nazis both in the US and West Germany (and NATO) easier to understand than the USSR keeping some nazis in important positions on their side.

This is just ridiculous, esp. re Berlin. I'd suggest starting with reading about D-day at the very least.

June 1944, something like 1.5 years after the turning point in Stalingrad on the eastern front.

So, what about it? Why don't you bring up the invasion of Sicily instead?

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#136

Post by dgfitz »

p3rls wrote: post #101
emmelaich wrote: post #60

What a fantastic quote.. > You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.” It's pretty much my reaction to every protest or social concern story in the media.

Yeah when I gaze out into the sea of salty and stultified faces at these protests "what brave souls" is what runs through my head too, if only the state wasn't so finnicky about creating martyrs, their courage would surely triumph in the court of public opinion. Alas.

I wonder how you would feel if you didn’t agree with their movement. Would you still call them brave?

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#137

Post by rkangel »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #2

I saw "Tomfoolery," a Lehrer revue, in 1980 or 1981 in SF. The actor singing "The Elements" had a periodic table and a pointer. He identified every element in time and at tempo without missing a one. Impressive.

Some years ago I did a production of Gilbert and Sullivan (I think Ruddigore - I've done a few). We had a talent night, and one of the guys did "The Elements" at full tempo while also solving a Rubiks cube and had it done before the end of the song.

It put all the rest of our "talents" to shame!

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#138

Post by thaumasiotes »

123894893 wrote: post #124
thaumasiotes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that there's no difference in the underlying mathematics. That would be true, by necessity, of any subtraction strategy that worked. There's no difference in the steps being performed. If you go through each approach, you'll notice that you do the same things in the same order, with the possible exception that carries might appear before or after the actual subtraction with which they are associated. All of…

> The "new math" part of the problem isn't that you do the base-10 subtraction differently. It's that you're expected to be able to do the same subtraction in base 8 too. That's the second verse. The entire first verse is mocking the "New Math" idea of borrowing, showing New Math subtraction in base 10.

Borrowing isn't even a New Math idea. Here's an American Old Math mathematics textbook from 1931: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509299/page/n2...

Beyond the intriguing assumption that an adult man might purchase this book, a manual of basic arithmetic, for the purpose of self-improvement, it's pretty much indistinguishable from what we have today. This is the treatment of subtraction:

> If any figure [digit] in the subtrahend is a number greater than the one above it in the minuend, it cannot be subtracted directly and the following method is used. A single unit (1) is "borrowed" from the next figure to the left in the minuend and written (or imagined to be written) before the figure which is too small. The figure of the subtrahend is then subtracted from the number so formed and the remainder figure written down in the usual way.

> The minuend figure from which the 1 was borrowed is now considered as a new figure, 1 less than the original, and its corresponding subtrahend figure subtracted in the usual way. If the minuend figure is again too small, the process just described is repeated.

> As an illustration of the procedure just described, let it be required to subtract 26543 from 49825. The operation is written out as follows:

                   7₁
    Minuend:     49/25   [the 8 is struck through; I don't know how to type this]
    Subtrahend:  26543 
                -------
    Remainder:   23282
> Here the subtrahend figure 4 is subtracted from 12 instead of the original 2, and the subtrahend figure 5 is then subtracted from 7 instead of the original 8.

(pp. 10-11)

What do you believe were the New Math revisions to this? There weren't any; what made it New Math was insisting that people be familiar with the theoretical background that the textbooks had always provided. The algorithm, and the explanation of it, were not changed in any way.

(Older textbooks do use the "8 from 4 is 6" model instead, where carries are done into the subtrahend instead of being taken from the minuend, and they have a different explanation. They still provide that explanation for those students who care to know, which is very few people.)

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#139

Post by BizarroLand »

noneeeed wrote: post #132

I can't imagine many things worse than being famous. I guess if you are the kind of super-rich where you can completely avoid interacting with the rest of society that it would be fine, but not being able to just walk down the street or go to the pub without someone stopping you must get tedious. The kind of quiet fame that Lehrer managed, known to a smallish segment of the population, for being really good at someth…

My favorite will always be poisoning pigeons in the park, introduced to me courtesy of Dr. Demento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#140

Post by aidenn0 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #42

Artie Shaw was another guy who walked away from fame, and he was a lot bigger than Tom Lehrer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artie_Shaw Gerry Rafferty (probably more commercially successful than Lehrer, at least) also didn't like the business or performing aspects of music. Bill Murray said (paraphrasing), "I always say to someone who wants to be rich and famous, 'try being rich first, and see if that doesn't get you…

Bill Withers hated working with the record labels so much he walked away from Columbia and quit touring, though he had about a dozen years from when he won his first Grammy to walking away. He attributed his ability to walk away to being older than most (early 30s) when his first hit was released.
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