Name: 【TED】Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard! (Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard!)
Uploaded: 2017-09-25T20:00:55.000Z
Duration: 13 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

Adverbs of degree

It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver,

and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill

and I was like, "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden."

And you know, it had a profound effect on me.

and it can be changed by me in these small ways.

which someone else said they work like this,

well, I can say they work a different way, a little bit.

I didn't realize the full effect of this,

and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there,

and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them,

and they could -- I watched this woman for three days.

I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart,

these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together

and make little thicker threads, like strings,

and she would weave the strings together,

and as the materiality of this exact very bag

formed before my eyes over those three days,

the materiality of the way the world works,

of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind,

because I realized that this bag and these clothes

and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener,

everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock

or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to,

maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way.

Who's making these things? How did they make them?

So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab,

And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís

doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers.

So I went to Vermont to Not Back to School Camp,

where there's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out

So I said, "Let's go into the woods near this stream

and just put stuff together, you know, make something,

I don't care, geometrical shapes, just grab some junk from around you.

And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults

Here's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream,

by other small oak leaves being put together.

A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass.

The materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom

being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it.

And after about 45 minutes, you get really intricate projects

like leaves sorted by hue, so you get a color fade

And someone asked him, "How do you get those sticks

And he's like, "I don't know, but I can show you."

And I'm like, "Wow, that's really amazing.

So his hands know and his intuition knows,

but sometimes what we know gets in the way

when it comes to the human-made, human-built world.

We think we already know how something works,

so we can't suppose all the things that could be possible.

So kids don't have as hard of a time with this,

and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book.

"Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon.

I'm going to give you some building blocks

and they're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks,

But he doesn't really know what to do with these.

And so he's like, "Okay, I'll just mess around with this."

This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest.

And before long, he's kind of got this mechanism

where you can almost launch and catapult objects around,

And at this point, I'm starting to wonder,

so that they can see the world as malleable,

so they see themselves as agents of change

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【TED】Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard! (Jay Silver: Hack a banana, make a keyboard!)

stuff

awesome

mess

necessarily