102 years ago, J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed Frankenstein. It took him three days to shoot the short, 12-minute film (when most films were actually shot in just one day). It marked the first time that Mary Shelley’s literary creation was adapted to film. And, somewhat notably, Thomas Edison had a hand (albeit it an indirect one) in making the film. The first Frankenstein was shot at Edison Studios, the production company owned by the famous inventor.
The gender stereotypes might be backward-looking (we’ll make up for it later in the day), but the technological vision is on the mark, right down to email, e-commerce and online banking. Of course, these weren’t the only people imagining an electronic, connected world during the 1960s.
In 1964, the futurist Arthur C. Clarke peered into the future and saw our connectedness coming. By 2000, he predicted, “We could be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be,” and “it will be possible in that age … for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”
And then Marshall McLuhan understood the trend too. He saw electronic media turning our world into a social one, a world where services like Facebook and Twitter would make complete sense. You can watch the prescient Marshall McLuhan right here. H/T Sasa
In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov described the facial features of his scandalous protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in small bits. When taken together, here’s what you get:
Gloomy good looks… Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice… broad shoulders … I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case… But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows… A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile… aging ape eyes… Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.
In a rather brilliant move, Brian Joseph Davis has run these descriptions through law enforcement composite sketch software and brought Humbert Humbert almost to life. (See above.) And he has done the same for a cast of other literary characters on his Tumblr, called The Composites. Other characters getting the perp treatment include Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), Edward Rochester (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), and Keith Talent (Martin Amis’ London Fields), among others. Find them all here. h/t Metafilter
This week the British Government once again refused to pardon Alan Turing. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Turing laid the foundations for computer science and played a key role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. In 1952 he was convicted of homosexuality. He killed himself two years later, after being chemically castrated by the government.
On Monday, Justice Minister Tom McNally told the House of Lords that the government of Prime Minister David Cameron stood by the decision of earlier governments to deny a pardon, noting that the previous prime minister, Gordon Brown, had already issued an “unequivocal posthumous apology” to Turing. McNally was quoted in the Guardian:
A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offense. He would have known that his offense was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offense which now seems both cruel and absurd–particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.
The decision came as a disappointment to thousands of people around the world who had petitioned for a formal pardon during the centenary year of Turing’s birth. The Guardian also quoted an email sent by American mathematician Dennis Hejhal to a British colleague:
i see that the House of Lords rejected the pardon Feb 6 on what are formal grounds.
if law is X on date D, and you knowingly break law X on date D, then you cannot be pardoned (no matter how wrong or flawed law X is).
the real reason is OBVIOUS. they do not want thousands of old men saying pardon us too.
Efforts to obtain a pardon for Turing are continuing. British citizens and UK residents can still sign the petition.
To learn more about Turing’s life, you can watch the 1996 BBC film Breaking the Code(above, in its entirety), featuring Derek Jacobi as Turing and Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter as the mysterious “Man from the Ministry.” Directed by Herbert Wise, the film is based on a 1986 play by Hugh Whitemore, which in turn was based on Andrew Hodge’s 1983 book Alan Turing: The Enigma.
Breaking the Code moves back and forth between two time frames and two very different codes: one military, the other social. The film runs 91 minutes, and has been added to our collection of Free Movies Online.
This video packs 14 years of United States weather (1997 – 2011) into 33 minutes, presenting a total of 120,900 individual frames, each spaced one hour apart. And they’re all set to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat Major. If you want to get right to the drama, we recommend jumping to the climactic 27th minute. H/T Devour.
The Graduate came out in 1967 and astounded audiences with its now famous storyline. The young college graduate Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) finds himself seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), a family friend, only to then fall in love with her daughter, Elaine. Pretty shocking material for many in 1967.
A financial and critical success, The Graduate made Dustin Hoffman a star, and the celebrity-style interviews soon followed. Above, we have Hoffman getting interviewed from the comfort of his own bed in 1968. The topics: Sex, his sex life, women’s role in society and their sexuality.
Here’s something you don’t see every night: the far side of the Moon, photographed by one of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft.
The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized. As a result, we always see the same view of the Moon no matter when or where (on Earth) we look at it. In this interesting video, released last week by NASA, we get a rare glimpse of the Moon’s other side, starting with the north pole and moving toward the heavily cratered south.
The video was captured on January 19 by the “MoonKAM” aboard one of a pair of GRAIL spacecraft that were launched last Fall and began orbiting the Moon on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The primary mission of GRAIL is to study the Moon’s interior structure and to learn more about its thermal evolution.
GRAIL is also the first planetary mission by NASA to carry instruments dedicated solely to education and public outreach. The “KAM” in “MoonKAM” stands for Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students. The program, led by former astronaut Sally Ride, will engage fifth- to eighth-graders from across the country in selecting target areas on the lunar surface to photograph and study. Educators interested in participating can register at the MoonKAM website. To learn more about the video and GRAIL, see the NASA news release.
It’s more than a theme park. It’s an iconic American institution, a symbol of an imagined Golden Age in American history, and a site of many good childhood memories. We’re talking about Disneyland. Construction began in July 1954 in rural Anaheim, California, and the park opened but a year later in July 1955. And, thanks to this newly-cleaned up piece of footage, you can see Walt’s “magical park” just a short two years later. The babies in the strollers are likely grandparents today. But the park still looks much the same. Disney History Institute offers more commentary on the clip here.
Neil Young made headlines last week when he appeared at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: Dive Into Media” conference and voiced his disapproval of the way music is being heard these days. “We live in a digital age,” Young said, “and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving it.”
Young is deeply dissatisfied with the sound quality of compressed MP3 digital files, which he said carry only five percent of the data from the original vinyl or master recordings. “It’s not that digital is bad or inferior,” he told the Journal‘s Walt Mossberg and Peter Kafka. “It’s that the way it’s being used is not sufficient to transfer the depth of the art.”
The full 32-minute interview is now available online, and can be seen above. Throughout the discussion, Young’s commitment to his cause is clear. “My goal,” he said, “is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years.”
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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