Anyone using the "eye test" would probably find that short form video, popularized by TikTok and now found everyone online, is bad for the brain. But a new study from the American Psychological Association now directly ties short form video content with significantly diminished mental health. In short -- pun intended -- it's rotting brains.
The web has a superpower: permission-less link sharing.
I send you a link and as long as you have an agent, i.e. a browser (or a mere HTTP client), you can access the content at that link.
This ability to create and disseminate links is almost radical against the backdrop of today’s platforms.
To some, the hyperlink is dangerous and must be controlled:
And yet, we keep on linking:
Why? Because it’s a web. Interconnectedness is the whole point.
Links form the whole. Without links, there is no whole. No links means no web, only silos. Isolation. The absence of connection.
Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links.
Comment? Reply via: Email, Mastodon, or Twitter.
Tagged in: #openWeb
This newsletter is about giant models of whales, like the ones you see in museums. But it begins with a story about a movie premiere that took place in one of those museums.
I have a friend who used to plan movie premieres for Warner Brothers, and often when there was a premiere in New York, he’d invite me and a guest to the premiere (I wrote a whole thing once about what movie premieres are like). I always thought this would be an impressive thing to bring a date to, and finally I had the opportunity.
I had just started dating this graphic designer when my friend invited me to the premiere of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water. The premiere was held at the American Museum of Natural History so that, in keeping with the in-the-water theme, the after-party could be in the Hall of Ocean Life beneath the giant blue whale model. You know, this one:
So we went. There were celebrities, and food and drinks, and all that was fun. But the movie was terrible. And there was something else that made it not exactly the best date. See, I mentioned that this woman was a graphic designer, but what I didn’t mention is that she happened to be a graphic designer for the American Museum of Natural History.
Look, I couldn’t control where the movie premiere was happening. I knew it wasn’t going to be as cool as if it was at Radio City Music Hall or something but it’s not every day you get to go to a movie premiere, right? Well, she was not impressed that I took her to a party under the big blue whale. She had been to plenty of events already in the Hall of Ocean Life.
At one point she said to me, “You realize that for our date, you pretty much took me to work.”
But eventually she married me anyway, so it worked out in the end.
A few weeks ago, I took our 12 year old to the same museum for the first time. When he saw the whale, he was absolutely amazed. His initial reaction was just being totally overwhelmed by its size. He couldn’t believe animals that big really exist. Thank you! Finally someone was impressed!
So that visit got me thinking about whales in museums. I know the blue whale is the largest mammal on Earth, but is the model in New York the biggest model of a blue whale? Is there another museum somewhere with an even bigger model?
There’s no Wikipedia entry for “List of whale models” (although there is a list of individual whales) so I did some research. I don’t know if I found all the biggest whale models in the world, but these are the biggest whale models I could find, past and present, in order by size:
At 98 feet, this life-size blue whale in Tokyo is the largest one I could find. Somehow in pictures it doesn’t look to me as big as the whale at AMNH but it could be because it’s outside with people in the foreground, so the scale is difficult to judge. Maybe those trees behind it are huge.
I will say that the museum looks very cool. If I ever go to Tokyo, I’m definitely going to check it out.
Already mentioned above, the AMNH whale was built in the 1960s and then renovated in 2001 to correct some minor anatomical mistakes. My favorite thing about the renovation was that they added a little belly button. If you ever go, be sure to look for it.
Since I already shared a photo of the AMNH whale, here’s a video showing how it gets cleaned instead:
In 1963, the Smithsonian exhibited this giant blue whale model, replacing a smaller one you’ll learn about below. At the time it was made, no photographs had been taken yet of a living blue whale, so some assumptions made about the whale’s posture turned out to be scientifically inaccurate.
In 2000, the space was renovated and the contractor in charge of the renovation became the model’s new owner. He listed the model on eBay with a reserve price of $2.25. The description said:
from the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History. (I KNOW THAT A WHALE IS NOT A FISH.) IT’S NO FLUKE, THIS IS FOR REAL!! 92 FEET LONG nose to fluke. ... I have been given the rights to find a new home for this gorgeous piece. ... This would make a fantastic showpiece for an amusement park or theme park, public aquarium, or municipality
But when the whale was taken down from the wall, it broke. So he canceled the sale.
Are we counting skeletons? Because this one’s not a model but an actual skeleton of a Blue Whale named Hope. I think that counts for the purposes of this list.
Wikipedia says that Hope is 83 feet long but the museum itself doesn’t seem to list a size on their page about Hope the whale. So I’ll trust Wikipedia in this case. The museum does have an interesting story about where the skeleton came from, though.
Ethyl is made out of plastic trash. Her name is short for polyethylene. Atlas Obscura has a ton of photos and this description:
Ethyl the Whale is an 82-foot-long, life-sized sculpture of a blue whale that holds the Guinness world record for largest recycled plastic sculpture. It was created by two artists from San Francisco, Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill, to bring awareness to the negative impact plastics have on the environment, and was named after its polyethylene body.
Ethyl was originally built for the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. It was subsequently acquired by the Santa Fe-based art collective Meow Wolf in 2019 and then dramatically transported to the New Mexico desert.
First displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, this blue whale model later went on view at the Smithsonian National Museum until around 1960 when it was replaced by the whale mentioned above that went unsold on eBay.
As we get to smaller whales, we meet Connie the Whale, the first whale on this list that’s not a Blue Whale. Connie is a sperm whale. Or at least she was.
Connie sat outside the Children’s Museum in Hartford, Connecticut until the museum moved in 2022. Plans to move Connie with the museum proved to be too expensive, and Connie was dismantled.
In 2024, Connie’s tail found a new home across the street from the museum along the Trout Brook Trail.
I guess if you squint, you can imagine the whale is diving and her tail is sticking up before disappearing below the surface.
In Berkeley, California, you’ll find Pheena, a fine whale, at the Lawrence Hall of Science. While fin whales are the second-largest species of whale, averaging around 65 feet but growing as long as 85 feet, the model here is not the size of a full grown adult at only 50 feet.
Pheena looks like a whale beached itself in a parking lot. I think it’s my least favorite whale on this list.
After the two blue whales whose stories are told above, the Smithsonian didn’t get another model of a blue whale. Now their biggest whale is a 45-foot Atlantic right Whale named Phoenix, installed in 2003, based on an actual whale named Phoenix.
I couldn’t find an official measurement of the gray whale at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Most of their literature simply describes it as “life-size.”
When the aquarium opened, a local paper described the whale as being 42 feet long, which is such a specific number it sounds like they got it from somewhere official. But in a 2014 post on the aquarium’s Tumblr page, they ask, “How do you truck a 30-foot gray whale model down Cannery Row?” And those are the only two mentions of the whale I can find that give any measurements.
As for how you truck a 30-foot gray whale model down Cannery Row, the answer is: on a flatbed truck.
There are many more giant display whales around the world, but those are the biggest ones I could find. At this point in the list, the whales get to be of small enough size that they are common and too numerous to mention.
So that brings me to how you can...
If you’re like me, then about now you’re wondering how you, too, can get your own giant whale. Well, a giant display whale can be expensive, but maybe not as expensive as you think. If you really want one, I’ll bet you can find one that fits your budget, if not your home.
In 2011, this 15 foot life-size fiberglass orca sold at auction for just $1,300:
If that’s not big enough for you, you can get a 30-foot orca made to order for $7,000 - $9,000 from MyDinosaurs:
If you want an animatronic whale, you can get this life-size sperm whale for $2,999.
It has the following animatronic capabilities:
1. Mouth opening and closing synchronized with sound. 2. Blink eyes. 3. Head up and down, left and right. 4. Neck up, down, left, right. 5. Forelimb movement. 6. Chest breathing 7, tail swaying. 8. Body up, down, left, right. 9. Spread wings. 10. Tongue in and out. 11. Spray water. 12. Smoke spurts. 13. Spit bubbles. 14. Face tracking. 15. Voice conversation.
Bowl of petunias sold separately.
But if size and budget are more important to you than, say, scientific accuracy, don’t worry. There’s a whale for you, too. On Alibaba, you can buy this beautiful, 27-foot long, purple and pink inflatable whale for only $468.
The title says it’s supposed to be a beluga whale, but I think it’s more likely a stylized humpback whale.
Well, those are all the biggest whales I could find. Do you know of a giant model whale that I missed? Send me an email or leave a comment.
Oh, and I apologize if this email triggered anybody’s megalohydrothalassophobia – fear of large things underwater. I hope you were reading it on dry land.
Thanks as always for reading. See you next time!
David
Here's something that happens to me all the time: a student can solve a problem one day. The next day, or a few days later, I give them a different problem on the same topic and they don't know what to do. What happened? Why didn't the learning stick?
Forgetting is maybe the most ubiquitous experience in education. Teachers teach, sometimes students learn and sometimes they don’t. Learning is a bit mysterious. There's no magic formula to make sure students remember everything they learn. Still, I think it's helpful to lay out a few things that improve long-term retention.
One common reason why learning doesn’t stick is that students don’t practice enough. That’s certainly often the case. Practice will be one idea I talk about below. But I worry that “students need more practice to remember things” becomes a narrow and limiting mental model. It’s easy to end up in a trap where everything is about practice, and the only response to students struggling is asking them to practice more. It’s also easy to give students repetitive, poorly designed practice that doesn’t help much. That’s the brute force approach to memory, and while practice is important it needs to be paired with a few other elements so that learning lasts.
I realized recently that I didn't know how many steps there are going up to my front door. It could be 2, or 3, or 4, or 5. I can picture the front of my house, I can imagine myself walking up those steps, but I couldn't tell you how many there are. I've walked into my house thousands of times. But I don't typically think about the number of steps, so I don't remember it.
There's a difference between doing something and learning from it. The key question to ask in school is, "what are students thinking about?" Students could solve a hundred problems about finding circumference but learn nothing. If the whole time they're just thinking "I answer these problems by multiplying the number in the problem by 3.14," that practice won't do any good because they aren’t thinking about circumference. Just as I walk into my house every day without thinking about how many steps there are, many students go through the motions without thinking about the mathematical ideas we want them to learn.
Here are a few things to consider about thinking:
Students learn what they think about. As often as possible I want students thinking "circumference is equal to pi times diameter" and not just thinking “multiply by 3.14.”
Students should be thinking about the deep structure of the concept as often as possible. Circumference isn't just pi times diameter, it's also 2 times the radius times pi, and circumference divided by pi is diameter, and circumference is proportional to diameter. All of those ideas form one connected network rather than a single procedure. I want students thinking about the connections in that network.
Don’t overload students. Our working memories are limited. If we ask students to think about too many different things at once, their working memories become overwhelmed and they won’t learn much at all. Focus on one thing at a time. This also means students need fluency with all the little pieces of a bigger problem, so those little pieces don’t take up space in working memory that should be dedicated to learning new ideas.
All the above assumes students have the bandwidth to be thinking about math. If they're feeling anxious or distracted by a Snapchat they just got or preoccupied by something happening outside school or the room is chaotic, they are less likely to be thinking about math. We should try to eliminate those distractions as often as we can.
Teaching students to combine like terms can be rough. Some students seem to get it right away, and others are perpetually confused. They’ll tell me 2x + 3x = 5, and just as they figure out that it’s 5x I ask them 8x - 4x and they tell me 4 — they’re supposed to subtract the x’s, right? And then we get to 8x - x, and that one is definitely 8, right? And 2x + 5 + 4x is a complete disaster. I eventually stumbled across a really nice metaphor. We start with m’s. M stands for a million. What’s 2m + 3m? Well 2 million + 3 million is 5 million. 8m - m is 7m, because 8 million - 1 million is 7 million. Then we expand out to billions, thousands, and ones. The key idea here is to take what we’re learning, and connect it to something students already understand. Learning sticks much more easily when students build connections between ideas and link new learning to prior knowledge.
This applies to all sorts of topics. We learn new things in relation to what we already know. Division is easier to learn if you have a solid grasp on multiplication. Proportions are easier to learn if you build on intuition for everyday proportional relationships like cost and speed. Operations with negatives build on familiar rules with positive numbers.
Here are a few specific ways to do this:
Make sure students have the prior knowledge to build on. Check to make sure students have the prerequisites they need, and reteach if they don’t.
Before introducing a new idea, ask a bunch of review questions on related ideas to get that prior knowledge fresh in students’ minds. This isn’t random review, and it isn’t necessarily what the class learned yesterday — the goal is to tee up the connections we want students to make.
Make the connections between new ideas and prior knowledge clear. Get students thinking about the ways that new learning builds on what they already know. Ask students how ideas are connected. Don’t take those connections for granted.
Don’t just make the connection between new learning and prior knowledge once. Reiterate those connections multiple times, over multiple days.
For a long time I couldn't remember the difference between affect and effect. Every so often I would need to use one of the words. I would look it up, use the right word, and move on with my life. A few weeks or months later I would need to use one of the words again, realize I'd forgotten, and look it up again. One reason the difference didn't stick is I was never retrieving what I knew from memory. Each time I was looking up the difference, rather than pulling it out of my memory. Retrieval is better for retention than rereading something or trying to learn it through pure repetition. I was looking up the difference between affect and effect, but never retrieving it. Eventually I got tired of forgetting and set some reminders to quiz myself about affect/effect every day or two. That retrieval helped, and now I don't need to look up the difference anymore!
I might have a really clever way to introduce solving equations, connecting it to what students already know and getting students thinking about the structure of equation-solving. All of that focuses on how the information enters the brain. If students never pull that information out, the learning won’t stick. That’s what retrieval practice is all about.
Here are a few things to consider when structuring retrieval practice:
Do it! For a long time I just didn’t make retrieval practice a priority. It doesn’t need to be a ton of practice every day, short chunks of regular retrieval can be really helpful.
Space it out. Retrieval practice should happen the day students learn something new, the next day, the next week, and the next month. If students forget, reduce the interval and start again.
Interleave. When different topics are interleaved together students need to figure out which ideas to retrieve, preventing them from going on autopilot.
Make sure students are actually retrieving. If you ask a question and students don’t remember it, that means they could use a quick reteach and then another round of retrieval soon.
Retrieve in a variety of ways. Ask different types of questions, and use different contexts.
Avoid preempting retrieval. If I want students to remember something they need to remember it themselves. Giving students too many hints to start practice or putting the steps on the board can short-circuit retrieval practice and hurt retention.
Here’s a problem: a bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (Answer in footnote.)1 I have solved lots of math problems like this one, but I got this one wrong when I first saw it.
The problem above is designed to be tricky. I don’t feel too bad about getting it wrong. But that’s how students feel a lot of the time: they learn one thing, and as soon as they feel comfortable with it we start asking them in lots of different ways that seem designed to be confusing. A student can solve a Pythagorean Theorem problem when there’s just one triangle, but once we make the diagram more complex they get stuck. We don’t want students to only be able to solve problems when we ask them in predictable ways, we want them to be able to apply that knowledge in lots and lots of different contexts. This is the toughest part of learning. There are no shortcuts, there’s no magic sauce that will help me see forks in chess games or help students realize that a word problem can be solved with a system of equations. It’s a slow, gradual process of practicing skills in new contexts and thinking about the deep structure of a mathematical concept.
Here are a few ideas:
Use lots of examples and non-examples. Explanations are overrated. Students learn best when they see a lot of examples of how an idea applies and think about what those examples have in common. Students also need non-examples to understand where an idea doesn’t apply.
Variety is key. Start with more predictable question types to help students gain confidence, but as soon as they’re ready for it ask questions in different ways and in different contexts.
Focus on the deep structure. If you want students to apply systems of equations to lots of different situations, get students thinking about the deep structure of a system of equations: two or more different constraints that can be represented as equations. Focusing on that deep structure makes it more likely students can apply their learning in the future.
Avoid too much repetitive practice. Repetition is helpful early on in the learning process, but as soon as students are ready for it practice should be varied and interleave different topics.
Be patient. Transfer is hard. Don’t give up, keep trying.
There’s no flowchart to figure out which of these four ideas is the cause of a particular student forgetting. And I have a class full of students who are probably forgetting for different reasons. Still, with every topic I teach, I can point to places where I can improve. I’m not a perfect teacher. When students aren’t remembering something I want them to remember, I use these four ideas as a place to start. I can always find something to tweak that will help students remember.
That’s the heart of this post. Forgetting and remembering aren’t random. They’re complex, and it’s never a sure thing. But there’s always something I can improve. If students aren’t remembering, it’s my job as the teacher to make a change. Get students thinking about meaning. Prompt connections to prior knowledge. Design effective retrieval practice. Ask students to apply what they know many different ways. Teaching doesn’t do much good if students don’t remember what they learn.
The ball costs $0.05 (and the bat costs $1.05, for a total of $1.10). $0.10 doesn’t work, because the bat would cost $1.10 and the total would be $1.20. Careful trial and error works for this problem, but you can also set up a system of equations and solve if you like:
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