Well, here’s an amusing response to Weird Al Yankovic’s video* (see my earlier post on the issues I had with it). He makes his point with charming clumsiness, but… he makes the point.
Still here:
…and YouTube links here, and here. (Watch them in order for maximum hilarity.)
-cvj
(*Thanks CS Guy!)
Don’t let these peoples’ swears get to you so much. They probably feel that by swearing and using hurtful words they can feel larger or better than themselves. When you put up a video on youtube you are exposing yourself to the world. There are many mean people in the world and if you let each one get to you, you would go crazy, so disregard any mean things, focus on constructive criticism and positive comments. A good philosophy to think by is do what you want and f**k the rest of the world. There is a fable about a son and father with their donkey, I forgot the whole thing, but the moral was that you can’t please everybody, so don’t try to
2/21/2007
I am amazed that I still get at least 1000 hits on this silly and funny video I made Brown and Nerdy but the people are not nice to me and nw I wonder should I have made this video or not ? was it a good decision that I made the video? People can not get the fun and start swearing at me calling names all that. That is wrong.
I only teach Math on the YouTube and that is is my passon.
I was getting only 50hits/day and Weord Al was getting 500,000 hits in the first week and it was all about math and calculus for fun and all that so I decided to post my response why not Brown and Nerdy eventhough I am not Nerdy and not white. I just wanted have fun that is all and also wanted to increase my satmathvideos hits and it did. This vedo incerase my hits to 5000 hits/day and out of which about 2000 hits are relatedt to Math education specially SAT MATH. I hd no idea that I was to get this much response from one small video. But it is pure fun that is all. I do not read too much in between lines.
visit my satmathvideos
http://www.youtube.com/satmathvideos
You might learn something and by the way the only SAT Math teacher on the you tube
I watched this Weird Al video awhile back. It was sort of funny; sort of. Not worth linking to or sharing. What bothered me about it, and kept me from enjoying it as much as I might have, was how it equated whiteness with nerdiness. I mean, what about the nerds of other colors? It made me sad to think of some chess-playing 13-year-old African-American math geek seeing this video and getting the message (couched in a well-meaning and silly music video that clearly means no harm) that having dark skin means you can’t be nerdy.
I put the video out of my mind until I read this post — written by a black physicist — who notes that not only does the video equate whiteness and nerdiness, it also equates dark skin with slightly thuggy ghetto behavior.
http://jennifersaylor.wordpress.com/2006/10/25/and-nerdiness-for-all/
Incredible! All this time, I thought it was just a tale… a rumor, a hoax, a story told in smoky pubs. But you exist! You are… THE ANTI-YANKOVIC!!!
Imagine how I feel, I have an Ph.D in physics, I’m black, and in high school I was voted most popular…..I’m neither white or nerdy.
This ‘brown and nerdy’ response didn’t tickle my funny bone. Maybe he needs some good music to liven it up.
When I saw Weird Al’s video, the ‘white’ part of white and nerdy barely registered because I was focused on the actions, music and words. I thought it was a hilarious glimpse into the world of my extra geek-y friends and I of the last 20 years. Many of those things Weird Al described we actually did (and do), even making jokes about it. And the viral music went into my brain and I couldn’t get it out for some days after seeing the music video, too. All in all, I thought ‘White and Nerdy’ was brilliant.
Weird Al said here
“This is the song that I was born to write, basically. I’ve been doing research on this song my entire life, so it’s basically the culmination of a lifetime of work. It’s also my first big-budget, live-action video in seven years, and it was a lot of fun to do. “
I actually meant that the Gaussian (normal) distribution is a good approximation to the binomial (not the poisson, I think) when the number of statistics is big. Maybe I should just go now. Sorry. I did recall that without looking it up! It just shows what a slow brain some people have for maths, and why they can’t possibly recall the stuff in class let alone in exam room stresses
whoops, I mean the gaussian is the approximation to the poisson when the sample of decays is very large…
Very good. Reminds me of school maths a bit 😉 I failed my maths A-level a four times before passing it, but only because I took pure and statistics which I couldn’t understand. I did pass first time when I sat pure and applied (mechanics) maths (although it meant I didn’t get into university when the others did, still I got to serve ice-creams in a leisure park for a while while they were partying) 😉
Main problem was that the nice teacher (won’t mention your name, Mrs Hunt, don’t worry) taught me pure maths with statistics. I couldn’t remember how to set up null hypotheses for chi-squared, and couldn’t grasp what she meant by testing at 2.5 and 5 % confidence levels, etc., or why you needed to learn the Poisson distribution as well as the Gaussian distribution (OK, I now know that radioactive decay statistics are Poisson and that is an approximation to the Gaussian distribution when N is large). The reason why I took pure & statistics in the first place was because it was supposed to be for “mathematically challenged” students. Don’t trust them teachers too much, kiddies!
yes.. this is pretty funny, playing off one set of stereotypical associations through posing another. Do we now need, “yellow & nerdy” and “red & nerdy” to make a set of counter viewpoints????