In the early 20th century United States, big melodramatic productions were on Broadway, and everywhere across the country. Which inevitably led to an Avant-Garde backlash. An interesting part of the backlash was Little Theater, a movement that embraced smaller, more emotional, and less profitable forms of drama. One of Little Theater's most notable practitioners, Eugene O'Neill changed the theatrical landscape with groundbreaking plays like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night.

In which John Green teaches you about the Protestant Reformation. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, pretty much everyone in Europe was a Roman Catholic. Not to get all great man, but Martin Luther changed all that. Martin Luther didn't like the corruption he saw in the church, especially the sale of indulgences, so he left the church and started his own. And it caught on! And it really did kind of change the world. The changes increased literacy and education, and some even say the Protestant Reformation was the beginning of Capitalism in Europe.

So we've talked a lot in this series about how computers fetch and display data, but how do they make decisions on this data? From spam filters and self-driving cars, to cutting edge medical diagnosis and real-time language translation, there has been an increasing need for our computers to learn from data and apply that knowledge to make predictions and decisions. This is the heart of machine learning which sits inside the more ambitious goal of artificial intelligence. We may be a long way from self-aware computers that think just like us, but with advancements in deep learning and artificial neural networks our computers are becoming more powerful than ever.

This week we introduce sociology’s three major theoretical paradigms, and some of the advantages and disadvantages of each paradigm.

In which John Green teaches you about Sub-Saharan Africa! So, what exactly was going on there? It turns out, it was a lot of trade, converting to Islam, visits from Ibn Battuta, trade, beautiful women, trade, some impressive architecture, and several empires. John not only cover the the West African Malian Empire, which is the one Mansa Musa ruled, but he discusses the Ghana Empire, and even gets over to East Africa as well to discuss the trade-based city-states of Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar. In addition to all this, John considers emigrating to Canada.

It's time to talk about one of the most awesome scientists that has ever been awesome: Marie Curie. She figured out ways to get an amazing education despite the limitations of her homeland, discovered some really important answers to the question "what is stuff?", and she helped other people (like her husband) complete their own studies and discoveries.

Did I say she was awesome yet? SHE WAS AWESOME!

It can be really important to separate out chemicals for all kinds of reasons. Today we’re going over three different processes engineers use to achieve that separation: distillation, which separates substances based on their different boiling points; liquid-liquid extraction, which uses differences in solubility to transfer a contaminant into a solvent; and reverse osmosis, which filters molecules from a solvent by pressurizing it through a semipermeable barrier.

Today we’re going to talk about numeracy - that is understanding numbers. From really really big numbers to really small numbers, it's difficult to comprehend information at this scale, but these are often the types of numbers we see most in statistics. So understanding how these numbers work, how to best visualize them, and how they affect our world can help us become better decision makers - from deciding if we should really worry about Ebola to helping improve fighter jets during World War II!

This week we are wrapping up our overview of sociology’s core frameworks and founding theorists with a look Max Weber and his understanding of the modern world. We’ll explore rationalization and the transition from traditional to modern society. We’ll also discuss bureaucracy, legitimacy, and social stratification in the modern state. Finally, we’ll see why Weber was so worried about the modern world.

Today we’re going to talk about measures of central tendency - those are the numbers that tend to hang out in the middle of our data: the mean, the median, and mode. All of these numbers can be called “averages” and they’re the numbers we tend to see most often - whether it’s in politics when talking about polling or income equality to batting averages in baseball (and cricket) and Amazon reviews. Averages are everywhere so today we’re going to discuss how these measures differ, how their relationship with one another can tell us a lot about the underlying data, and how they are sometimes used to mislead.

Today, we're looking at measures of spread, or dispersion, which we use to understand how well medians and means represent the data, and how reliable our conclusions are. They can help understand test scores, income inequality, spot stock bubbles, and plan gambling junkets. They're pretty useful, and now you're going to know how to calculate them!

Media isn’t just movies and newspapers and TV shows, it’s also a part of society that involves a lot of money. And all that money has implications for the media that gets created. Media is created by people -- a range of people, making a range of decisions, and earning a range of different paychecks to do it. Those decisions matter and understanding how money affects those decisions is an essential component of media literacy.

We’ve talked about how broad a concept “the media” really is – and given that, it can be hard to keep track of all the different forces that constitute “the media.” It can be tough, but it’s not impossible. Today we’re talking about how all those big players fit together and why all those mergers and acquisitions matter to being a media literate citizen.

Copyright and other media regulations have always been a bit tricky, but the internet made all of that infinitely more complicated. But what does all of that mean for you, the consumer?

Now that you have a solid understanding of the media landscape, it’s time to equip you with the essential skills for navigating it.

You are constantly surrounded by media, so the question is: how does your brain handle all of that? The unfortunate answer is that our brains have a lot of processes that not super helpful for media literacy, but hopefully with a little self-awareness, we can work around that.

Like Egypt, Sumer, and Mesoamerica, ancient China represents a hydraulic civilization—one that maintained its population by diverting rivers to aid in irrigation—and one that developed writing thousands of years ago. Today, we’re going to focus on the time of the Northern and Southern Song Dynasties, a time of great technical innovation. But, before we get to the Song, let’s take a tour through the ages and explore key elements of Chinese scientific culture.

The religion of Islam significantly influenced knowledge-making in the greater Mediterranean and western Asian world. Islamicate scholars—meaning people influenced by Islamic civilization, regardless of their religious views—gave us terms such as “algebra,” “azimuth,” “algorithm,” “alcohol,” “alkali,” and “alembic.”
We’ll dive into Islamic medicine and philosophers such as the great Persian polymath Ibn Sina in future episodes. For now, let’s explore the beginnings of Islamicate natural philosophy.

Hank gets down to the nitty gritty about meiosis, the special type of cell division that is necessary for sexual reproduction in eukaryotic organisms.

So we’ve talked about computer memory a couple times in this series, but what we haven’t talked about is storage. Data written to storage, like your hard drive, is a little different, because it will still be there even if the power goes out - this is known as non-volatile memory. Today we’re going to trace the history of these storage technologies from punch cards, delay line memory, core memory, magnetic tape, and magnetic drums, to floppy disks, hard disk drives, cds, and solid state drives. Initially, volatile memory, like RAM was much faster than these non-volatile storage memories, but that distinction is becoming less and less true today.