The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Darwinmania (as The New York Times dubbed it) is about to begin. During the next year, we will celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species (download zip audio here) and the discovery of natural selection. It’s pretty much a given that the minutiae of Darwin’s life will get thoroughly [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ Leave a Comment
When art meets engineering:
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≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Tinysong.com offers a service that’s rather impressive. You go to their homepage, search for a song, and then you can listen to it online and share it with a friend (via a specially created url). Just how it all works (copyright included), and just how deep the collection actually goes, I am not totally sure. [...]
≡ Category: TED Talks, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quantitative or qualitative judgment, I am not sure. On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talking about how to avert a climate crisis, David Gallo showing amazing underwater creatures, and Ken Robinson describing why schools kill creativity (we’ve posted that one [...]
≡ Category: Physics, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Article begins: “Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures. They have proposed [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
“In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.” If you want to get deeper into Greene’s work on string [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 1 Comment
The chance of ice disappearing this summer? 50/50. Worrisome, I’d say.
≡ Category: Business, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Given the sudden national obsession with the price of oil & gas, it seems worth flagging this bit of video put together by two professors from Duke University. Some may find their perspective on gas mileage rather obvious, others not. Either way, it can’t hurt to get their point across.
Separately, here’s a quick piece on [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s 1984, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, The Great Gatsby and other classics boiled down to three lines, courtesy of McSweeny’s.
≡ Category: Video - Arts & Culture, Web/Tech, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
A couple weeks ago we talked about a new trend in the book publishing world — creating promotional videos for new books and letting them go viral on YouTube and other social video sites. Here’s one of the better examples I’ve seen. 12 books by Lemony Snicket get promoted at once. Lots of bang for [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel, has hit the streets. And it comes just three years after his last one, Shalimar the Clown, which makes him a good deal more prolific than many of his contemporaries. (A piece in The Guardian — The Great American Pause — notes that many celebrated [...]
≡ Category: Comedy | ≅ 1 Comment
A quick find … I wanted to flag a good interview with George Carlin where he talks candidly about his evolution as a comic and the strange trajectory of his career. The conversation was held at the 92nd Street Y in New York. You can download it here: iTunes – Feed – MP3 – Blog [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ 5 Comments
In case you haven’t been watching … Apple’s iTunesU has started striking out in new directions. When it launched a little more than a year ago, iTunesU served up free educational content exclusively from universities. Now, it has gone “beyond the campus.”
With this move, Apple is now featuring edifying material from such institutions as The [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture, YouTube | ≅ 4 Comments
As mentioned this weekend, YouTube has rolled out its new Screening Room, which will make available a steady stream of short independent films for free. The initial lineup includes the 2006 academy award-winning animated film, The Danish Poet, directed by Torill Kove and narrated by Liv Ullmann. Within the Screening Room itself, YouTube doesn’t provide [...]
≡ Category: Comedy | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s the obit. And here’s Carlin with Johnny Carson over 40 years ago, sporting a very different look. Rather remarkable to look at.
Also worth a look is his famous piece: Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Hear on TV because it formed the basis for a first amendment case that went to the US Supreme Court [...]
≡ Category: Music, Video - Arts & Culture, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Roller Coaster…
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≡ Category: Film, YouTube | ≅ 4 Comments
YouTube just launched its new “Screening Room,” and there’s a good chance that the Sundance Film Festival will never quite be the same again.
The Screening Room presents high quality, independent films to YouTube users and promises to roll out four new films every two weeks. Given YouTube’s immense reach, these indies will immediately find a [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 2 Comments
In 2004, Danger Mouse released The Grey Album which layered the rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album on top of The Beatles’ White Album. Black and white makes grey.
Now, on YouTube, you can find The Grey Video, which experimentally brings Danger Mouse’s concept to video. The video, created by two Swiss directors, meshes clips from The [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
The controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s adventures with warrantless wiretapping first began in December 2005, when the New York Times broke the story. During the months that followed, the whole debate remained fairly abstract. We talked about individual rights and the power of the executive. We never thought about the individuals who were actually monitored [...]
≡ Category: Economics, Online Courses, Philosophy | ≅ 1 Comment
David Harvey, an important social theorist and geographer, has got the right idea. Take what you know. Teach it in the classroom. Capture it on video. Then distribute it to the world. Keep it simple, but just do it.
In launching this new web site, Harvey is making available 26 hours of lectures, during which he [...]
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