Canadian “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman first garnered popular attention with a well-received, well-reviewed rap adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (To get a sense of the project, check out this brief scene from “The Pardoner’s Tale.”) And we also previously featured his brilliant work on Macmillan’s What’s Your English? campaign.

Brinkman has brought his follow-up show, a fascinating homage to Charles Darwin called “The Rap Guide to Evolution,” to New York City, where it’s getting rave reviews. In the video above, he explains how he went about putting the project together, and how evolutionary science enriched his understanding of the violence and anger so prevalent in the music he loves. The whole talk is great, but if you want to start off with a taste of the rap itself, skip forward to minute 9:03.

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Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

Baba Brinkman: The Rap Guide to Evolution is a post from: Open Culture

Last week, Citigroup admitted that hackers exposed the private financial data of more than 360,000 customer accounts. Meanwhile, in an unrelated attack, Lulz Security managed to bring down the CIA website, and this week they’ve declared war on government agencies around the world.

Now might be a good time to beef up on your knowledge of malware, cybercrime, and cyberwarfare, starting with Stuxnet, a computer virus that was launched against Iranian nuclear infrastructures in 2010 (most likely by the U.S.). For a quick primer on Stuxnet, check out Anatomy of a Computer Virus. It’s only three and a half minutes long, but you’ll learn enough to decide whether or not to set your laptop on fire, sell everything you own, and run screaming for the Yukon.

For a more detailed exploration of the virus, watch Cracking Stuxnet, A 21st-Century Cyber Weapon, a TED talk by cyber-security expert Ralph Langner. Disclaimer: It won’t necessarily put you at ease — the presenter closes by thanking Mr. Langner for “scaring the living daylights out of us.”

Via PopTech and Hungry Beast

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

Anatomy of a Computer Virus: A 3.5 Minute Primer is a post from: Open Culture

Arkansas-born artist Shea Hembrey kicks off his TED talk by confessing to a hick childhood in which he and his sister “would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.” That modest joke sets the stage for his introduction of Seek, a project Hembrey conceived in response to his disappointment with several exhibits of contemporary art in Europe, including the Venice Biennale. Finding much of the work he encountered too obtuse and inaccessible, Hembrey decided to create an international biennial of his own, featuring the 100 most inspiring artists he could find.

The twist, of course, is that all 100 artists (and artworks) were created by Hembrey himself, in strict accordance with two personal criteria:  First, the work must be something he could explain to his grandma in less than five minutes; next, its process must engage the three “H’s” of head, heart, and hand.

All 100 pieces feature distinct materials, character and craft, and taken together they provide an impressive showcase for Hembrey’s humor and virtuosity. But that grandma of his had better be hiding a degree in semiotics, or at least an old copy of the The Postmodern Condition, because the success of Seek’s joke is largely dependent on our knowledge of the world it lampoons.  And for all the determined folksiness of his manifesto, the position Hembrey stakes out — somewhere between parody and homage — would not be unfamiliar to the curators of the Venice Biennale.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

How Shea Hembrey Became 100 Artists is a post from: Open Culture

Since the break-up of Talking Heads in 1991, David Byrne has made a good career for himself as a solo artist, working in film and music, and also becoming an active supporter of cycling. Overtly intellectual, Byrne has given lectures on a great variety of topics – from Carl Jung to the ways in which venue and context shape artistic creation.

The TED talk above was given in February 2010 in Long Beach, California, and here David Byrne presents his ideas on the interrelationship between music and architecture. A transcript of this talk can be found on the TED Talks page.

Byrne was not the first to explain the link between music and architecture. In 2002, renowned architect Daniel Libeskind delivered a Proms Lecture on that very topic (find the audio stream here) and, in 2007, Jonathan Cole presented his own lecture, “Music and Architecture: Confronting the Boundaries between Space and Sound,” at Gresham College, London. But it is Byrne’s talk that approaches the subject from the practical point of view of a musician.

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve is a post from: Open Culture

Morgan Spurlock’s newest documentary, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, exposes the myriad ways in which popular media is almost wholly sponsored, leased, bought and branded by powerful corporations. Ironically — and intentionally — Spurlock made sure his documentary would also be almost wholly sponsored, leased, bought and branded by powerful corporations. In his very funny TED talk, Spurlock (Super Size Me, 30 Days) explains how he furthered his experiment in “pure transparency” by encouraging sponsorships of, you guessed it, his very funny TED talk.

Confused? That’s because pure transparency is a lot easier to envision than execute. Find out why starting at minute 6:18.

via TED

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

Morgan Spurlock: The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold is a post from: Open Culture

Deb Roy is the director of the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab. For the first few years of his son’s life, Roy installed cameras in every room of the family home. Now he jokes that he has the “largest home video collection ever made” – roughly 90,000 hours of images and footage of the growing baby’s world. The purpose was to consider and analyze all the factors impacting his son’s first words, including the 7 million words that the boy heard from his father, mother, nanny, and other visitors to the house.

Roy’s talk made one of the biggest splashes at TED this year, not only for what he learned about early language acquisition, but also for his breathtaking data visualization maps. Even by TED standards, it’s an idea-packed 20 minutes: Impressive. And when you consider that Roy is now on sabbatical and employed by the AI company Bluefin Labs, working on, among other things, social media and market research, it all becomes more than a little bit frightening.

On a brighter note, Roy’s son turned out to be an early talker.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

The Birth of a Word: Deb Roy at TED is a post from: Open Culture

10 Harvard professors. 10 fascinating ideas. 10 minutes each. That was the gist of Harvard Thinks Big, a TED-esque event held on February 11th. Now fast forward several weeks, and the talks all appear online for free. Find them on YouTube, iTunes, or Harvard’s dedicated web site.

Of all the 10 talks, we decided to feature one: Daniel Gilbert, a psych professor known for his book Stumbling On Happiness, presents a talk called “It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and I Feel Fine.” (Yes, a nod to R.E.M.) And it tries to make sense of a baffling question. Our planet is on the brink of an ecological catastrophe and we’re calmly sitting here watching videos. Humans have thrived because we take threats seriously. But why not this one?

Other speakers at the event include Steven Pinker, Lawrence Lessig, Richard Wrangham, and Elaine Scarry – some well known Harvard names. One figure not present was Michael Sandel. But here we have his TED Talk from 2010: The Lost Art of Democratic Debate.

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Harvard Thinks Big is a post from: Open Culture

Where will the Middle East go from here? Towards democracy, as many hope? Towards a more theocratic model, as some despair? Or, towards more of the same disillusioning autocracy?

On the first day of the big TED conference, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, offered a supremely optimistic take on the revolutions transforming Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and perhaps beyond. Throughout the past few weeks, many Westerners have tuned into Al Jazeera’s live English-language coverage on the web and found themselves pleasantly surprised by the balance and depth of their reporting. Now you get 17 upbeat minutes with the leader of the Qatar-based news organization …

Revolutions in the Middle East: Head of Al Jazeera Speaks at TED is a post from: Open Culture

This week, some of the world’s greatest thinkers (and biggest spenders) are gathered in Palm Springs and Long Beach, California for TED’s annual conference. In case your invitation to TED2011 got lost in the mail along with ours, you can still keep up with the conference through TED’s homepage. Some highlights so far include an opening address beamed in from outer space, physicist Janna Levin’s discussion of what she calls the soundtrack of the universe, and finally, a stunning video documenting the restoration of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 classic film, The Leopard. Even better, the video is narrated by Martin Scorsese, uber-director, cinema historian, and founder of The Film Foundation, one of the many organizations involved with the restoration.

By the way, Scorcese gave a fascinating talk about film restoration last year at LACMA. You can watch it here. For a complete list of films his foundation has been involved in restoring or preserving, click here.

The Restoration of a Masterpiece, as Narrated by Martin Scorsese is a post from: Open Culture

On a related note, TED has also just rolled out TEDBooks, a new digital book series that delivers powerful ideas in 20,000 words or less. That’s about 1/3 the length of a traditional book. TEDBooks are currently being sold for $2.99 through Amazon as “Kindle Singles.” You can learn more about the initiative on TED’s blog or via BrainPickings, or simply visit Amazon to preview the first three books in the series:

• Homo Evolutis by Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans
• The Happiness Manifesto by Nic Marks
• Beware Dangerism! by Gever Tulley

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875 TEDTalks in a Neat Spreadsheet is a post from: Open Culture