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.

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 W.W.

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. You can watch an embedded version above, or download an AVI file here.

What’s the “theoretical minimum” for thinking intelligently about modern physics? Here’s your chance to find out.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.