Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age

in History, Literature, Media, Technology | January 18th, 2011

There’s noth­ing new about it. Major peri­ods of tech­no­log­i­cal change have always engen­dered dis­lo­ca­tion and debate. Some resist the changes wrought by new tech­nol­o­gy, and oth­ers embrace them. 1968 brings us back to one such moment, when the Amer­i­can nov­el­ist Nor­man Mail­er and com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist Mar­shall McLuhan appeared on the CBC pro­gram, The Sum­mer Way, to debate the rel­a­tive mer­its of our Electronic/Information Age. Are we alien­at­ing our­selves as we push the elec­tron­ic enve­lope? Or have we entered a val­ue neu­tral state (if not some­thing bet­ter)? The two big thinkers hash out the ques­tion for 28 min­utes. You can watch the con­ver­sa­tion in its entire­ty (28 min­utes) on YouTube.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan’s 1969 Deck of Cards, Designed For Out-of-the-Box Think­ing

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Arduino Documentary: Open Source Hardware is Here

in Film, Technology | January 10th, 2011

Open Source, it’s not just for soft­ware. It’s for hard­ware too. The new film, Arduino: The Doc­u­men­tary, revis­its a project launched in the Ital­ian town of Ivrea back in 2005. The chal­lenge? To devel­op cheap, easy-to-use elec­tron­ics com­po­nents for design stu­dents. (You can get into the tech­ni­cal side of things here.) The mes­sage? Geek.com sum­ma­rizes it well: “we are about to see an explo­sion of hard­ware devices that come from bed­room tin­ker­ers and stu­dent projects.” Note: A Span­ish ver­sion of the film is avail­able here, and they’re all released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Arduino: The Doc­u­men­tary will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Thomas Edison Recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in Early Voice Recording

in History, Science, Technology | January 3rd, 2011

In the late 1870s, Thomas Edi­son, Amer­i­ca’s pro­lif­ic inven­tor, per­fect­ed the phono­graph and cap­tured a very ear­ly record­ing of the human voice – his own voice recit­ing the still pop­u­lar nurs­ery rhyme, Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb. (Get mp3 here.) Lat­er, the Edi­son cylin­der also record­ed for pos­ter­i­ty Russ­ian com­pos­er Pyotr Tchaikovsky (The Nut­crack­er, the 1812 Over­ture, etc.) talk­ing with oth­er musi­cians in a light moment.

The Edi­son cylin­der was actu­al­ly pre­ced­ed by anoth­er sound-record­ing device, the pho­nau­to­graph, invent­ed by Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville in 1857. Not long ago, sci­en­tists from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry extract­ed a record­ing not heard in 150 years, a voice singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Cap­tured on Film by Thomas Edi­son (1909)

Bike Tricks Cour­tesy of Thomas Edi­son

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Robot Masters Rubik’s Cube in 15 Seconds

in Technology | December 27th, 2010

Where was this when I need­ed it 30 years ago? Two stu­dents at Rowan Uni­ver­si­ty, Zachary Grady and Joe Ridge­way, have con­struct­ed a robot­ic arm that can solve the Rubik’s Cube in 15 sec­onds. As The New Sci­en­tist explains, the “sys­tem uses a cam­era to cap­ture how the cube is scram­bled and sends the images to a com­put­er. It deter­mines the pat­tern on each face and algo­rithms are used to solve the cube. The solu­tion is then trans­lat­ed to the arm’s pneu­mat­ics and motors.” For more bril­liant robot tricks, you can watch robots shoot archery, lead the Detroit Sym­pho­ny orches­tra, and even make eth­i­cal deci­sions…

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My Blackberry Is Not Working!

in Comedy, Most Popular, Technology | December 23rd, 2010

Clas­sic… This fruity sketch just aired on the BBC pro­gram The One Ron­nie. Great work by Ron­nie Cor­bett and Har­ry Enfield.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Conan O’Brien @ Google
The Mon­ty Python Phi­los­o­phy Foot­ball Match Revis­it­ed
Father Gui­do Sarducci’s Five Minute Uni­ver­si­ty

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Google Teaches Your Parents Tech

in Education, Google, Technology | December 14th, 2010

Yes­ter­day, Google launched TeachParentsTech.org, a lit­tle spin-off web site that fea­tures 50 how-to videos, all designed to answer your par­ents’ basic tech ques­tions. Your father wants to know how to share a big file? Your moth­er is try­ing to fig­ure out how to book­mark a web page? Sim­ply head to TeachParentsTech.org, find the appro­pri­ate how-to video, send it via email, then free up time to teach your­self more heavy-duty tech.

Many of these videos show­case Google soft­ware. A coin­ci­dence? Hard­ly. Think of this as soft Google mar­ket­ing to the Boomers.

via The Offi­cial Google Blog

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Introduction to Computer Science & Programming: Free Courses

in Education, Technology | October 28th, 2010

Nowa­days, any well-round­ed stu­dent must learn to mas­ter read­ing, writ­ing and math. And then add some­thing new to the mix: learn­ing to code. If you did­n’t learn to pro­gram soft­ware in school, not to wor­ry. Free mate­ri­als abound on the web, and we have made them easy to find. Above, you can start watch­ing the first lec­ture of an MIT course (Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming) that assumes no spe­cial knowl­edge of pro­gram­ming, and it sets out to teach you to think like a com­put­er sci­en­tist. (Find the full set of lec­tures on YouTube, iTunes and MIT’s web­site.) Or alter­na­tive­ly, you can spend time with anoth­er course – Inten­sive Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence Using C, PHP, and JavaScript – taught by David Malan at Har­vard Exten­sion. (Get it in mul­ti­ple for­mats here.) And then don’t for­get that Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty offers sev­er­al intro­duc­to­ry cours­es, all found under the Stan­ford Engi­neer­ing Every­where umbrel­la.

Once you have a good foun­da­tion in place, you can move in a vari­ety of direc­tions. With­in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es, we have list­ed 27 com­put­er sci­ence cours­es where you can learn all about oper­at­ing sys­tems, com­put­er graph­ics, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, build­ing web sites, design­ing iPhone apps and beyond. The cours­es are all free. They’re avail­able 24/7 on the web. You can get going any time…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Stan­ford Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es This Fall: Free World­wide

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Big Thinkers: A Look Back

in Media, Technology | September 9th, 2010

Back in 1999, ZDTV launched Big Thinkers, a week­ly cable TV pro­gram that fea­tured half-hour inter­views with thinkers on the bleed­ing edge of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. The show did­n’t have the longest run. But it did man­age to shine the spot­light on some impor­tant minds – Michio Kaku (the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist), Sher­ry Turkle (MIT psy­cho­an­a­lyst), Lawrence Lessig (law pro­fes­sor & free cul­ture advo­cate), and Esther Dyson (tech­nol­o­gy investor), to name a few. Big Thinkers was per­fect Open Cul­ture mate­r­i­al before the days of Open Cul­ture. So we’re pay­ing a lit­tle trib­ute to the show. Above, you will find an episode ded­i­cat­ed to Daniel Den­nett, the Amer­i­can philoso­pher and cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist who has done exten­sive research on the phi­los­o­phy of mind. Part 1 appears above, and Part 2 and Part 3 here. Final­ly, you can watch oth­er Big Thinkers episodes (includ­ing those men­tioned above) on this YouTube chan­nel.

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