In the 1950s, Mick Jagger (then still called “Mike Jagger”) was a middle class kid growing up in Dartford, Kent, England. His mother, Eva, was a hairdresser; his father, Joe, a PE teacher. Together, they lived in a nice, orderly home, with more than enough money to pay the bills. (His neighbor, Keith Richards, couldn’t say the same.) In 1957, the elder Jagger began consulting on a weekly TV show called Seeing Sport, whichpromoted the virtues of sports to British children. During the coming years, Mick and his brother Chris made regular appearances on the show, showing viewers how to build a tent, or master various canoeing skills. In the 1959 clip above, Mick shows off the footwear needed for rock climbing. Nothing too fancy. No mountaineering boots or anything like that. Just a pair of “ordinary gym shoes … like the kind Mike is wearing.” The episode was shot in a spot called “High Rocks,” near Tunbridge Wells. This background info comes to us via Philip Norman’s 2012 biography of Mick Jagger.
Americans sometimes complain that, unlike the currency of many other countries, which feature portraits of artists, scientists, and writers, U.S. dollar bills don’t tend to feature intellectuals. But one could, I think, make the case for Benjamin Franklin, who must certainly count as a man of letters, and did illustrate an important physics lesson when he flew that kite with a key on it. Still, that doesn’t exactly make him a physicist, as residents of Austria, New Zealand, Scotland, and Croatia, all of whom have used bills emblazoned with the faces of physicists, well know.
It does, however, get Franklin a place on University of Maryland physicist Edward F. Redish’s page “Physicists on the Money,” which was featured on Jason Kottke’s site yesterday. Redish highlights 24 bills bearing portraits of noted figures throughout the history of physics, including, at the top of the post, the Danish 500-kroner note that pictures quantum theorist Niels Bohr. Just above we have the universally recognizable dishevelment of Albert Einstein, who found his way onto Israel’s five-pound note by, among other achievements, coming up with the general theory of relativity. Below you’ll see a physicist you may not have heard of, let alone spent: tenth-century scholar Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, pictured on Kazakhstan’s one-tenge note. Redish’s delightfully retro site also offers a collection of physicists on stamps, and links to a page with more scientist- and mathematician-bearing banknotes.
The camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is an instrument of intuition and spontaneity — “the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.” Like a Zen archer, Cartier-Bresson viewed his métier as a way of being in the world. Photography for him was an “artless art,” best approached by forgetting technique and opening oneself to the unconscious. “To take photographs,” he said, “means to recognize–simultaneously and within a fraction of a second–both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye, and one’s heart on the same axis.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson: Pen, Brush and Camera (above) is an excellent overview of the great photographer’s life and work. Directed and narrated by Patricia Wheatley, the film was produced for the BBC in 1998, the year four major exhibitions were held in London to celebrate Cartier-Bresson’s 90th birthday. The film traces the photographer’s extraordinary life, from his early training as a painter and his infatuation with Surrealism to his later work as a globe-trotting photojournalist and his decision, after 40 years of work in the medium, to give up photography and dedicate the last decades of his life to drawing. The film includes rare footage of Cartier-Bresson at work, along with interviews by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold and others. Best of all, Wheatley was able to film extensive interviews with the notoriously shy photographer, both in London and in his apartment overlooking the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.
To learn more about Cartier-Bresson and to see a wonderful slide show of his photography narrated by the man himself, please see our earlier piece, “Henri Cartier Bresson and the Decisive Moment.”
A year ago the European Union launched a campaign to attract more young women into the scientific professions. In Europe, women lag behind men in science and engineering, making up only a third of science researchers. But the video the EU made was laughable.
You may recall. It was called, Science: It’s a Girl Thing! and featured three young fashionistas parading around in high heels while a male scientist peers quizzically at them over his microscope.
Along comes science journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the German science site SciLogs is called Significant Details: Conversations with Women in Science. The interviews are fresh, informative, and accessible.
It’s inspiring to see such a range of women explain their research and walk us through their process for doing it.
A recent interview featured Dr. Kristen Panfilio (above), an American biologist on faculty at the University of Cologne. Panfilio’s work focuses on insect extraembryonic development, which means she studies how insect tissues develop into the bug’s ultimate shape by comparing the process in two insects: the milkweed bug and the red flour beetle.
Each conversation begins with a “significant detail” of the woman’s work. With the wry humor and precision of a true scientist, Panfilio demonstrates how she prepares her favorite tool, a glass stick, by softening the end with a cigarette lighter.
Panfilio’s specific field is evolutionary developmental genetics. Along with her lab assistants she studies how embryonic cells know what role they should play in forming a specific organism shape. How does a bone cell know it’s a bone cell?
The interview is about as much like Science: It’s a Girl Thing! as Meryl Streep is like Lindsay Lohan. This is a real person talking about how she has built her career (she wanted to be an artist when she was a teenager and studied ancient Chinese history at a small liberal arts college) and explaining her highly specialized work.
She also touches on one of the most wonderful things about scientific research: Some of the most exciting moments are when the results don’t align at all with expectations.
Best of all, it’s just one of the wonderful interviews in Hoppenhaus’s series.
The Colbert Report opened last night with a segment called “Stephen Colbert’s Tribute to Having Paul McCartney on His Show, Featuring Paul McCartney, With Special Guest Stephen Colbert.” And, for the next 12 minutes, Paul and Stephen covered a lot of ground. Because McCartney has just released material from Wings – a 1976 concert film called Rockshowand a reissue of Wings Over America – the conversation begins with the Wings era: how Macca started all over again; drove to gigs in a van, with no hotel reservations booked; eventually recorded a fine album (Band on the Run) in Nigeria, amidst a cholera outbreak; and began performing live for the first time in years … which led to inevitable questions about the Beatles: why they stopped performing live in 1966, and how their songwriting evolved. It all ends with interviewer and interviewee singing a charming duet of Irving Berlin’s 1936 classic “Cheek to Cheek.” Later, McCartney treated the Colbert crowd to six songs. We’ve embedded a couple of clips below. You can watch the full 60-minute show here.
Read Open Culture long enough, and sooner or later you’ll encounter “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman, the Canadian MC whose rhyming subjects of choice include evolution, The Canterbury Tales, and British versus Canadian English. Though the hard-reading Brinkman has, it seems, staked out the musical genre of “lit hop” for himself, he’s gained just as much of his distinctive brand of rigorously factual hip-hop notoriety by rapping for the other of what C.P. Snow defined as the “two cultures.” His parallel science rapping career began on a commission from University of Warwick microbiologist and Rough Guide to Evolution author Mark Pallen. Out of all this came “the first peer-reviewed rap” show, The Rap Guide to Evolution, whose development we’ve previously featured.
Above, you’ll find the music video for “Artifical Selection,” one song from The Rap Guide to Evolution. “Artificial selection, it starts with a question,” Brinkman raps. “How did people ever get cows, chickens and pigs / And other animals and plants to act so domestic? / We took them from the wild and we bred them, brethren.” He explores the topic further, touching on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the inadvertent usage of evolution by early farmers and livestock breeders, domestic aphids kept by ant colonies, and even the natural selection inherent in the MC’s development of his performance techniques. On Brinkman’s official site, the video comes with tags like “Heredity,” “Lamarkism,” and “Unity of Common Descent.” How many rap videos could credibly do the same?
The History section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 60 courses. Some courses (like those featured below) focus on broad time periods and themes. Others take a look at more specialized topics that will keep you engaged for hours. All lectures were taped right in the classrooms of great universities:
China: Traditions and Transformations – Multiple Formats – Peter K. Bol & William Kirby, Harvard
European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present - YouTube - iTunes Video - Web - Thomas Lacquer, UC Berkeley
History of the World to 1500 CE – YouTube - iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
History of the World Since 1500 CE – YouTube - iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
The Western Tradition (Video) – YouTube – Eugen Weber, UCLA
US History: From Civil War to Present - iTunes Audio - Web - Jennifer Burns, UC Berkeley
As you can see, the courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web. And they’re all listed in our meta collection of 700 Free Online Courses. Other key disciplines found in the collection include Philosophy, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond.
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On the eve of yet another Superman movie reboot—coming tomorrow with all the usual summer hit fanfare and noise—take a moment before gorging yourself on popcorn and extravagant CGI spectacles to reflect on the character’s enduringly simple origins. After all, this month marks the 75th anniversary of this most iconic of American superheroes, who first appeared in the June 1938 Action Comics #1. The brainchild of Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (so memorably fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Superman is what Neil Gaiman calls an archetypal “primal thing,” a character who can be reinvented every decade while still remaining unmistakably himself.
Witness, for example, the first appearance of Superman on the big screen in the 1941 Fleischer cartoon (top), Superman (or The Mad Scientist)—the first in a series of seventeen shorts. On the heels of the first non-print adaptation of the character—the Adventures of Superman radio drama (listen above)—the cartoon series shows us the original Siegel and Shuster hero, a rough-and-tumble space alien raised in an orphanage, not by the kindly Kents in rural America. You’ll notice however, that Superman’s resume—more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings… etc.—hasn’t changed a bit. But some of the character’s attributes and origins were considerably softened after DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth instituted a code of superhero ethics (many years before the Comics Code Authority stepped in to censor the whole industry).
You can learn even more about Superman’s origins from his creators themselves, interviewed in the clip above for the 1981 BBC documentary Superman: The Comic Strip Hero. Siegel reveals how the idea for Superman came to him during one restless night in which he composed all of the basic script for the character, “an entirely new concept.” The very next day, Shuster sat down at his drawing board and Superman’s look emerged fully-formed. Both creators and their heirs have won and lost high-profile lawsuits over rights to their characters. But legal wrangling over compensation aside, there’s no denying that their mad eureka moment left an indelible cultural legacy no updated film, logo, or controversy can diminish.
Yesterday we featured the National Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can download 25,000 high-quality digital images of that museum’s works of art. Today, why not have a look at Google Art Project? Though we’ve posted about it before, you’ll want to check out its slick new redesign — not to mention its expanded collection, which now includes more than 40,000 works of art from over 250 museums. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardenois writes that the latest iteration of Google Art Project’s “improved search tools now make it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. [ ... ] Some of the most important artworks are also available as gigapixel images. Many museums also allow you to browse their galleries using Google Street View.”
The collections newly added to Google Art Project come from institutions as far- and wide-ranging as Kuwait’s al Sabah Collection, Japan’s Kawabara Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst, and Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the top, we have an image of Sunkwan Kwon’s “A Man in Stripe Shirt Who is Dropping His Head for a Long Time After Phone Call,” made available in the Korean Art Museum Association collection. But don’t look at the image in this post; look at the piece’s entry in Google Art Project, which lets you scroll and zoom as you please. And you will want to zoom, since Kwon’s very large-format photography demands close attention to detail. At such a high resolution, you can pay that attention, looking right into the windows and observing the people behind them. Viewers, as the work’s description says, “should keep having tenacious questions that ask who the characters are, why they show tense expressions on their face and what their situations are.”
Chances are in the past week you’ve read some argument about how the internet has destroyed the middle class, democracy, culture, etc, or a rebuttal of one of the above. I can’t add much to these debates. They sometimes sound like arguments over whether telephony is a boon or a curse. These technologies—as long as the grid’s up and running—we shall always have with us.
Sociological speculation notwithstanding, the exponentially increasing computing power that pushes our online interactions to ever-dizzying speeds is surely something to pause and marvel at, if not to fear. The short video above from Buzzfeed takes us on a wild ride through the millions of transactions that occur online in a single minute. Here we learn that in sixty-seconds, there will be 2,000,000 Google searches, 27,800 uploads to Instagram, 278,000 Tweets, 1,875,000 Facebook likes, a “low estimate” of 200,000 people streaming porn….
Actually, it does start to seem like all this online activity is pretty narrowly focused, or maybe that’s a limitation of the survey. Another video from 2011 (below) and infographics here and here offer some comparative analytics.
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About Us
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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