Put simply, you’ll probably never see a noir film quite like this. Key Lime Pie was directed by Trevor Jimenez in 2007, and recommend on Twitter by Joaquin Baldwin, a talented young animator featured on Open Culture some months ago. It runs a quick 3 and a half minutes.

Some of the most basic questions about human existence (how did we develop language? why do we love music and art but kill in war? how did we develop certain eating habits? etc.) come back to a more singular question: how are we different from chimpanzees? This question is slowly getting answered by some of today’s leading primatologists and evolutionary biologists, including Robert Sapolsky, Daniel Lieberman, Richard Wrangham, Jane Goodall, Steven Pinker, all featured above.

Always wanted to read science fiction? But never knew where to start? io9, a blog dedicated to futurism and sci-fi, has you covered. Today, they published a handy sci-fi syllabus/reading list “intended to introduce the novice student … to the major themes in the genre, as well as books and authors who are representative of different eras in SF lit (including the present day).” The io9 reading list breaks down a vast body of sci-fi literature into six useful categories – 1) Foundational Works/Classics, 2) Utopias and Dystopias, 3) Robots, 4) Aliens, 5) Space Travel, and 6)  Science Fiction as Political Philosophy. Wells, Lovecraft, Huxley, Orwell, Dick, Asimov, Gibson, Heinlein, LeGuin – they’re all on the list.

Related FYIs: you can find many of HP Lovecraft’s writings online here. Thanks Julie for the recent heads up.

Also, you can download an audio version of Huxley narrating A Brave New World here.

This new video from Cambridge University, featuring archaeologist John Robb, gives you a quick and visually appealing introduction to how humans have understood something we take for granted – our own bodies. Covering 10,000 years in six minutes, Robb takes us from the “Animal Body” and “Sexualized Body” of the Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, to the “Politicized Body” of the Classical Age, “God’s Body” of the Middle Ages, and finally “The Body as Machine,” the metaphor we have been living with since 1500. And we wrap up with the “Body Digital,” the body of the future, and “Multiple Bodies.” This video comes from the Cambridge Ideas series available on Cambridge’s YouTube channel.

Philip Roth, now 77 years old, keeps publishing with a certain urgency. Everyman in 2006, Exit Ghost in 2007, Indignation 2008, The Humbling last year, and next comes Nemesis, due to be released in early October. After The Humbling hit the shelves, magazine editor Tina Brown conducted a rare video interview with Roth, and they covered a fair amount of ground in 14 minutes: his creative surge, how he approaches writing sex scenes, Obama’s literary talents, the coming extinction of the novel and whether the Kindle can make any bit of difference, etc. You can watch the video above, or read a transcript here.

Now a little freebie. A nice copy of Indignation goes to the first reader who sends along a compelling piece of open/intelligent media that we choose to post on the site. (If you’re looking for more guidance on what we have in mind, please read the tips on this page.) You can submit your media picks here. Cheers…

The video says it all. CNN has more on Captain Jack…

via Alec Couros aka @courosa

Back in 1983, the BBC aired Fun to Imagine, a television series hosted by Richard Feynman that used physics to explain how the everyday world works – “why rubber bands are stretchy, why tennis balls can’t bounce forever, and what you’re really seeing when you look in the mirror.” In case you’re not familiar with him, Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist who had a gift for many things, including popularizing science and particularly physics. The clip above comes from Fun to Imagine, and thanks to this dedicated BBC website, you can now watch all six videos in the series, each running about 12 minutes.  If you’re looking for more Feynman videos, let me give you this: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, an hour-long BBC/PBS program from 1981, and Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics taped in 1964, now posted online courtesy of Bill Gates. And, oh yes, don’t forget Feynman playing the bongos too…

Want to study some physics? Get Free Physics courses here. And Free Physics Textbooks here.

As journalists try to find their footing in the new digital environment, News21, a Carnegie and Knight initiative, has started “incubating” eight journalism schools across the country and helping students develop new forms of investigative reporting in multimedia formats. Above, we have Spilling Over, a piece of digital reporting that lays bare the emotional toll the BP Oil spill has taken on a Louisiana community. The eight minute video report was assembled by a News21 team at the University of North Carolina. NPR has more on the News21 project, and the News21 website features other student projects. H/T to Mike S. for another superb find…

David Gergen has served four different American presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton), and he now heads the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Last month Gergen, known for being a measured observer of politics, spoke before the Commonwealth Club of California and issued a very sober warning: America faces monumental problems. But unfortunately our capacity to address them has never been so diminished, and we’re this close to heading into a civilizational decline. Just what is limiting our ability to handle these problems? If you cut to the chase, it’s a mediocre generation of Americans – politicians, business leaders, media moguls, citizens – habitually putting personal interests first and the greater good second. It’s not a pretty picture, but Gergen suggests a few ways out of the woods. (Hint: education counts here.) You can stream the talk here, grab it on iTunes, or listen below. And if you think there’s nothing you can personally do to make this generation a better one, I suggest you watch the last few minutes of this Robert Sapolsky video.

This amazing little video charts the location of every asteroid discovered since 1980. As we move into the 1990s, the rate of discovery picks up quite dramatically because we’re now working with vastly improved sky scanning systems. And that means that you will especially want to watch the second half of the video. Below the jump, I’ve pasted some more information that explains what you’re seeing. Thanks to @WesAlwan and Mike for sending this great little clip our way.

via Gizmodo

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Building becomes canvas. Give it a minute to get going. According to an OC reader, the show was organized to celebrate the independence of Ukraine (August 24th). Thanks Olga!

via metafilter

On December 24, 1968, astronauts aboard Apollo 8, making the first human trip around the moon, stumbled upon a most beautiful scene – an “Earthrise.” Almost 40 years later (in 2007), Japan’s Kaguya satellite captured footage of the same scene unfolding: an Earthrise and also this time an Earthset. If you click on the preceding links, you will see some pretty wonderful still shots in HD.

Last week, Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of TIME magazine – the first time in a decade that a living novelist has graced the cover page. Authors only get there if they’re flirting with greatness (TIME’s piece is called “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist“) and if they have a new novel coming out. Freedom hits the bookstores next Tuesday, but you can get started with the first two chapters right now. Good Neighbors and Agreeable both appear on The New Yorker magazine web site.

You’ve perhaps seen the “Nine Minute Sopranos” (all 6 seasons summed up in 9 minutes) or “The Wire Wrap Up” (5 seasons of The Wire recapped in five short minutes). Now you get 11 Great Operas in 10 Minutes along with their plot lines that rival the dark twists and turns of any HBO series. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) La traviata, Carmen, Don Giovanni, Aida – they’re all covered here. Nice job by Kim Thompson and a big “via” goes to Maria Popova, a.k.a. @brainpicker.

America, as a nation, has some big fish to fry these days. But the energy is being focused right now on a symbolic question. Can the nation tolerate the building of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero almost a decade after the 9/11 attacks? Or, more to the point, can America uphold one of its core values – religious tolerance? The debate has smoldered on throughout the summer, and we’ve seen the hard right and left condemn the Cordoba Initiative and Islam more generally. On the right, Newt Gingrich has talked about  how we’re facing an “Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” And built into his thinking is the assumption that when Christians commit abhorrent crimes, it’s a perversion of the religion, not an indictment of its essence. But the same charity  doesn’t get extended to the Islamic minority faith in the country. Meanwhile, Sam Harris on the secular/atheist left gets in bed with Gingrich when he says “there is much that is objectionable—and, frankly, terrifying—about the religion of Islam and about the state of discourse among Muslims living in the West.” If it matters, the main difference between Harris and Gingrich is Harris’ consistency, which boils down to a consistent contempt for religion. (Partially Examined Life takes a much closer look at Harris’ arguments here).

All of this makes me wonder: What would someone who actually knows something about Islam say about the whole affair? So here you have it. Karen Armstrong, one of the most well known thinkers in the field of comparative religion, a former Catholic nun, and the author most recently of The Case for God, offering her thoughts on the matter above.