Santiago de Compostela: A View From the Octocopter

in Art, Technology | September 2nd, 2011

Micro­copter­video is a Span­ish com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in shoot­ing videos using small remote-con­trol heli­copters called “octo­copters.” (You can see the one used in this video here; and if you want to build one your­self, you can find instruc­tions here.) Since these small heli­copters go places where nor­mal cam­eras can’t, these new­fan­gled cam­eras can offer views that are sim­ply out of this world.

The lat­est video gives you a tour of the medieval San­ti­a­go de Com­postela Cathe­dral locat­ed in north­ern Spain. It starts with beau­ti­ful views of the exte­ri­or, but the most impres­sive shots are saved for inside the cathe­dral, espe­cial­ly when the octo­copter soars high above the chamades of the organ, giv­ing us an incred­i­ble look at the choir.

Some of these views have been cap­tured as stills and can be seen at Flickr. And don’t for­get to enjoy some more of those won­der­ful octo­copter videos on this Vimeo page.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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Take Stanford Computer Science Courses This Fall: Free Worldwide

in Stanford, Technology | August 16th, 2011

This fall, pro­fes­sors from Stan­ford’s pres­ti­gious School of Engi­neer­ing will offer online three of its most pop­u­lar com­put­er sci­ence cours­es: Machine Learn­ing, Intro­duc­tion to Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Intro­duc­tion to Data­bas­es. (You can sign up by click­ing on these links.) The cours­es will fea­ture short, inter­ac­tive video clips that stu­dents can watch when­ev­er and wher­ev­er they want; short quizzes that pro­vide instant feed­back; and the abil­i­ty to rank ques­tions to be answered by Stan­ford instruc­tors. Accord­ing to the Stan­ford Report, “Already more than 58,000 peo­ple have expressed inter­est in the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence course taught by Sebas­t­ian Thrun, a Stan­ford research pro­fes­sor of com­put­er sci­ence and a Google Fel­low, and Google Direc­tor of Research Peter Norvig.”

This isn’t the first time Stan­ford has offered free com­put­er sci­ence cours­es to the world. Back in 2008, Stan­ford Engi­neer­ing Every­where pre­sent­ed lec­tures from 10 com­plete online com­put­er sci­ence and elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing cours­es. This includes the three-course “Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence” sequence tak­en by the major­i­ty of Stan­ford under­grad­u­ates. These cours­es are all list­ed in the Com­put­er Sci­ence and Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing sec­tions of our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es. H/T @eugenephoto

via Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence & Pro­gram­ming: Free Cours­es

Devel­op­ing Apps for iPhone & iPad: A Free Stan­ford Course

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Harry Partch’s Kooky Orchestra of DIY Musical Instruments

in History, Music, Technology, Video - Arts & Culture | August 9th, 2011

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.

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Hear Voices from the 19th Century: Tennyson, Gladstone & Tchaikovsky

in History, Media, Technology | August 3rd, 2011


Head over to Sound­Cloud, and you’ll find 10 audio files that span three cen­turies. It’s a fair­ly ran­dom col­lec­tion, we’ll admit. But two record­ings from the 19th cen­tu­ry imme­di­ate­ly stand out.

First we have Alfred Lord Ten­nyson (1809 – 1892), Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed King­dom dur­ing Queen Vic­to­ri­a’s reign, read­ing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the wax cylin­der in 1890.

And then we get to hear echoes of the voice of William Glad­stone, the four-time Prime Min­is­ter of Great Britain (1809 — 1898). Here, Glad­stone’s voice was record­ed by Thomas Edis­on’s phono­graph cylin­der (1888), the same device that lets us lis­ten to Tchaikovsky (The Nut­crack­er, the 1812 Over­ture, etc.) chat­ting with his friends. Some have doubt­ed the authen­tic­i­ty of the Glad­stone record­ing, but it still remains gen­er­al­ly accept­ed.

For more on record­ings from the 19th cen­tu­ry, we’d rec­om­mend spend­ing some time with a five-part BBC series called Gramo­phones & Grooves. It takes you into the ear­ly record­ing indus­try and lets you hear count­less oth­er voic­es.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

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Time Capsule: The Internet in 1995

in History, Technology | July 29th, 2011

On Jan­u­ary 27, 1994, the Today Show ran a hilar­i­ous seg­ment try­ing to unrav­el this crazy new thing called “The Inter­net.” A year lat­er, how­ev­er, it looks like the media had it all fig­ured out. Check out this 1995 MTV trend piece by Kurt Loder: We got a kick out of the clunkiess of the old new media (Com­puserve! Dial-up! Netscape!), but Loder also touch­es on hack­ing, inter­net pornog­ra­phy, pri­va­cy, and free­dom of speech issues that still haven’t been resolved. The biggest shock­er of the clip is not how much things have changed but how much they haven’t.

Oh, and also, Moby had hair?

via The Awl

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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The Persecution of Daniel Lee

in Life, Technology | July 29th, 2011

A sto­ry appear­ing in July’s Stan­ford Mag­a­zine begins with the cap­tion: “An Inter­net smear cam­paign near­ly destroyed the South Kore­an star, but he fought back with the only weapon he had: the truth.” And, from there, you’re launched into one of the more flab­ber­gast­ing sto­ries you’ve read in some time. Give The Per­se­cu­tion of Daniel Lee a read, and you’ll see that we’re not being the least bit hyper­bol­ic.

The inter­net can be a won­der­ful place. We all know that. But, as with any oth­er place humans inhab­it, it has a dark side, and that’s what we encounter here…

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Metropolis II: Chris Burden’s Amazing, Frenetic Mini-City

in Animation, Science, Technology | July 20th, 2011

In his 2007 New York­er essay on per­for­mance artist Chris Bur­den, the crit­ic Peter Schjel­dahl wrote that most of Bur­den’s oeu­vre con­sist­ed of “pow­er­ful works that deal inge­nious­ly with aes­thet­ics and ethics of pow­er.”

Schjeld­hal added that “you needn’t like them to be impressed,” and then described some of Bur­den’s more infa­mous pieces:

He spent five days in a small lock­er, with a bot­tle of water above and a bot­tle for urine below; slith­ered, near­ly naked and with his hands held behind him, across fifty feet of bro­ken glass in a park­ing lot; had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volk­swa­gen; was kicked down a flight of stairs; and, on dif­fer­ent occa­sions, incurred appar­ent risks of burn­ing, drown­ing, and elec­tro­cu­tion.

Bur­den’s more recent â€śMetrop­o­lis II,” which might seem tame by com­par­i­son, fea­tures over 1,100 mini­cars careen­ing through a maze of inter­con­nect­ed free­ways. It’s still pret­ty chal­leng­ing, even in dilut­ed video form:  The noise and con­stant motion seem cal­cu­lat­ed to wreck your nerves, and accord­ing to this brief seg­ment on the piece, at least one car spins off the tracks every hour. The city may be sur­re­al, but the stress feels as famil­iar as your last bad rush hour.

You can find a fas­ci­nat­ing on-stage inter­view with the artist in LAC­MA’s Direc­tor’s Series, as well as a wealth of infor­ma­tion about Bur­den’s life and work on the muse­um’s web­site.

H/T Fast­CoDe­sign

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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Pong, 1969: A Milestone in Video Game History

in History, Technology | July 5th, 2011

The world’s first video game, OXO, was invent­ed in 1952. As the title sug­gests, it was sim­ple tic-tac-toe, and you could only play it on the EDSAC com­put­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. (Watch it in action here.) The fun did­n’t real­ly get start­ed until the late 1960’s, when Robert Baer, Bill Har­ri­son and Bill Rusch devel­oped a ping pong game you could play on your tele­vi­sion. The above video shows Baer and Har­ri­son play­ing the game on the “brown box” — the pro­to­type for the com­put­er con­soles that would make the 70s and 80s such won­der­ful, seden­tary decades to be a child.

Baer insist­ed on detailed note-tak­ing, with the hap­py result that you can now read all of his team’s ear­li­est notes and mem­os at the online archives of the Lemel­son Cen­ter for the Study of Inven­tion and Inno­va­tion. Or you could just play Pong.

via Matthias Rasch­er

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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