Month: December 2013

What happens when computer scientists want to figure out what would once have been a hypothetical question? Like, say, “Who was the most important person in the history of the world?” They think like Google:

We rank historical figures just as Google ranks webpages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation (including PageRank, article length, and readership) into estimates of their fame, explained by a combination of achievement (gravitas) and celebrity. We correct for the passage of time in a principled way, so we can fairly compare the significance of historical figures of different eras.

 I’ll just tell you — Shakespeare comes in at #3.  #1 probably won’t surprise many people, but I think that #2 might.

There’s a link right to their WhoIsBigger site, which looks like it could be fun to play with.  It looks like it might be broken, though — I’m in “American Writers” and the top category is dominated by Howard Stern, Angelina Jolie, director Ed Wood and professional wrestler Jon “JBL” Leyfield.  I don’t even know what category that’s *supposed* to be.

They also have a book Who’s Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank
, which could probably be some interesting bathroom reading material for that college student relative you haven’t bought for yet. 🙂

“Music doesn’t make you smarter, Harvard study finds,” the headline read.  Actually I should say “The angry Facebook post read” because I first spotted this story when a musician friend of mine shared it.

“We don’t teach our children Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy because it makes them do better in American history class or at learning the periodic table of the elements,” said Samuel Mehr, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Education who led the work. “We teach them those great authors because those great authors are important. There’s really no reason to justify music education on any other basis than its intrinsic merits. We have our Dante, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare, and they are Bach, Duke Ellington, and Benjamin Britten.”

I love that like “we teach great authors because great authors are important.”  It sounds like something a fourth grader says when doing an oral biography report.  “Charles Darwin…was….a really great scientist…because….he did great things….and he was really great.”

What’s interesting to me though is that while we’ve done away with the idea of the “Mozart effect”, we may be living in a world of  “Shakespeare effect.”  What if reading Shakespeare really does make you smarter?

Or am I just grasping at the same straws the musicians grasped at with the Mozart thing?  Something that will be totally debunked in a few years?  Or should expecting parents start piping audiobooks of Love’s Labour’s Lost through suction cup headphones directly to the womb?  Get it?  Pregnant? Labor?  Ah, forget it.

(Seriously, though, who remembers the episode of E.R. where Dr. Mark Green tries to save a pregnant woman and her baby?  That episode was so good they used to play it every year on Thanksgiving. They won awards for that episode.  That episode was called Love’s Labor Lost
.)

HuffPo’s article on “Literary Connections to Christmas” hit my radar because Nahum Tate, who gave King Lear a happy ending, also wrote the Christmas Carol “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks.” I’m not even sure I know that one.

But keep reading, loyal geeks, because the fun fact comes later in the list:

The term ‘Father Christmas’ — used to refer to the personification of the festive season, a bit like ‘Old Father Time’ — first turns up in a 1616 masque … [featuring] old man ‘Christmas,’ attended by all ten of his children, whose names include Carol, Wassail, Misrule, and Minced-Pie.

Guessed which contemporary?  No fair if you already knew.  It’s 1616 so it’s probably not Marlowe, what with him being dead and all.  Speaking of dead, it’s also probably not Edward de Vere, though that won’t stop him from laying claim to the credit.

The friend of our beloved Shakespeare who brought us the term Father Christmas was none other than Ben Jonson.