The New Yorker Knocks The Kindle

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, iPhone | July 30th, 2009

It’s not often that The New York­er does the gad­get review. But here we have one — Nichol­son Bak­er break­ing down the Kin­dle. The upshot? He’s not a big fan. Why? Let me give you some of the mon­ey quotes. And also note the iPhone/iPod Touch rec­om­men­da­tions at the end (where I added some use­ful links):

“The prob­lem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had real­ly been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The prob­lem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a green­ish, sick­ly gray. A post­mortem gray. The resiz­able type­face, Mono­type Cae­cil­ia, appeared as a dark­er gray. Dark gray on paler green­ish gray was the palette of the Ama­zon Kin­dle [DC note: This is why I returned my Kin­dle].”

“Despite its smoother design, the Kin­dle 2 is, some say, hard­er to read than the Kin­dle 1. “I imme­di­ate­ly noticed that the con­trast was worse on the K2 than on my K1,” a review­er named T. Ford wrote. One Kindler, Eliz­a­beth Glass, began an online peti­tion, ask­ing Ama­zon to fix the con­trast. “Like read­ing a wet news­pa­per,” accord­ing to peti­tion-sign­er Louise Pot­ter.”

“Ama­zon, with its list­ma­nia lists and its some­times inspired rec­om­men­da­tions and its innu­mer­able fas­ci­nat­ing reviews, is very good at sell­ing things. It isn’t so good, to date any­way, at mak­ing things. But, for­tu­nate­ly, if you want to read elec­tron­ic books there’s anoth­er way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs sev­en­ty dol­lars less than the Kin­dle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recent­ly cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kin­dle for iPod” appli­ca­tion onto it.”

“There are oth­er ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Euca­lyp­tus appli­ca­tion, by a Scot­tish soft­ware devel­op­er named James Mont­gomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twen­ty thou­sand pub­lic-domain books whose pages turn with a volup­tuous grace. There’s also the Ice­berg Read­er, by Scroll­Mo­tion, with fixed page num­bers, and a very pop­u­lar app called Stan­za. In Stan­za, you can choose the col­ors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the bright­ness with a ver­ti­cal thumb swipe as you read… Forty mil­lion iPod Touch­es and iPhones are in cir­cu­la­tion, and most peo­ple aren’t read­ing books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beau­ti­ful, and (b) it’s not imi­tat­ing any­thing. It’s not try­ing to be ink on paper. It serves a night-read­ing need, which the light­less Kin­dle doesn’t.”

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Dylan & Cash Together

in Music | July 29th, 2009

Vin­tage video…

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Solving Stonehenge?

in History, Science | July 28th, 2009

Is Wal­ly Walling­ton onto some­thing?

Thanks Jil­lian for send­ing this one along…

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Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, Explains Why Creative Excellence Takes Time

in Life | July 27th, 2009

Ira Glass, host of the beloved radio show This Amer­i­can Life, offers a help­ful reminder that excel­lence doesn’t come auto­mat­i­cal­ly. It takes effort, years of it. And he revis­its some of his ear­ly radio work in order to prove it.  A good reminder for any­one with seri­ous artis­tic or cre­ative ambi­tions.

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Yale Open Courses Now on iTunesU

in Apple, Online Courses, Yale | July 26th, 2009

Over the past two years, Yale has released fif­teen free “open cours­es.” Ini­tial­ly, these cours­es were only avail­able through Yale’s web site and lat­er YouTube. Now, they’re also acces­si­ble through iTune­sU — which means that you can put these cours­es on your iPod with rel­a­tive ease. Just click here and scroll down, and you’ll find well-pro­duced cours­es that cov­er eco­nom­ics, his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, physics, med­i­cine and more. Thanks to this inte­gra­tion with iTunes, we’ll soon be able to include these cours­es in the Open Cul­ture iPhone app. If you haven’t played with it, give it a try. In the mean­time, all Yale cours­es appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es, fea­tur­ing online class­es from top uni­ver­si­ties.

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Ideas to Die For

in Philosophy | July 23rd, 2009

Here we have philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett apply­ing Dar­win­ian thought to human think­ing, all of which gets him into the intrigu­ing con­cept of “memes,” infec­tious ideas that can sub­vert our sur­vival instincts and threat­en whole cul­tures. It’s anoth­er good bit of think­ing from TED Talks.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is a writer and musi­cian who hosts the pod­cast The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life and has just released this sleazy ver­sion of a Michael Jack­son tune.

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Never Mind Amazon, Get Your Free Orwell Here

in Audio Books, Books | July 22nd, 2009

The whole mini-con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing Ama­zon’s dele­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ani­mal Farm from Kin­dle accounts remind­ed me of some­thing. Over at the Inter­net Archive, you can find 1984 avail­able as a free audio book. And, nice­ly, the record­ing is pro­fes­sion­al­ly done. You can down­load the full zip file here. Or alter­na­tive­ly you can get the indi­vid­ual mp3 files, or stream them, from this page. On a more per­ma­nent basis, you can find Orwell’s 1949 work housed in our Free Audio Book Col­lec­tion along with lots of oth­er free texts.

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The Ancient History Learning Guide

in History | July 21st, 2009

For life­long learn­ers, cours­es on Ancient Greece and Rome always remain in steady demand. While these cours­es are poor­ly rep­re­sent­ed in under­grad­u­ate pro­grams (at least in the States), they’re pop­u­lar in con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion pro­grams designed for old­er stu­dents. Even­tu­al­ly, it seems, many stu­dents come to the con­clu­sion that you can’t skip over the foun­da­tions and still make sense of it all. And so they go back to basics.

The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny, a com­mer­cial provider of cours­es for life­long learn­ers, has rec­og­nized this demand and built a very rich col­lec­tion of lec­tures ded­i­cat­ed to the Ancients. (NOTE: Our read­ers can get $10 off of their cours­es, by click­ing here and using the code word “CULTURE”. Be sure to check out the cours­es in mp3 for­mat, par­tic­u­lar­ly the ones on sale. They’re very afford­able.) These cours­es are pol­ished and well thought out. I rec­om­mend them high­ly.

Then you should know about some of the free alter­na­tives. Thanks to the “open course” move­ment, you can now find a series of free cours­es online, includ­ing some from top-ranked uni­ver­si­ties. Let me give you a quick overview of your options:

Last fall, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty intro­duced a new round of open cours­es that includ­ed Don­ald Kagan’s Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry. A lead­ing fig­ure in the field, Kagan takes stu­dents from the Greek Dark Ages, through the rise of Spar­ta and Athens, The Pelo­pon­nesian War, and beyond. You’ll cov­er more than a mil­len­ni­um in 24 lec­tures. As I’ve not­ed else­where, Yale’s cours­es are high touch. And what’s par­tic­u­lar­ly nice is that the course can be down­loaded in one of five for­mats (text, audio, flash video, low band­width quick­time video, and high band­width quick­time video). Sim­ply choose the for­mat that works for you, and you’re good to go.

When you’ve com­plet­ed the arc of Greek his­to­ry, you can move next to the UC Berke­ley course, The Roman Empire. The course taught by Isabelle Paf­ford moves from Julius Cae­sar to Con­stan­tine (rough­ly 40 BC to 300 AD) in 42 lec­tures. And the audio comes straight from the class­room, which means that you’ll get sol­id infor­ma­tion but you’ll also have to endure some extra­ne­ous talk about home­work assign­ments and exams. (It’s free, so don’t com­plain.) You can down­load this course in one of three ways: iTunes or  streamed audio. Last­ly, I should note that Paf­ford has taught anoth­er relat­ed course at Berke­ley — The Ancient Mediter­ranean World (iTunes — Feed - MP3s).

Once you have the big sur­vey cours­es under your belt, you can switch to some more focused cours­es com­ing out of Stan­ford. Let’s start with Patrick Hunt’s course Han­ni­bal (iTunes). As I’ve not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, this pod­cast­ed course takes you inside the life and adven­tures of Han­ni­bal, the great Carthagin­ian mil­i­tary tac­ti­cian who maneu­vered his way across the Alps and stunned Roman armies in 218 BC. The course also gives you glimpses into cut­ting-edge trends in mod­ern archae­ol­o­gy. Because Han­ni­bal still remains a fig­ure of intense his­tor­i­cal inter­est, it’s not sur­pris­ing that this course has ranked as one of the more pop­u­lar cours­es on iTune­sU.

Anoth­er short course worth your time is Virgil’s Aeneid: Anato­my of a Clas­sic. Pre­sent­ed by Susan­na Braund (a Stan­ford clas­sics pro­fes­sor at the time), the course teas­es apart the epic poem that was an instant when it was writ­ten 29–19 BC), and still endures today. Divid­ed into 5 install­ments, each run­ning about two hours, this pod­cast offers a good intro­duc­tion to one of the cen­tral texts in the Latin tra­di­tion.

Final­ly, let me throw in a quick bonus course. The His­tor­i­cal Jesus, anoth­er Stan­ford course taught by Thomas Shee­han, looks inside the historical/Roman world of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a his­to­ry course, not a reli­gion course, and it uses the best lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal evi­dence to answer the ques­tions: “Who was the his­tor­i­cal Jesus of Nazareth? What did he actu­al­ly say and do…? What did the man Jesus actu­al­ly think of him­self and of his mis­sion…? In short, what are the dif­fer­ences — and con­ti­nu­ities — between the Jesus who lived and died in his­to­ry and the Christ who lives on in believ­ers’ faith?

UPDATE: Thanks to a read­er, I was remind­ed of anoth­er relat­ed course: 12 Byzan­tine Rulers: The His­to­ry of the Byzan­tine Empire (iTunes  — Site). These pod­casts cov­er the lega­cy of the Roman Empire that emerged in the East (after it had col­lapsed in the West). You can read more about this course in one of my ear­ly blog posts.

All of these cours­es can be found in our larg­er col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es. There you will find 200 high qual­i­ty cours­es that you can lis­ten to any­time, any­where.

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