Elephant Painting


The video above is fair­ly mind-blow­ing. And here you can watch the ele­phant from anoth­er angle. The ele­phant appar­ent­ly resides in a safe haven in Thai­land, after hav­ing been abused in Bur­ma. For more info, see The Ele­phant Art & Con­ser­va­tion Project. (Video has been added to our YouTube playlist.)

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Dith Pran on Genocide

Dith Pran, a pho­to­jour­nal­ist and polit­i­cal activist who sur­vived The Killing Fields in Cam­bo­dia, and whose expe­ri­ence was nar­rat­ed in the 1984 film by the same name, has died at 65. You can revis­it his pho­to­graph­ic work here, and watch a talk he gave in 2006. Here, Pran recounts what hap­pened in Cam­bo­dia — how The Viet­nam War spread to Cam­bo­dia, empow­er­ing the mur­der­ous Khmer Rouge — and ques­tions whether we’re gen­er­al­ly get­ting clos­er to mak­ing geno­cide a thing of the past.

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Nosferatu: The Silent Adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Released in 1922, the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist film, Nos­fer­atu: A Sym­pho­ny of Hor­ror, offers a chill­ing adap­tion of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la (get free audio­book of Stok­er’s work here). The film was made by F. W. Mur­nau and stars Max Schreck. Watch it below, or find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

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80+ Free Courses from UCSD

Here’s a quick note for any­one look­ing for free online cours­es: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia — San Diego now gives you free access to more than 80 cours­es. (Access the full list here.) The cours­es, most­ly root­ed in the sci­ences, can be accessed via iTunes or rss feed. We’ve inte­grat­ed some of these cours­es into our own meta list of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. It now includes about 215 cours­es, and we’d encour­age you to book­mark the page and use it often.

Bush’s War

To mark the fifth anniver­sary of the Iraq inva­sion, PBS’s Front­line is air­ing “Bush’s War,” which offers “the defin­i­tive doc­u­men­tary analy­sis of one of the most chal­leng­ing peri­ods in the nation’s his­to­ry.” Draw­ing on an exten­sive archive, the pro­gram lays out the “entire nar­ra­tive,” show­ing how “the war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the gov­ern­ment.” If you can’t catch it on TV, you can watch it online. Click here and then click “Watch Online.”

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The Real Cost of the Iraq War

Dur­ing the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion esti­mat­ed that the mil­i­tary mis­sion would run around $50 bil­lion, even though experts doubt­ed those num­bers at the time. (In 2002, Yale’s William Nord­haus guessed that the costs could reach $500 bil­lion with­in five years.) Now, here we are in 2008, and new tal­lies sug­gest that the real costs could rise to some­where between $1 tril­lion and $3 tril­lion. This award-win­ning piece — MP3 — iTunes — Feed — delin­eates the mount­ing costs and intro­duces you to some of think­ing in Joseph Stiglitz and Lin­da Bilmes’ new book: The Three Tril­lion Dol­lar War.

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The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

At The Berk­man Cen­ter for Inter­net and Soci­ety (at Har­vard Law School), Clay Shirky gave a talk on his high­ly tout­ed new book, Here Comes Every­body: The Pow­er of Orga­niz­ing With­out Orga­ni­za­tions. You can catch his talk here: video for com­put­er or portable device — high res video — mp3 audio. And sam­ple some of his oth­er writ­ing here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Grateful Dead Free Concert Archive

gratefuldead.jpgA nice lit­tle find for Dead Heads: The Inter­net Archive hosts a large col­lec­tion of the Grate­ful Dead­’s live music. Some con­certs (usu­al­ly record­ed by mem­bers of the audi­ence) can be down­loaded. Oth­er audio (usu­al­ly tak­en from the sound­board) can be streamed. You can access the over­all col­lec­tion here.

A few items worth sam­pling include: Live at the Boston Gar­den (May 7, 1977); Live at the Dane Coun­ty Col­i­se­um (Feb­ru­ary 15, 1973); or Live at Madi­son Square Gar­den (Sep­tem­ber 4, 1979).

Enjoy.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.