The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Google, History | ≅ 1 Comment
The story of Pompeii is well known. Back in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted and covered the neighboring Roman city with 60 feet of ash over the course of two days. The city was wiped out and then entombed for centuries, until archaeologists started unearthing the ruins in the 18th and 19th centuries, offering the [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
The University of Michigan now offers a course designed to help students turn their iPhones into musical instruments. The video above shows footage from one of their practice sessions held in November. A final concert will be held on December 9. You can read more about this project here. Also see Stanford students playing the [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 2 Comments
What do natural magnetic fields look like? This extraordinary footage from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory (UC Berkeley) gives you a glimpse and reveals their “chaotic, ever-changing geometries.” In terms of wow factor, it’s right up there with the Geometry of Sound.
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
What if people behaved like banks? Or, more precisely, what if individuals holding “underwater” mortgages stopped following the social norms of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘promise-keeping’ and instead acted like capitalist players in a free market? Most would dump their sinking mortgages and walk away. That’s the finding of Brent White, a law professor at the University of [...]
≡ Category: Most Popular | ≅ 15 Comments
Every now and then, we like to remind readers of the audio/video resources that Open Culture makes available to lifelong learners. These collections are all free, and can be downloaded to your computers and mp3 players. When you add it all together, you will find thousands of hours of free educational content here from quality [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Werner Herzog, one of Germany’s finest living directors, has a new film out, The Bad Lieutenant (watch trailers here), which has a loose relationship with Abel Ferrara’s own Bad Lieutenant from 1992. The new film, starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes, gets reviewed by A.O. Scott in the New York Times. And now a former Times [...]
≡ Category: Life, TED Talks | ≅ 2 Comments
Last week, we waded into the best of TED debate. What’s the best TED Talk out there? It’s hard to say. Purely subjective. But we can say one thing. Jill Bolte Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight” talk reaches the top of many lists. What happens when a neuroanatomist experiences a massive stroke and feels all the [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
This short animated film, When the Day Breaks, comes to us via The National Film Board of Canada, which appears on our list of places to watch free movies online. (Scroll to the bottom of the page.) In this film directed by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, “Ruby the pig seeks affirmation in the city [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
20 years ago, the dominoes fell in Eastern Europe. Not long after the Wall fell in Berlin, a non-violent revolution got underway in Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution took just a matter of six weeks (November 17 – December 29, 1989) to unfold. It was fast and bloodless, and it put on the world stage Václav [...]
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