A Big Bach Download: All of Bach’s Organ Works for Free

in Music | November 24th, 2010

bach2

A quick fyi for Bach lovers: You can download for free the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach. They were recorded by Dr. James Kibbie (University of Michigan) on original baroque organs in Leipzig, Germany. Start with a collection of Favorite Masterworks, or get the complete works that have been divided into 13 groups for easy download. Once you download these zip files, you will need to unzip them and import them into iTunes or a similar application. Thanks for @Pdarche (Peter Darche) for flagging this for us.

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How a Bach Canon Works

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All of Bach Is Putting Videos of 1,080 Bach Performances Online:

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The Big Cheat

in Business, Math, Random | November 23rd, 2010

There’s high drama in the classroom at the University of Central Florida. Richard Quinn, a longtime business instructor, gives 600 students their mid-term exam. Then comes the anonymous tip that cheating is rampant. Forensic analysis bears that out. Ultimatums are made. Moral lessons drawn. Soon the confessions – all 200 of them – follow. A rough day for all involved.

Postscript: We poked around a bit more and read the student newspaper at UCF. It’s possible that the cheating ring may be less devious than it first appears, but it’s still not entirely clear.

via Kottke.org

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NPR Hip Hop

in Comedy, Music, Radio | November 23rd, 2010

You never saw this coming, right? A little hip hop for NPR listeners. Adam Cole, a Stanford student, raps it out with Jenna Sullivan. Get the lyrics for “Good Radiation” below the jump…
(more…)

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Neuroscience and Free Will

in Philosophy, Psychology, Science | November 23rd, 2010

We have free will. We make our own decisions. We have long taken these basic assumptions for granted. But what does neuroscience make of this? In this excerpt from the BBC Horizon special, “The Secret You,” Marcus Du Sautoy (Oxford University) participates in a brain imaging experiment conducted by John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist based in Berlin. And the results? Well, they force us to rethink things a bit. Goodbye Descartes. Goodbye mind before matter. Goodbye to consciousness and free will, as we traditionally like to think about them. And welcome to the world of neurons, to brain activity that makes your decisions before your conscious self is even aware of them. To delve deeper into all of this, you can watch Haynes give a 90 minute lecture here called “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.”

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Five Minutes with Richard Dawkins

in Life, Religion, Science | November 22nd, 2010

You’ll get the schtick pretty quickly. The BBC’s Matthew Stadlen spends five quick minutes with celebrities, thinkers and newsmakers. And, above, he gets down to business with Richard Dawkins, with the conversation touching on religion, the afterlife, spirituality, morality, happiness, and the whole point of life. Other thinkers featured in the series include Martin Amis, AC Grayling, Alain de Botton, Brian Cox, Sir Terry Pratchett and others.

via Metafilter

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45 Great Cultural Icons Revisited

in Art, Literature, Most Popular, Philosophy | November 21st, 2010

It’s no secret. We love to highlight vintage video of cultural icons. This weekend, we showed you the last days of Leo Tolstoy to commemorate the centennial of the great writer’s death, and you expressed your appreciation. And it led us to think: why not dig through our archive, and revive some of the great treasures previously featured on Open Culture? And so here it goes: Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here. So close, you can almost touch them. Enjoy the list, and if we’re missing some good clips, don’t hesitate to send them our way…

Video

  1. Salvador Dali (and Other VIPs) on “What’s My Line?”
  2. Arthur Conan Doyle Recounts the Backstory to Sherlock Holmes
  3. Orson Welles’ Final Moments
  4. William S. Burroughs Shoots Shakespeare
  5. Borges: The Task of Art
  6. Jack Kerouac Meets William F. Buckley (1968)
  7. Ingmar Bergman Visits Dick Cavett, 1971
  8. Picasso Painting on Glass
  9. Leonard Bernstein Breaks Down Beethoven
  10. Record Making With Duke Ellington (1937)
  11. Bertrand Russell on God
  12. Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison (1909)
  13. A Young Glenn Gould Plays Bach
  14. Rod Serling: Where Do Ideas Come From?
  15. Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine
  16. Rare Interview with Alfred Hitchcock Now Online
  17. Miles and Coltrane on YouTube: The Jazz Greats
  18. Footage of Nietzsche’s Final Days (May be bogus)
  19. Samuel Beckett Speaks
  20. Jimi Hendrix Plays Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  21. Django Reinhardt at 100
  22. When Pavarotti Met James Brown, the Godfather of Soul
  23. James Dean and Ronald Reagan Clash in Newly Discovered Video
  24. The Last Czar (1896)
  25. Leon Trotsky: Love, Death and Exile in Mexico
  26. Revisiting JFK on YouTube
  27. Mahatma Gandhi Talks (in First Recorded Video)
  28. Malcolm X at Oxford, 1964
  29. Helen Keller Captured on Video
  30. Anne Frank: The Only Existing Video Now Online
  31. Mike Wallace Interviews 1950s Celebrities (Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Salvador Dali, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, etc.)

Audio:

  1. Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1890)
  2. Aldous Huxley Narrates Brave New World
  3. Truman Capote Reads from Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  4. Kurt Vonnegut Reads from Slaughterhouse-Five
  5. William Faulkner Audio Archive Goes Online
  6. The John Lennon Interviews
  7. Rare Recording of Walt Whitman Reading
  8. Virginia Woolf: Her Voice Recaptured
  9. T.S. Eliot Reads The Waste Land
  10. Ernest Hemingway Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”
  11. F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare
  12. James Joyce Reading from Finnegans Wake
  13. Rare Ezra Pound Recordings Now Online
  14. William Carlos Williams Reads His Poetry (1954)
  15. Interviews with Schoenberg and Bartók

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The Very Last Days of Leo Tolstoy Captured on Video

in Books, Literature | November 20th, 2010

103 years ago today (November 20), Leo Tolstoy, who gave us two major classics in the Russian tradition, Anna Karenina and War & Peace, died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate and his wealth and traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to live the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weak constitution could bear. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s very last days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online. A big thanks to Mike S. for flagging the video and the anniversary itself.

Note: You can find many of Tolstoy’s major works in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.

Related Content:

Rare Recording: Leo Tolstoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Languages, 1909

How Leo Tolstoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Other Tales of Lifelong Learning

The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Volumes for Free (in Russian)

How Leo Tolstoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Other Tales of Lifelong Learning

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London 360

in Random | November 19th, 2010

Here’s an amazing way to get the lay of the land in London. Photographer Jeffrey Martin has stitched together 7,886 high-res images, creating an 80 gigapixel (or 80 billion pixel) panoramic photograph of England’s great capital. The photo is also interactive, which means you can play aerial tourist. When you enter the site, click on “Show Landmarks” (lower left corner), make a selection, and then start flying around the city.

These photos were taken from a 36 floor building, using a DSLR camera and a 400mm lens. And it now stands as the world’s largest 360 photo.

via newslite

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.