Ben Canales took a trip to Crater Lake to shoot the stars, sacrificing money and personal relationships along the way. But he’s not complaining. The results are just painfully pretty…
Pachelbel’s Music Box Canon
Johann Pachelbel (1653 — 1706) wrote his Canon in D major in the late 17th century, then it disappeared for a good 300 years. It didn’t mount a comeback until Arthur Fiedler first recorded the Canon in 1940, and until the Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra popularized the piece with two famous recordings (listen here). Now the Canon is everywhere. You hear it at weddings, of course. It finds its way into Beatles’ tracks. It goes fantastically viral on YouTube. (This legendary clip has 91 million views.) And now it gets cranked out of music boxes.
This video arranged by Vi Hart has a nice way of stripping things down and reminding us what a canon is fundamentally about. Along very similar lines, you will want to check out this clip showing how a Bach Canon Works. It’s pretty amazing.
via Metafilter
The Making of The Shining
In 1980, Stanley Kubrick shot The Shining, the classic horror film based on Stephen King’s novel. During production, the director allowed his daughter Vivian, then 17 years old, to shoot a documentary called Making The Shining, which lets you spend 33 minutes being a fly on the wall. The film originally aired on the BBC and gave British audiences the chance to see Jack Nicholson revving himself up to act, and Shelley Duvall collapsing in the hallway from stress and fatigue. Minutes later, we watch Mr. Kubrick exert some directorial force on the actress, and we understand her predicament all the more.
via Coudal.com
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Harry Partch’s Kooky Orchestra of DIY Musical Instruments
Composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch (1901–1974) is one of the pioneers of 20th-century experimental instrumentation, known for writing and playing music on incredible custom-made instruments like the Boo II and the Quadrangularis Reversum, and laying the foundations for many of today’s most creative experimental musical instruments.
In this Universal Newsreel footage from the 1950s, Partch conducts a student music performance on his instruments, built with insights from atomic research and Partch’s 30-year obsession with finding the elusive tones that exist between the tones of a regular piano. The setting is Mills College in Oakland, CA. The unorthodox orchestra performs music tuned to the 43-tone scale Partch invented, rather than the usual 12-tone, even though individual instruments can only play subsets of the scale.
For more on Partch’s genius and seminal innovation, see his excellent 1949 meditation, Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, its Roots, and its Fulfillments.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
Pendulum Waves as Kinetic Art
This Harvard-produced video has gone viral, and then some, having clocked more than 3,000,000 views. We’ve watched the pendulum balls swirl, moving almost impossibly from pattern to pattern, and we’ve remained dazzled all along. But the mechanics behind this choreographed action haven’t really been brought to the fore. So let’s turn to Harvard’s web site to understand how this kinetic art works:
The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.
We’re adding this clip to our collection of 125 Great Science Videos. You’ll also find a good number of Physics courses in our big collection of Free Online Courses.
A Day in California
Opinions are famously mixed on Southern California. It has never been Woody Allen’s kind of place. In Annie Hall, he quipped “I mean, who would want to live in a place where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light.” But this is coming from a guy who prefers fog and overcast skies to sunny days at the beach, someone who doesn’t quite connect with what has drawn 25 million people to the region. Ryan Killackey’s short film, “A Day in California,” will speak to those residents, or anyone who dreams of the Southern California life. He worked on the project for a year and a half, and it combines 10,000 images into a seamless whole. Learn more about the project or watch the film here.
via @alyssa_milano
Financial Markets Course with Yale Sage Robert Shiller
In March 2000, Yale economist Robert Shiller published Irrational Exuberance, a book that warned that the long-running bull market was a bubble. Weeks later, the market cracked and Shiller was the new guru. Fast forward a few years, and Shiller released a second edition of the same book, this time arguing that the housing market was the latest and greatest bubble. We all know how that prediction played out.
Unlike most of the financial industry, Shiller isn’t locked into a perennially bullish view, bent on pumping the market despite what the real numbers suggest. And that should give students, whether young or old, some confidence in his free course simply called “Financial Markets.” Available on the web in multiple formats (YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video — Yale Web Site), the 26 lecture-course covers the inner-workings of financial institutions that ideally “support people in their productive ventures” and help them manage economic risks. You can start with Lecture 1 here. Above, we present his introductory lecture on Stocks.
Finally (and separately) you can get Shiller’s thoughts on how to handle America’s big debt mess here. It was recorded in recent days.
Shiller’s course appears in the Economics section of our big collection of Free Online Courses. 385 courses in total. Don’t miss them.
Astonish Me: A Magical Mystery Through Nature’s Hidden Secrets
The World Wildlife Fund turns 50 this year, and, to mark the occasion, the acclaimed dramatist Stephen Poliakoff and director Charles Sturridge have teamed up to shoot ‘Astonish Me,’ a short, magical tale that reminds us of the many mysteries nature still conceals.
Every year, scientists discover somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 new species. (See some of the most intriguing recent ones here.) But this could all disappear if we don’t pay more attention to conservation. Everyone who worked on the film — from actors to film crew — did so for free. The action takes place in London’s Natural History Museum.
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