≡ Category: History | ≅ Comments
In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, The Teaching Company has made available two free lectures that survey the ancient Greek origins of the Olympics. Presented by Jeremy McInerney, a professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, these talks, each running about 30 minutes, bring you back to 776 BC, to the [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
A little summer randomness. It’s actually quite beautiful …
(And, no, I’m not sure if this is technically a tsunami.)
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≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
What makes a diary like a blog? The Orwell Prize is offering up a new answer to that familiar question in August when it fires up the Orwell Diaries, a blog that will post each entry from George Orwell’s private musings exactly 70 years after it was written. I like this idea because it combines [...]
≡ Category: Foreign Language | ≅ Comments
YouTube’s Trendspotting Tuesday focused this past week on the growing number of videos that can teach you a foreign language (for free, of course). Among the 12 video collections featured here, you’ll find ones that offer lessons in French, Spanish, Modern Greek, Latin, Japanese and Swahili, among others. They also highlight clips that demonstrate how [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Comments
By now, most everyone knows that Randy Pausch sadly died of pancreatic cancer last week. And, if you have an internet pulse, you’re already acquainted with his lecture that caught the public imagination last year: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. What you may not have seen is the short, six-minute speech Pausch made at Carnegie [...]
≡ Category: Google, Web/Tech | ≅ Comments
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, some former Google engineers launched a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”), which claims to be the “world’s biggest search engine,” indexing 120 billion web pages, or roughly about three times what Google supposedly does. (Get more info on the new site’s schtick here.) A quick round [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
1200 people live in Antarctica during the summer, and about 200 in winter. Assuming that you’re not among them, we’ve posted this time lapse video to show you what you’re missing:
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≡ Category: Google, Video - Arts & Culture, Wikipedia | ≅ Comments
Here is Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, being interviewed after Google debuted Knol. Interesting that his first thought is that users should copy Knol content and bring it to Wikipedia … :
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Randy Pausch, the computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University whose “Last Lecture” caught the public imagination, has died of pancreatic cancer. Thanks partly to a Wall Street Journal article written last September, the public discovered the remarkably upbeat and uplifting lecture Pausch gave soon after getting diagnosed. Titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” (see [...]
≡ Category: Google, Wikipedia | ≅ Comments
Last December, Google announced that it was testing a new content initiative — dubbed “Knol” — intended to rival Wikipedia. The fruits of their labor are now live (in beta), available for all to see.
As we mentioned in our initial piece, Knol caters to the individual author/expert, not to the wisdom of crowds (à la [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
It’s 1940. The film is The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin’s famous satire of Nazi Germany. In this celebrated scene, Chaplin dances with a large globe with Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin Overture playing in the background.
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≡ Category: Current Affairs, Online Courses, Physics, Science, UC Berkeley, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
Richard Muller teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents. You can download the course in audio (iTunes – Feed – MP3s) or watch it on YouTube (see first lecture below and get full course here). And now you can buy Muller’s new book. Just published by [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
A good find by the folks at BoingBoing: Dementia 13, Francis Ford Coppola’s slasher/thriller from 1963, can be downloaded for free over at Archive.org (which is where you can also download a nice version of Orwell’s 1984).You can watch an embedded version below, or download an AVI file here. Here’s the gist of the plot: [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Physics, Science, Stanford, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
What’s the “theoretical minimum” for thinking intelligently about modern physics? Here’s your chance to find out. Below, you will find three courses (the first of eventually six) presented by Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who helped conceptualize string theory and has waged a long-running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking (see his new book on [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
What can you say about this? A quick trip back to the 1950s… File this under Random …
(For foreign readers, all you need to know is that The Flintstones was a classic American cartoon.)
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Related Content:
Rewind the Videotape: Mike Wallace Interviews 1950s Celebrities
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
Joerg, one of our readers, wrote us rather joyfully and declared: “Today I found the site of my dreams: Supposedly most of the greatest new documentaries can be watched online” and they’re “financed by ads.” The site is called SnagFilms, and indeed, it finds “the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley | ≅ Comments
How does modern neuroscience make sense of the current McCain-Obama race? Have a listen to Christopher Lydon’s fascinating conversation with George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (iTunes – MP3 – Feed – Web Site).
Lakoff is the author of the new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand [...]
≡ Category: Music, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead “3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects.” And the video was made entirely with visualizations of that data. You can watch the video below and find out more about the making of the video [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Comments
I want to send a quick apology to our email subscribers. Long story short, we encountered some problems with our email subscription list over the past week (problems that we’re beyond our control). But things are working again, and I wanted to highlight some of the posts you may have missed. Sorry again. And here [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture, YouTube | ≅ Comments
Now featured in The YouTube Screening Room: Jake Polonsky’s School of Life. “The film may be set in an elementary school, but it tells a poignantly ironic story that any adult will relate to. School of Life won the 2004 British Independent Film Award for Best Short.” A higher quality version can be watched here. [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Online Courses, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
How about a blog post that doesn’t deal with the controversy surrounding The New Yorker’s clumsy attempt at satirizing Barack and Michelle Obama …. ? (Update: See the imagined, right-wing satirical cartoon of John McCain.)
When Stanford launched its new YouTube channel several weeks ago, it debuted with a complete series of lectures from an undergraduate [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
Howard Zinn, a historian from Boston University, best known for his book People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, has been brought to YouTube. This video presents an animated version of Zinn’s essay, Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire. Zinn cartoon-style, here it goes (and you [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ Comments
Here’s a free audio version of Craphound, the first short story published by Cory Doctorow, who is otherwise known for his new book, Little Brother, and for his work on the very popular BoingBoing blog. (As an fyi, you can find an alternative reading of the same story here.)
Looking for more free downloads? Try the [...]
≡ Category: Google, Most Popular, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science, YouTube | ≅ Comments
Smart video collections keep appearing on YouTube. But rather antithetical to the ethos of its parent company (Google), YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find. So we’ve decided to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits. There are about 70 collections in total, and [...]
≡ Category: Apple, Most Popular, Web/Tech | ≅ Comments
In advance of tomorrow’s release of the new 3G iPhone, Apple has launched its new App Store on iTunes, which features new tools that will immediately make the iPhone (and iPod Touch) a more versatile — and, in some cases, enlightening — device. Below, we have highlighted ten apps worth exploring if you’re hungry for [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ Comments
The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into 56 languages. A huge bestseller, in short. Here it is unabridged and free. I am not sure how long this offer will last. So I would grab it sooner than later — and while you’re at it, don’t forget to look through [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
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A contribution (which we always welcome) from one of our readers in Romania:
“The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created the first publicly shown movies, the first documentaries and, with this 50-second film shot at a Provence railway station, the first horror picture. It is said that as Paris audiences watched the train chug [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Comments
Gas prices are up. Most sectors of the economy are down (see this WSJ bit) as a consequence. The exceptions? Apparently hybrid cars and online courses, according to this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Feeling the pinch, students are skipping the drive to campus and taking courses online. The net result: many schools [...]
≡ Category: Art, Random, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
When completed in Dubai, this “dynamic building” designed by David Fisher will be in constant motion, always changing its shape, and also generate its own electric energy. You can reserve your apartment today, or wait for similar buildings to get erected in Moscow and New York. The whole concept feels a bit Las Vegas-esque. But [...]
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