The First Unintended Horror Film (1895)

A con­tri­bu­tion (which we always wel­come) from one of our read­ers in Roma­nia:

“The broth­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière cre­at­ed the first pub­licly shown movies, the first doc­u­men­taries and, with this 50-sec­ond film shot at a Provence rail­way sta­tion, the first hor­ror pic­ture. It is said that as Paris audi­ences watched the train chug toward the screen, they believed it was about to crash out of the frame and into the audi­to­ri­um, and ran out scream­ing. True or not, the sto­ry indi­cates the pow­er the medi­um would wield over its audi­ence.

The 50-sec­ond silent film [L’Ar­rivée D’un Train En Gare De La Cio­tat] cap­tures the entry of a steam loco­mo­tive into the train sta­tion in the French coastal town of la Cio­tat. Like most of the oth­er ear­ly Lumière films, L’Ar­rivée d’un train con­sists of a sin­gle, unedit­ed ‘view’ illus­trat­ing an aspect of every­day life.”

“L’Ar­rivée D’un Train En Gare De La Cio­tat” appears in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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Architecture in Motion

When com­plet­ed in Dubai, this “dynam­ic build­ing” designed by David Fish­er will be in con­stant motion, always chang­ing its shape, and also gen­er­ate its own elec­tric ener­gy. You can reserve your apart­ment today, or wait for sim­i­lar build­ings to get erect­ed in Moscow and New York. The whole con­cept feels a bit Las Vegas-esque. But who knows, maybe this is the wave of the future. To see what I’m talk­ing about, watch the video below and get more info here.

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Fourth of July Factoid

With­out Thomas Jef­fer­son and John Adams, Amer­i­cans would­n’t have the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. Rather strange­ly, both men died on the same day, exact­ly fifty years after the sign­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion — July 4, 1826.

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Stephen Colbert Reads Joyce’s Ulysses

Every June 16 is Blooms­day, which com­mem­o­rates Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio here). In Dublin and around the world, cel­e­bra­tions usu­al­ly include a read­ing of Joyce’s clas­sic. This year, in New York City, one high-pro­file event fea­tured Stephen Col­bert read­ing the part of Leopold Bloom, the char­ac­ter around which the sprawl­ing nov­el turns. You can lis­ten to Col­bert read here and here. Enjoy, and I will catch you back here after the hol­i­day week­end.

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Will Google Kill Science?

Not an obvi­ous con­clu­sion, I’ll agree. How­ev­er, Chris Ander­son, edi­tor of Wired, presents the argu­ment like this: as all sorts of data accu­mu­late into a vast ocean of petabytes, our abil­i­ty to syn­the­size it all into ele­gant the­o­ries and laws will dis­ap­pear. The sto­ry is the cov­er of this mon­th’s issue of Wired but I came across it in a newslet­ter from The Edge, a group of thinkers try­ing to pro­mote a “third cul­ture” of online intel­lec­tu­al thought.

Ander­son­’s argu­ment isn’t real­ly that the sci­en­tif­ic method will dis­ap­pear, but rather that cor­re­la­tion will become as good as it gets in terms of ana­lyz­ing real-world data. Every­thing will be too messy, noisy and chang­ing too quick­ly for prop­er hypothe­ses and the­o­rems. As Ander­son puts it, it will be “the end of the­o­ry.”

The nice thing about read­ing this on Edge is that the newslet­ter comes with sev­er­al crit­i­cal respons­es includ­ed from “The Real­i­ty Club,” which includes thinkers like George Dyson, Kevin Kel­ly and Stu­art Brand. But I say that as the con­sumers and pro­duc­ers of most of these mass­es of data, the vote should lie with you, read­er: does Google’s brute force approach to data hord­ing spell the end sci­en­tif­ic ele­gance?

Seymour Hersh Reveals Covert Operations In Iran

A quick fyi: Pulitzer Prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist Sey­mour Her­sch has a new piece in The New York­er detail­ing “a major esca­la­tion of covert oper­a­tions against Iran.” The plans draft­ed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and fund­ed by Con­gress brings the US anoth­er step clos­er to a mil­i­tary strike against Iran’s nuclear pro­gram, and such a strike becomes all the more like­ly, Hirsch believes, if Oba­ma wins the Novem­ber elec­tion. (Why? Because Oba­ma favors hav­ing direct talks rather than using pre­emp­tive force.) You can find an accom­pa­ny­ing audio inter­view with Her­sch here. He also appeared yes­ter­day on NPR’s Fresh Air and elab­o­rat­ed on all of this. You can lis­ten here: StreamiTunesFeed.

Down­load 250 Free Online Cours­es here

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Looking Inside Darwin’s Room (and Also Where Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, & Kipling Did Their Thing)

Dar­win­ma­nia (as The New York Times dubbed it) is about to begin. Dur­ing the next year, we will cel­e­brate Dar­win’s 200th birth­day and the 150th anniver­sary of the Ori­gin of Species (down­load zip audio here) and the dis­cov­ery of nat­ur­al selec­tion. It’s pret­ty much a giv­en that the minu­ti­ae of Dar­win’s life will get thor­ough­ly reex­am­ined. So I fig­ured why not get ahead of the curve and give you this — Dar­win’s writ­ing room. It’s pro­vid­ed cour­tesy of the Guardian Book Sec­tion, which lets you take a peek at the writ­ings rooms of Vir­ginia Woolf, Lord Byron, Rud­yard Kipling, Mar­tin Amis and many oth­er impor­tant writ­ers. (You can also vis­it our piece from last year for more room pho­tos.)


Wind Powered Art

When art meets engi­neer­ing:

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Find Any Song Online and Share. Now.

Tinysong.com offers a ser­vice that’s rather impres­sive. You go to their home­page, search for a song, and then you can lis­ten to it online and share it with a friend (via a spe­cial­ly cre­at­ed url). Just how it all works (copy­right includ­ed), and just how deep the col­lec­tion actu­al­ly goes, I am not total­ly sure. But, the var­i­ous tests that I threw at it sug­gest that there’s a fair amount of depth there.

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Top 10 TEDTalks (and Do Schools Today Kill Creativity?)

Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quan­ti­ta­tive or qual­i­ta­tive judg­ment, I am not sure.  On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talk­ing about how to avert a cli­mate cri­sis, David Gal­lo show­ing amaz­ing under­wa­ter crea­tures, and Ken Robin­son describ­ing why schools kill cre­ativ­i­ty (we’ve post­ed that one below). Again the full list is here.

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Stephen Hawking’s Explosive New Theory

Arti­cle begins: “Prof Stephen Hawk­ing has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of cre­ation led to the vast cos­mos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the ear­ly uni­verse expand­ed at a mind-bog­gling rate because regions sep­a­rat­ed by vast dis­tances have sim­i­lar back­ground tem­per­a­tures. They have pro­posed a process of rapid expan­sion of neigh­bour­ing regions, with sim­i­lar cos­mic prop­er­ties, to explain this growth spurt which they call infla­tion. But that left a deep­er mys­tery: why did infla­tion occur in the first place?” The rest here.


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