We’ll let you spot the typo to end all typos. Needless to say, the school has issued its mea culpa on Twitter and started printing new commencement brochures. Now they’ll wait with bated breath to see if their goof becomes fodder for The Daily Show. We all make mistakes and then we move on. via Jim Romanesko
Give us a follow on Facebook and Twitter, and you can share intelligent media (and the occasional joke) with family and friends.
Neil Gaiman, considered one of the top ten living post-modern writers, never went to college. He neither started nor finished his advanced studies, but rather put himself into the world and started writing. And write he did. He’s now the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods, among others, and he’s also the winner of the 2009 Newbery Medal and 2010 Carnegie Medal in Literature. (We have gathered free versions of Gaiman’s writing in audio & text here.) This weekend, Gaiman spoke at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and told the graduating class all the things he wish he knew at their age. The talk runs 19 minutes. The distilled version appears below.
via Metafilter
If you missed the big solar eclipse and its strange shadows last night, not to worry. Cory Poole, a science teacher in Redding, California, has you covered. Above, you’ll find his video that brings together 700 images (view them individually in high res here) into a 60 second time-lapse film. The images were viewed/taken through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stacked Hydrogen Alpha Solar Telescope. The music was composed in Abelton Live. Find courses on Astronomy in our collection of Free Online Courses. via Gizmodo
Want to share intelligent media with family and friends? Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
Strange as it sounds, Benito Mussolini played a historic role in the introduction of talking motion pictures.
Throughout the early 1920s, various sound technologies for cinema were tested and exhibited publicly. By 1927 two rival companies were on the home stretch in the race to introduce a viable synchronized sound system for widespread commercial use in theaters. Warner Bros. had invested heavily in a recording-on-disc method trade-named “Vitaphone,” and would unveil the first feature film with recorded dialogue sequences, The Jazz Singer, on October 6, 1927. Meanwhile the Fox Film Corporation was developing a sound-on-film technology, called “Movietone,” that would later become the industry standard. With Movietone the audio was recorded as a variable-density optical track on the film, alongside the visual image, instead of on a separate gramophone record.
To beat Warner Bros. to the punch, Fox premiered its Movietone feature Sunrise, by the German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau, at Times Square in New York on September 23, 1927, two weeks ahead of The Jazz Singer. Murnau’s film had synchronized music and sound effects, but no dialogue. The heavily publicized event included the screening of a pair of Movietone newsreels: one of the Vatican choir, the other of Mussolini. “See and Hear ‘The Man of the Hour’ His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Premier of Italy,” said a Fox advertisement. “He speaks to you and lives before your eyes on the Movietone!” The ground-breaking newsreel was a publicity coup for both the movie company and the dictator. Film historian Donald Crafton provides some background in his book The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931:
On 20 April 1927, Charles Pettijohn, general counsel for the Hays Office and head of the Film Boards of Trade, was meeting with Benito Mussolini. He suggested that the dictator sit for a filming, and Mussolini, a longtime film buff, readily agreed. Il Duce liked the result so much that he ‘is having a talking film prepared that will show his daily activities.’ Mussolini reportedly said, ‘Let me speak through [the newsreel] in twenty cities in Italy once a week and I need no other power.’ This film would enable him to appear in public with no threat of assassination.
The original version of the “Mussolini Movietone” included footage of Fascist regiments drilling, and a grand introduction of the dictator by the American ambassador to Italy, Henry P. Fletcher. “I am very glad,” Mussolini says in the newsreel, “to be able to express my friendly feelings towards the American nation, friendship with which Italy looks at the millions of citizens, who from Alaska to Florida, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, live in the United States, which lay deeply rooted in our hearts.” Fourteen years later Italy and the United States were at war, and less than four years after that, on April 28, 1945, Mussolini was killed by his own people. They made a newsreel about that, too.
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!
Hillman Curtis began his career in the San Francisco new wave group Mrs. Green, served as Macromedia’s design director, founded the design firm hillmancurtis, Inc., wrote manuals on new media, and shot short documentaries. He accomplished much of note across the design professions before his untimely passing last month, and these projects reveal his great affinity for like-mindedly multidisciplinary and aesthetically inclined creators. He won a great deal of his internet fame examining just such people in the Artist Series, a cycle of five-to-ten minute profiles of, broadly speaking, his colleagues. These include Milton Glaser, the man behind the look of the immortal I Love New York campaign; David Carson, art director of the nineties’ cultishly coveted rock magazine Ray Gun; and Mark Romanek, director of striking commercials and feature films like One Hour Photo.
At the top of this post, you’ll find Curtis’ Artist Series short on Daniel Libeskind, the architect overseeing the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. It examines the architect’s buildings, his sketches, his meetings, and his ideas about the built environment as a tool for liberation rather than a “neutral world that confirms all our ideas.” Ultimately, Libeskind asks this of his craft, his profession, and his worldview: “How will it carry people into a world that is good?” Directly above is Curtis’ profile of graphic designer Paula Scher, who talks about the speed with which she sketched the Citibank logo. The client seems to have balked at this, assuming that anything so quickly created couldn’t possibly warrant the cost. Scher argues that, while it appeared to take her only a second, it really took her “a second and 34 years,” “a second and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that’s in my head.” Neither she nor anyone else in the Artist Series sees divisions between their work, their life, and the rest of humanity. Hillman Curtis, by all accounts, lived the same way.
Related content:
Powers of Ten: The 1968 Documentary by Legendary Designers Ray and Charles Eames
Paola Antonelli on Design as the Interface Between Progress and Humanity
Classic Jazz Album Covers Animated, or the Re-Birth of Cool
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Adam Savage was born in New York City, not far from Sarah Lawrence College, the liberal arts school where he delivered the commencement speech this past weekend. Savage never went to Sarah Lawrence. Nor did he finish his own degree at NYU. But he had plenty to tell the graduating class. On his own web site, Savage calls himself “a maker of things.” As a kid, he made his own toys. As a young adult, he began experimenting with special effects for films, then served stints as an “animator, graphic designer, rigger, stage and interior designer, carpenter, scenic painter, welder, actor, writer, and television host.” (Perhaps you have seen his popular Discovery Channel show, Mythbusters.) In short, Savage is a “collector of skills, a polymath. How did he get this way? By casting his intellectual net widely and by continuing to learn throughout life — which is pretty much what we’re all about here. There’s a lot of good advice in this short, feel-good speech. Some of my favorite bits include:
“Don’t work for fools. It’s not worth it. Getting paid less to work for people you like and believe in is much better for you (and your career) in the long run.”
“Stay obsessed. That thing you can’t stop thinking about? Keep indulging it. Obsession is the better part of success. You will be great at the things that you can’t not do.”
“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and is one of our national treasures. A true giant of writing.The silliest thing he ever wrote is the quote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” This is insane. If there’s one thing that typifies the American experience it is that reinvention and rebirth are intrinsic to it. Raymond Chandler didn’t write a single word of any consequence until his 40s. Julia Child learned to cook at 40! Clint Eastwood directed his first film at 41. Don’t be afraid to be a late bloomer. Repeatedly.”
Good thoughts, all of them. You can find the full transcript here. H/T @opedr
More Commencement Speeches:
‘This Is Water’: Complete Audio of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Graduation Speech (2005)
Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dartmouth Graduation
J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Grads Why Success Begins with Failure
The eerie (and, for me, the unexpected) part of the solar eclipse now in full bloom in Northern California is that you can see the moon in the shadows. They’re everywhere. Here they appear on the door of a parked car.
Says Wired:
Those not directly in the path of the eclipse will still see some strange effects by stepping outside. Shadows cast from trees and bushes will contain thousands of tiny odd crescents, as the spaces between leaves become pinhole cameras.
Anyone remember those pinhole cameras from elementary school? You can watch a live stream of the eclipse below:
Scholars of ancient history and IT experts at Stanford University have collaborated to create a novel way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospatial network model, allows visitors to experience the strategy behind travel in antiquity. (Find a handy tutorial for using the system on the Web and YouTube). The ORBIS map includes about 750 mostly urban settlements of the Roman period. Users of the model can select a point of origin and destination for a trip and then choose from a number of options to determine either the cheapest, fastest or shortest route. Select river or open sea transport for the cheapest route. Pick road travel by pack animal or wagon for the shortest, but most expensive, trip. In creating ORBIS, historians used ancient maps and records along with modern-day weather information and results from experiments sailing in ancient-style ships to calculate the travel conditions of 2,000 years ago.
Aside from the site’s interactivity, there’s enough discussion in ORBIS about ancient Roman transport to satisfy the biggest history buff but the real fun is in exploring how people and goods were moved across the empire. Cities on the edge of the empire, for example, were more expensive to transport to, even if they weren’t that far away. All trips vary in time and cost, however, depending upon the time of year and mode of travel. The fastest route to deliver wheat from Carthago (modern-day Tunisia) to Londinium (London) would take more than 27 days under the best travel conditions (during July). Cargo would move across the Mediterranean by open sea, across southwestern France by riverboat and along the coast to southeastern England. The cost? A little less than 8 dinarii per kilogram of wheat using a donkey for land transport. Compare that to other routes that eliminate the open sea during winter months, or road travel to save money, and you’re close to understanding why it was no picnic ruling the Roman Empire.
Last week we played for you the only known recording of Sigmund Freud’s voice (1938). Now it’s time to revive the voice of another intellectual giant, Albert Einstein. In this recording, the physicist offers the briefest explanation of the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2. When was this recorded? We’re unfortunately not sure. Let’s just say somewhere between 1932 (a date Einstein mentions in the clip) and his death in 1955. Somewhere in those 20+ years, give or take a few. Don’t miss the recently-opened Einstein archive and many free Physics courses in our collection of Free Online Courses from top universities.
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!
As Michael Palin once put it, “there’s no getting away from the wit, wonder and wizardry of the man Cahiers du Cinéma once described as Terry Gilliam.”
Those qualities are clearly visible in this very funny early film by Gilliam called The Miracle of Flight. The film was made in 1971 for the American-British TV show The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine. Monty Python was on hiatus that year, so Gilliam went to work for the short-lived Comedy Machine, creating the opening credit sequence and various animated features using his trademark airbrush and paper cutout techniques. (Watch his primer on doing your own cutout animation here.) The material for The Miracle of Flight was apparently packaged as a stand-alone film in 1974, right after Gilliam’s first film, Storytime. It was later used as a bonus feature before theatrical screenings of Gilliam movies, and during live Python performances. The film version is slightly different from the one aired on the Comedy Machine. According to Smarter Than The Average, “for the theatrical version it lost a grizzly punchline where a man who had failed at his attempt to fly by emulating the ergonomics of a bird takes his revenge by ripping the bird to pieces.” The writer then goes on to describe details only a Python fanatic could notice:
The Miracle of Flight in particular is a cornucopia of oddities for the Python connoisseur, containing as it does one line recorded by Terry Jones, the tarred-and-feathered character who appears in Animations of Mortality, the mountain in the finale of the Meaning of Life computer game and the animated woman from Python who says “Turn that television off–you know it’s bad for your eyes”. Most baffling of all is the muzak in the airport terminal, which is the same as used in the Dental sequence of the Meaning of Life CD-Rom nearly thirty years later. For sheer numbers of Python iconography appearing in a non-Python production, The Miracle of Flight’s only rival is Eric Idle’s music video for George Harrison’s Crackerbox Palace. But I digress.
Indeed. But we enjoyed it. And you’ll enjoy The Miracle of Flight, which might more accurately be called The Triumph of Gravity.
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!
Bryan Magee comes from a tradition that produced some of the twentieth century’s most impressive media personalities: that of the scholarship-educated, Oxbridge-refined, intellectually omnivorous, occasionally office-holding, radio- and television-savvy man of letters. Students and professors of philosophy probably know him from his large print oeuvre, which includes volumes on Popper and Schopenhauer as well as several guides to western philosophy and the autobiographical Confessions of a Philosopher. He also wrote another memoir called The Television Interviewer, and philosophically inclined laymen may fondly remember him as just that. When Magee played to both these strengths at once, he came up with two philosophical television shows in the span of a decade: Men of Ideas, which began in 1978, and The Great Philosophers, which ran in 1987. Both series brought BBC viewers in-depth, uncut conversations with many of the day’s most famous philosophers.
You can watch select interviews of Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers on YouTube, including:
At the top of the post, you’ll find Magee talking with A.J. Ayer, a well-known specialist in “logical positivism,” about the development of, and challenges to, that philosophical sub-field. Two philosophers, relaxed on a couch, sometimes smoking, enthusiastically engaged in a commercial-free back-and-forth about the most important thinkers and thoughts in the field — watch something like that, and you can’t possibly think of now as a golden age of television.
Note: Oodles of philosophy courses, many thought by famous philosophers, can be found in the Philosophy section of our list of Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Related Content:
Free Online Philosophy Courses
44 Essential Movies for the Student of Philosophy
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
©2006-2025 Open Culture, LLC.
All rights reserved.
