The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Art, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Every year, right before Labor Day, 50,000 people travel to Black Rock City, Nevada to take part in Burning Man — an experimental community dedicated to radical self reliance, radical self-expression and art. As Burning Man’s own web site will tell you, “Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the [...]
≡ Category: Art, Business | ≅ Leave a Comment
You have to appreciate the paradox of Banksy: A commercially successful anti-capitalist. A vandal who adds value. It’s the sort of amusing contradiction that appears often in the artist’s own work. A case in point: In 2009 Banksy made a wall painting on an industrial estate outside Croydon, South London, depicting a spike-headed punk rocker puzzling [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics, Politics | ≅ 2 Comments
Back in 2008, Annie Leonard produced The Story of Stuff (see below), a 20-minute animated film that explores the way our consumerist habits take a toll on the environment and sustainability. The video racked up millions of views on YouTube, and now Leonard returns with the second video in a longer series. It’s called the The Story [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Video - Science | ≅ 4 Comments
We have seen several time-lapse views of Earth from the International Space Station, but this may well be the best. Recorded from August to October, 2011, this HD footage has been smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc, and then coupled with music by Jan Jelinek. It gives you a pretty splendid view of the aurora [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ 4 Comments
Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith were canoeing somewhere in Ireland when they had a chance encounter with one of nature’s greatest and most fleeting phenomena — a murmuration of starlings. The spectacle is a magical case of mathematical chaos in action. And, it’s all driven by the quest for survival. The Telegraph has more…. via Dot Earth
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 3 Comments
On Wednesday night, Peter Gabriel brought his 46-piece orchestra to the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City and treated the audience to a 65-minute concert featuring orchestral versions of some classic Gabriel songs: Red Rain, Solsbury Hill, Biko, Intruder, Mercy Street, Wallflower, San Jacinto, Rhythm of The Heat, Signal to Noise — they were [...]
≡ Category: Religion | ≅ 53 Comments
Atheist Christopher Hitchens was asked earlier this year how his struggle with cancer has affected his views on the question of an afterlife. “I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation element of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it,” he responded. “It’s considered perfectly normal [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick fyi: To mark Remembrance Day, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has made Claude Guilmain’s documentary The Van Doos in Afghanistan available online for a limited time. You can watch it free until Monday. The NFB writes: In this documentary, we hear directly from francophone soldiers serving in the Royal 22e Régiment [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Music, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Electronic musician John Boswell has just released the 12th installment in his “Symphony of Science” series. Onward to the Edge celebrates the adventure of space exploration and features the auto-tuned voices of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, particle physicist Brian Cox and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. It’s a mashup of material from four sources: Tyson’s My Favorite [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Economics | ≅ 5 Comments
Don’t blame the lamestream media for this one. When it comes to our protracted economic stagnation, there is ultimately one place to point the finger: It’s those pesky mainstream economists. That’s the tongue-in-cheek conclusion of Niall Ferguson, history professor at Harvard and author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Ferguson makes his [...]
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