Lynn:
The lighting in the first 3 episodes is excessively bright and the colors are washed out. The first thing you notice in this episode (before they even start speaking) is that they've figured out something about the lighting. The colors actually have some saturation. It looks much better.
Tall Steve and MF make their first appearance here. MF is discussing the history of the punk movement (movement?) and TS shows us the number of ways he knows to characterize his height.
J&B rail against the disparate levels of poverty, showing a table illustrating the decline in income among the lower classes and a wild increase in income among the higher classes. MKM explains how a plain averaging of the whole population would be misleading because the distribution is skewed to the right. Be still my beating heart. What she's referring to is the tendency to take an average and represent it as giving the “typical” member of a population, also called an “exemplar” of that population. You can see how this is mistaken by putting a millipede, 10 monkeys and 3 giraffes in a cage and asking “what is the average number of legs of the creatures in the cage?” vs asking “what is the typical number of legs of the creatures in the cage?”. Clearly, the former has a simply derived answer, whereas the latter is complete nonsense. On the other hand, if you put a random selection of humans in a cage, you would get a range of 0, 1, or 2 legs, and you could derive a description of the typical number of legs of people in that cage (be careful, it's not necessarily the same as the typical number of legs of humans in general - for a cage with 1000 0 legged people, 10 1-legged people and 10 2-legged people, the correct answer would be 0). In other words, the notion of “typical” is only valid when considering a relatively homogenous population which can model as an exemplar plus “noise” of some kind (in the example given, the “noise” is legs - or measured in legs, depending on how you look at it).
They also check the progress of the “fertilized” egg from episode 2. It is disgusting, though the camera doesn't show it all that well. Also, someone is sitting silently in conception corner and we see a part of their head, while the heads of J&B are out of the shot. That's just the high production values of the early shows. I wonder who that was.
I like the ending, where J says “we've failed, we've flunked” and some other stuff of that nature. What's important in education is steady progress. No one realistically expects instant brilliance, and if that is displayed, the real question is “why is this person taking this course?” (especially in a college setting).
