Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Making & Mythology of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

in Apple, Television | January 19th, 2017

If you’re like me, every lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion doled out for the upcom­ing third sea­son of Twin Peaks is like a series of clues found along a dark path through the Ghost­wood Nation­al For­est. We’ve seen brief views of some major char­ac­ters. We’ve heard Ange­lo Badala­men­ti con­firm he’s back to score the series. We picked up and speed read the Mark Frost-writ­ten Secret His­to­ry. We know that it will be 18 hours of pure David Lynch and Mark Frost, and that what­ev­er it may do, it won’t go all wonky and not-so-good like the ter­ri­ble trough in the mid­dle of Sea­son Two. And now we have a date for the pre­miere: May 21.

So it’s not time to brew cof­fee, or put a cher­ry pie in the oven, just yet. Instead, it’s time to bone up on the series itself and ask our­selves, is Twin Peaks a failed series that needs to be rec­ti­fied? Or if Lynch and Frost had nev­er agreed to revis­it their icon­ic work, would we still have a cohe­sive work?

Video essay­ist Joel Bocko says yes, and has made what is prob­a­bly the defin­i­tive and most thor­ough analy­sis of the series out there on the web.

I first stum­bled across Jour­ney Through Twin Peaks one night, and think­ing that it was only one short video essay I start­ed watch­ing. My mis­take: episode one was only the first in a 28-chap­ter series that totaled over four hours, arranged in four parts. And, yes, I sat and watched the whole damn thing.

Bocko is good, real good. This is not uncrit­i­cal fan wor­ship. This is a man, like many of us, who fell in love with the tran­scen­dent heights of the show and suf­fered through its mis­er­able lows, but, through that mis­ery, fig­ured out what made the show such a game-chang­er.

One impor­tant thing Bocko does is give Mark Frost his due. Usu­al­ly hid­den behind the art and the mythos of Lynch, Frost brought much to the show, from the detec­tive pro­ce­dur­al frame­work to themes of the occult and Theos­o­phy. Bocko shows how Lynch came out of the Twin Peaks expe­ri­ence with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent and much more com­plex idea of char­ac­ter. Before Peaks, Lynch’s work saw good and evil exist­ing not just on oppo­site sides of the spec­trum, but as dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters. (Think of Blue Vel­vet.) In the films he makes after­wards, dop­pel­gangers, fugue states, and self-nega­tion, along with the spir­i­tu­al con­fu­sion that come with it, are cen­tral to Lynch’s work.

But that’s just one of the many insights wait­ing for you in this reward­ing ana­lyt­i­cal work, which also takes in Fire Walk With Me and Mul­hol­land Dr. through to Inland Empire. Suf­fice it to say, it’s full of spoil­ers, so pro­ceed with cau­tion.

On the oth­er hand, if you don’t have time before the pre­miere, you can always watch the first sea­son in under a minute here.

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Photographer Creates Stunning Realistic Portraits That Recreate Surreal Scenes from Hieronymus Bosch Paintings

in Art, Photography | January 19th, 2017

All images cour­tesy of Lori Pond

It is not often not­ed that the sur­re­al­ist move­ment in the 1920s orig­i­nat­ed with poets like Paul Élu­ard and André Bre­ton, him­self a trained psy­chol­o­gist, who drew explic­it­ly from the work of Sig­mund Freud, “the pri­vate world of the mind,” as the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art puts it. And yet we cer­tain­ly see the influ­ence of Freudi­an poet­ry in the work of Gior­gio de Chiri­co, Mar­cel Duchamp, Sal­vador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Man Ray. We also see it, inex­plic­a­bly, in the work of Hierony­mus Bosch, that 15th cen­tu­ry Dutch painter of bizarre works like The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, a trip­tych that becomes expo­nen­tial­ly more night­mar­ish as one scans across it from left to right. (Take a vir­tu­al tour of the paint­ing here), and from which pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lori Pond draws in the aston­ish­ing pho­tographs you see here.

How does such a far­away fig­ure as Bosch, whom we know so lit­tle about, seem to com­mu­ni­cate so close­ly with our epoch’s artis­tic move­ments? The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, writes Stephen Hold­en at the New York Times, “out­strips in bold­ness many of the extreme dig­i­tal fan­tasies in Hol­ly­wood hor­ror films.” Bosch’s incred­i­bly detailed paint­ings “feel star­tling­ly con­tem­po­rary.… Repro­duc­tions of his paint­ings have adorned rock album cov­ers, been par­o­died on The Simp­sons and print­ed on silk bodices designed by Alexan­der McQueen.” And he was, in fact, named “Trendi­est Apoc­a­lyp­tic Medieval Painter of 2014.”

We might well won­der what Bosch would have done with the same tech­nolo­gies as those who now pay him trib­ute. Per­haps some­thing very much like Pond has with her Bosch Redux series, a col­lec­tion of pho­tographs of very close-up details in sev­er­al of Bosch’s paint­ings, fea­tur­ing one or two char­ac­ters. To make these pho­tos, writes Alyssa Cop­pel­man at Adobe’s Cre­ate blog, Pond “bought props online, in antique stores, and at swap meets, and friends donat­ed her old Hal­loween cos­tumes.” She hired a pros­thet­ics design­er and her “taxi­dermy teacher.” For pho­tos like that above from the cen­tral pan­el of the trip­tych, Pond even hired a set builder to cre­ate a life-sized boat that could fit the two real-life mod­els.

Many of these effects might have been accom­plished by ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry sur­re­al­ists, and indeed, when these details from Bosch’s work are ampli­fied they resem­ble noth­ing so much as those psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic mod­ernists. But Pond admits, “I ful­ly abide by the max­im, ‘A pho­to­graph isn’t a pho­to­graph until it goes through Pho­to­shop.’” She makes the usu­al adjust­ments, adds fil­ters and effects, then employs “tex­tures, back­grounds, and oth­er small details from the orig­i­nal paint­ings,” mak­ing Bosch a col­lab­o­ra­tor in these close-up remix­es, which come from The Last Judg­ment, The Temp­ta­tion of St. Antho­ny, and The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, of course—the paint­ing that first gave her the inspi­ra­tion when Pond saw it at the Pra­do in Madrid. You can see many more exam­ples of the series at Pond’s web­site, six­teen sur­re­al­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic visions in all.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

New App Lets You Explore Hierony­mus Bosch’s “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights” in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Lis­ten to a Record­ing of a Song Writ­ten on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Cen­tu­ry Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ing

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Alan Turing Gets Channeled in a New Opera: Hear Audio from The Life And Death(S) Of Alan Turing

in Computer Science, Music, Opera, Science | January 16th, 2017

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Steve Park­er

It can seem like a cru­el irony that some of the most cel­e­brat­ed peo­ple of our day did­n’t receive the same acclaim dur­ing their some­times trou­bled lives. Van Gogh may have been on the cusp of fame when he died despair­ing and broke, but few could have imag­ined then that he would be the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved and admired artist he became in the fol­low­ing decades. (A recent Doc­tor Who episode poignant­ly imag­ined Van Gogh trav­el­ing to our time to wit­ness his lega­cy.) In a more recent exam­ple in the sci­ences, the book—now film—Hid­den Fig­ures cel­e­brates three pre­vi­ous­ly unsung African-Amer­i­can women: math­e­mati­cians, or “human com­put­ers,” whose cal­cu­la­tions were instru­men­tal to NASA’s suc­cess but whose accom­plish­ments were obscured by prej­u­dice.

The same could not quite be said for Alan Tur­ing, anoth­er genius recent­ly cel­e­brat­ed in a mul­ti­ple-award-win­ning Hol­ly­wood film, award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary, and spate of arti­cles, essays, and books. Tur­ing was vicious­ly per­se­cut­ed for his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty by the state, and he has often been unfair­ly char­ac­ter­ized in many por­tray­als since.

In 1952, he was con­vict­ed of “gross inde­cen­cy” for a rela­tion­ship with anoth­er man and giv­en the choice between prison and chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion. The bril­liant Eng­lish math­e­mati­cian, code­break­er, and father of mod­ern com­put­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence chose the lat­ter, and the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects were so demor­al­iz­ing that he took his own life two years later—perhaps grim­ly inspir­ing the Apple logo as he enact­ed his favorite scene from Snow White (a mat­ter in some dis­pute, it should be not­ed).

Tur­ing “left behind a last­ing lega­cy,” note the mak­ers of the docu-dra­ma Code­break­ers, “and lin­ger­ing ques­tions about what else he might have accom­plished if soci­ety had embraced his unique genius instead of reject­ing it.” It’s not fair to say that soci­ety reject­ed his genius—perhaps even more trag­i­cal­ly, it reject­ed his full human­i­ty. Turing’s genius, though cut short at 41, received its due, inspir­ing, since 1966, the high­est award in com­put­er sci­ence. His famed “Tur­ing test” became the stan­dard by which near­ly all attempts at arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have been mea­sured. In addi­tion to those films, books, and essays, Tur­ing has been much laud­ed in musi­cal pro­duc­tions, name­ly the Pet Shop Boys “orches­tral pop biog­ra­phy” A Man From the Future and a 30-minute ora­to­rio by Adam Gop­nik and com­pos­er Nico Muh­ly called Sen­tences.

And now, a new two-act opera, The Life and Death(s) of Alan Tur­ing, was pre­sent­ed to the pub­lic for the first time, in its entire­ty, on Jan­u­ary 12th at New York’s Amer­i­can Lyric The­ater (ALT). Com­mis­sioned in 2012, and writ­ten by com­pos­er Jus­tine Chen with a libret­to by David Sim­pati­co, the opera is “a his­toric-fan­ta­sia on Turing’s life” that does not obscure the man as it acknowl­edges his genius. Many crit­ics felt that 2014’s The Imi­ta­tion Game “obfus­cat­ed his sex­u­al­i­ty and desex­u­al­ized him in an attempt to make the sto­ry more main­stream,” remarks Shawn Milnes at The Dai­ly Beast. “He was not a sex­u­al crea­ture in this movie,” agrees Sim­pati­co. “He was in the clos­et.” That impres­sion of Tur­ing’s per­son­al life has almost become com­mon­place. And yet the truth “could­n’t be more oppo­site,” Sim­pati­co argues.

He was com­plete­ly out. He was out upon meet­ing peo­ple. He would say, ‘How are you doing? I’m a homo­sex­u­al. Will you have a prob­lem with that? No.’ He was out to every­body. The movie makes it feel like he had some­thing to hide.

Ful­ly acknowl­edg­ing all of the dimen­sions of Turing’s life allows the opera–The Life and Death(s) of Alan Tur­ing– to draw deeply mov­ing arias from his biog­ra­phy like “Cave of Won­ders,” above, in which Tur­ing express­es “his grief over the loss of his first love,” Christo­pher Mor­com, a fel­low grade school stu­dent who died young in 1930. Tur­ing was “open­ly dev­as­tat­ed” by the event, writes L.V. Ander­son at Slate, “and he sub­se­quent­ly devel­oped a rela­tion­ship with Morcom’s fam­i­ly, going on vaca­tions with them and main­tain­ing a cor­re­spon­dence with Morcom’s moth­er for years. In The Imi­ta­tion Game, by con­trast, he “denies hav­ing known Christo­pher very well” in a flash­back scene.

The music of the opera’s Pro­logue, above, owes a debt to com­posers like Steve Reich and John Adams, with its puls­ing piano and cacoph­o­ny of voic­es, sim­u­lat­ing, per­haps, the rush of thought in Turing’s bril­liant mind. At the ALT site, you can hear a fur­ther excerpt from the opera, “The Social Con­tract,” which dra­ma­tizes the pres­sure Turing’s moth­er put on him to mar­ry, and his sub­se­quent con­sid­er­a­tion of a mar­riage of con­ve­nience to his col­league in cryp­to­analy­sis, Joan Clarke. In the opera, writes Milnes, Sim­pati­co had the idea of “fus­ing sex and intel­lect on stage” in order to bal­ance Turing’s por­tray­al and “see who the per­son was,” as he puts it. As Sim­pati­co says, the trag­i­cal­ly per­se­cut­ed genius “had no divi­sion between his sex­u­al, sen­su­al, phys­i­cal car­nal self and his intel­lec­tu­al, cere­bral, inte­ri­or self.” Only peo­ple who couldn’t take them both togeth­er seemed to have found it nec­es­sary to sep­a­rate the two, and thus do ter­ri­ble dam­age to the man as a whole.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Books on Young Alan Turing’s Read­ing List: From Lewis Car­roll to Mod­ern Chro­mat­ics

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Music: Researchers Restore Three Melodies Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads a Let­ter Alan Tur­ing Wrote in “Dis­tress” Before His Con­vic­tion For “Gross Inde­cen­cy”

Vin­cent van Gogh Vis­its a Mod­ern Muse­um & Gets to See His Artis­tic Lega­cy: A Touch­ing Scene from Doc­tor Who

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How the World’s Oldest Computer Worked: Reconstructing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism

in Astronomy, History, Technology | January 13th, 2017

In 1900, Greek sponge divers dis­cov­ered a ship­wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. The arti­facts they came back up with includ­ed mon­ey, stat­ues, pot­tery, and var­i­ous oth­er works of art and craft, as well as a curi­ous lump of bronze and wood that turned out to be by far the most impor­tant item onboard. When an archae­ol­o­gist named Vale­rios Stais took a look at it two years lat­er, he noticed that the lump had a gear in it. Almost a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er, the sci­ence his­to­ri­an Derek J. de Sol­la Price thought this appar­ent­ly mechan­i­cal object might mer­it fur­ther exam­i­na­tion, and almost a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry after that, he and the nuclear physi­cist Char­alam­bos Karaka­los pub­lished their discovery–made by using X‑ray and gam­ma-ray images of the interior–that those divers had found a kind of ancient com­put­er.

“Under­stand­ing how the pieces fit togeth­er con­firmed that the Antikythera mech­a­nism was capa­ble of pre­dict­ing the posi­tions of the plan­ets with which the Greeks were famil­iar — Mer­cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Sat­urn — as well as the sun and moon, and eclipses,” writes Big Think’s Rob­by Berman. “It even has a black and white stone that turns to show the phas­es of the moon.”

Deter­min­ing how it real­ly worked has required the build­ing of var­i­ous dif­fer­ent mod­els of var­i­ous dif­fer­ent kinds, one of which you can see assem­bled, oper­at­ed, and dis­as­sem­bled before your very eyes in the CGI ren­der­ing at the top of the post. Its design comes from the work of his­to­ri­an of mech­a­nism Michael T. Wright, who also put togeth­er the phys­i­cal recre­ation of the Antikythera mech­a­nism you can see him explain just above.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

By its very nature, an arti­fact as fas­ci­nat­ing and as incom­plete as this draws all sorts of the­o­ries about the specifics of its design, pur­pose, and even its age. (It dates back to some­where between 205 and 100 BC.) In 2012, Tony Freeth and Alexan­der Jones pub­lished their own mod­el, dif­fer­ent from Wright’s, of this “machine designed to pre­dict celes­tial phe­nom­e­na accord­ing to the sophis­ti­cat­ed astro­nom­i­cal the­o­ries cur­rent in its day, the sole wit­ness to a lost his­to­ry of bril­liant engi­neer­ing, a con­cep­tion of pure genius, one of the great won­ders of the ancient world,” — but one which “didn’t real­ly work very well.” Some of the prob­lems has to do with the lim­i­ta­tions of ancient Greek astro­nom­i­cal the­o­ry, and some with the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of its lay­ers of hand­made gears.

More recent research, adds Berman, has dis­cov­ered that “the device was built by more than one per­son on the island of Rhodes, and that it prob­a­bly wasn’t the only one of its kind,” indi­cat­ing that the ancient Greeks, despite the appar­ent defi­cien­cies of the Antikythera mech­a­nism itself, “were appar­ent­ly even fur­ther ahead in their astro­nom­i­cal under­stand­ing and mechan­i­cal know-how than we’d imag­ined.” Now watch the video just above, in which the Apple engi­neer makes his own Antikythera mech­a­nism with an entire­ly more mod­ern set of com­po­nents, and just imag­ine what the ancient Greeks could have accom­plished had they devel­oped Lego.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch 100 Randomly Ticking Metronomes Miraculously Achieve Synchronicity

in Math, Physics, Science | January 13th, 2017

It’s always sat­is­fy­ing to impose order on chaos, espe­cial­ly if it doesn’t involve bel­low­ing at a room­ful of jacked up teenagers.

Wit­ness the exper­i­ment above.

Mem­bers of Ikeguchi Lab­o­ra­to­ry, a Japan­ese orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the analy­sis and pre­dic­tion of non­lin­ear phe­nom­e­na, placed 100 ran­dom­ly tick­ing metronomes on a hang­ing plat­form, curi­ous as to how long it would take them to syn­chro­nize.

(SPOILER ALERT! They start synch­ing up around the 1 minute, 20 sec­ond mark.)

How? Why? Is this some mys­ti­cal, musi­cal vari­ant of men­stru­al syn­chrony?

Nope. Physics is doing the heavy lift­ing here.

The key is that the plat­form hold­ing the metronomes is not fixed. It affects their move­ment by mov­ing in response to theirs.

To put it anoth­er way, KE = 0.5 • m • v2. Which is to say Kinet­ic Ener­gy = 0.5 • mass of object • (speed of object)2.

If you’re look­ing for anoth­er sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion, here’s how Giz­mo­do puts it: “the metronomes are trans­fer­ring ener­gy to the plat­form they’re on, which then trans­fers that ener­gy back to the metronomes—until they all sync up and start hit­ting the beat in one glo­ri­ous wave­length.”

By the two and a half minute mark, some view­ers will be rar­ing to delve into fur­ther study of ener­gy trans­fer­ence.

Oth­ers, their brains implod­ing, may elect to down­shift into a pure­ly audi­to­ry expe­ri­ence.

Close your eyes and lis­ten as the last hold outs fall into rhyth­mic step with the rest of the herd. A pleas­ant­ly har­mo­nious sound, not unlike that moment when a room­ful of jacked up teens sim­mers down, achiev­ing the sort of bliss­ful hive mind that’s a balm to teacher’s fraz­zled soul.

Crav­ing more?  Ikeguchi Lab­o­ra­to­ry also filmed their metronomes in tri­an­gu­lar, cir­cu­lar and X‑shaped for­ma­tions, avail­able for your view­ing plea­sure on the lab’s YouTube chan­nel.

via The Kid Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch What Hap­pens When 100 Metronomes Per­form Györ­gy Ligeti’s Con­tro­ver­sial Poème Sym­phonique

The Remark­able Physics of Ants: Watch Them Turn into Flu­ids and Solids at Will

The Mys­te­ri­ous Physics Behind How Bikes Ride by Them­selves

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

An Introduction to Confucius’ Life & Thought Through Two Animated Videos

in Philosophy | January 12th, 2017

Though it isn’t wide­ly acknowl­edged, there’s been a long­stand­ing and robust debate at least since the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry over whether or not a his­tor­i­cal Jesus exist­ed. The major­i­ty of Chris­tians dis­miss the evi­dence, or lack there­of, for rea­sons of belief, but on a wider view it’s not at all unique that the his­tor­i­cal founder of a reli­gion or school might be an inven­tion, or might have been noth­ing at all like the tra­di­tion sug­gests. Such ques­tions have arisen about the real­i­ty of the Bud­dha, for exam­ple, or the author­ship of Lao Tzu, writer of the Tao Te Ching, or the his­tor­i­cal exis­tence of his sup­posed con­tem­po­rary Con­fu­cius, founder of the sys­tem of phi­los­o­phy and ethics sim­ply known as Con­fu­cian­ism.

What do we know about Con­fu­cius? “Very lit­tle for cer­tain,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his School of Life intro­duc­to­ry video above. “He’s said to have been born in 551 BC in Chi­na,” and he may have been a stu­dent of Lao Tzu. Con­fu­cius sup­pos­ed­ly served as min­is­ter of crime under the ruler of the state of Lu. Many mun­dane sto­ries about the Chi­nese thinker make his exis­tence seem quite plau­si­ble, though his leg­end picked up mirac­u­lous fea­tures over time. But the say­ings sup­pos­ed­ly by and about Con­fu­cius, his­tor­i­cal or otherwise—like those of Jesus and the Buddha—were only writ­ten down many years after his death, col­lect­ed in the famous Analects (Lun­yu, or “edit­ed con­ver­sa­tions”).

These say­ings became enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar dur­ing the Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment and the 20th cen­tu­ry, writes Char­lotte Allen at The Atlantic, in part because Con­fu­cius remained “agnos­tic on whether a super­nat­ur­al world actu­al­ly exists.” Though he encour­aged par­tic­i­pa­tion in reli­gious rit­u­als, “The Mas­ter,” one of the analects remarks, “nev­er talked of: mir­a­cles; vio­lence; dis­or­ders; spir­its.” What he did talk about what was “the Gold­en Mean: all things in mod­er­a­tion, even mod­er­a­tion itself.” Con­fu­cius was a con­ser­v­a­tive thinker—in the sense that word once had of hold­ing fast to tra­di­tion, encour­ag­ing adher­ence to “rit­u­al pro­pri­ety” and fam­i­ly obser­vances, and respect­ing the rule of law.

His say­ings include a ver­sion of the Gold­en Rule, and he “is said to have taught his dis­ci­ples the cul­ti­va­tion of per­son­al virtue.… ven­er­a­tion of one’s par­ents, love of learn­ing, loy­al­ty to one’s supe­ri­ors, kind­ness to one’s sub­or­di­nates, and a high regard for all of the cus­toms, insti­tu­tions, and rit­u­als that make for civil­i­ty.” One can see his appeal to many lib­er­al West­ern philoso­phers, who have often advanced rad­i­cal the­ses along­side the con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues Max Weber char­ac­ter­ized as the Protes­tant eth­ic. Thomas Paine, writes Allen, “list­ed Con­fu­cius with Jesus and the Greek philoso­phers as the world’s great moral teach­ers” in the Age of Rea­son, and Ezra Pound had a par­tic­u­lar­ly high regard for the Chi­nese thinker.

This kind of ven­er­a­tion has meant that “to many edu­cat­ed West­ern­ers, Con­fu­cius is the very emblem of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion and reli­gious belief.” Or as the TED-Ed video above puts it, “most peo­ple rec­og­nize his name and know that he is famous for hav­ing said… some­thing.” In this video intro­duc­tion to Con­fu­cius, the philosopher’s biog­ra­phy plays a very promi­nent role, and it does make for an engag­ing sto­ry. But we should be aware that the details of his life are high­ly con­test­ed by schol­ars in the East and West. The only sources date from “well after his death,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, and “tak­en togeth­er paint con­tra­dic­to­ry pic­tures of his per­son­al­i­ty and the events in his life.” Some schol­ars even claim he was an inven­tion of the Jesuits, who may have cre­at­ed the Con­fu­cius char­ac­ter to accord with their West­ern desire for a per­son­al founder.

But we need not believe bio­graph­i­cal details or decide between schol­ar­ly con­tro­ver­sies to appre­ci­ate Con­fu­cian thought. As de Bot­ton makes clear, Con­fu­cius’ respect for tradition—though cer­tain­ly patri­ar­chal and hierarchical—also gives us a lot of insight into how and why we should heed peo­ple with exper­tise and supe­ri­or knowl­edge, why we should val­ue edu­ca­tion and dif­fi­cult study, and why per­son­al integri­ty mat­ters in civic life. Though we can­not ver­i­fy his life sto­ry, we can see it as a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive alle­go­ry for his ideas. Con­fu­cius exhort­ed his dis­ci­ples to obey their lead­ers, yet he also insist­ed that those lead­ers be benev­o­lent and hon­or­able.

It is said that Con­fu­cius left Lu, where he had served faith­ful­ly as a min­is­ter, when the Duke received a gift of cour­te­sans and hors­es from a neigh­bor­ing ruler, and began to spend all his time cavort­ing, and mis­us­ing the state’s resources. Thus, accord­ing to the tra­di­tion, began a peri­od of wan­der­ing as the philoso­pher pon­dered the cul­ti­va­tion of char­ac­ter. You can read the Analects for your­self in a num­ber of translations—including this free online ver­sion from Robert Eno. And if you wish to immerse your­self more ful­ly in the study of Con­fu­cian­ism and Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy and cul­ture more gen­er­al­ly, you can do so for free through Harvard’s edX course on Chi­na or, through Coursera’s “Clas­sics of Chi­nese Human­i­ties: Guid­ed Read­ings,” taught by Ou Fan Leo Lee, Pro­fes­sor of Chi­nese Cul­ture at The Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Three Ani­mat­ed Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Download 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Software, Web Development & Business from O’Reilly Media

in Business, Data, e-books, Software, Television | January 5th, 2017

Last week we high­light­ed for you 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media. Lit­tle did we know that we were just scratch­ing the sur­face of the free ebooks O’Reil­ly Media has to offer.

If you head over to this page, you can access 243 free ebooks cov­er­ing a range of dif­fer­ent top­ics. Below, we’ve divid­ed the books into sec­tions (and pro­vid­ed links to them), indi­cat­ed the num­ber of books in each sec­tion, and list­ed a few attractive/representative titles.

You can down­load the books in PDF for­mat. An email address–but no cred­it card–is required. Again the com­plete list is here.

• Busi­ness & Lead­er­ship (10 ebooks total)
  • The Secrets Behind Great One-on-One Meet­ings
  • Your Crit­i­cal First 10 Days as a Leader
  • more
• Data, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Big Data (95 ebooks total)
  • What Is Data Sci­ence?
  • What Is Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence?
  • Ana­lyz­ing Data in the Inter­net of Things
  • more
• Design (20 ebooks)
  • Design Essen­tials
  • Design­ing for the Future
  • Expe­ri­ence Design
  • more
• Hard­ware & the Inter­net of Things (24 ebooks)
  • What Is the Inter­net of Things?
  • Build­ing a Hard­ware Busi­ness
  • Pitch­ing Your IoT Project
  • more
• Software/Programming (36 ebooks)
  • A Whirl­wind Tour of Python
  • Java: The Leg­end
  • 20 Python Libraries You Aren’t Using (But Should)
  • more
• Secu­ri­ty (8 ebooks)
  • Pri­va­cy and the Inter­net of Things
  • Crack­ing Secu­ri­ty Mis­con­cep­tions
  • more
• Web Devel­op­ment & Per­for­mance (19 ebooks)
  • Get­ting Start­ed with the Web
  • Devel­op­ing Great Web APIs
  • Mod­ern Javascript
  • more
• Web Per­for­mance & DevOps (31)
  • Mobile App Ana­lyt­ics
  • Mod­ern Web Oper­a­tions
  • DevOps in Prac­tice
  • more

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:

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

A New Free eBook Every Month from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

in Art, History | December 26th, 2016

If any one paint­ing stands for mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, Nighthawks does. In fact, Edward Hop­per’s 1942 can­vas of four fig­ures in a late-night New York City din­er may qual­i­fy as the most vivid evo­ca­tion of that coun­try and time in any form. For Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the video essay­ist Nerd­writer, the expe­ri­ence of Nighthawks goes well beyond the visu­al realm. “I’ve always thought of him in a sort of aro­mat­ic way,” says Puschak of the artist, “because his paint­ings evoke the same kinds of feel­ings and mem­o­ries that I get from the sense of smell, as if he was chan­nel­ing direct­ly into my lim­bic sys­tem, exca­vat­ing moments that were stored deeply away.”

But Puschak would­n’t have expe­ri­enced the ear­ly 1940s first-hand, much less the turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry peri­od in which Hop­per grew up. Nor would have most of the peo­ple cap­ti­vat­ed by Nighthawks today, much less those count­less appre­ci­a­tors as yet unborn. How does Hop­per, in his most famous paint­ing and many oth­ers, at once cap­ture a time and a place while also res­onat­ing on a deep­er, more uni­ver­sal­ly human lev­el?

Puschak takes up that ques­tion in “Look through the Win­dow,” a video essay that exam­ines the pow­er of Hop­per’s art, “clean, smooth, and almost too real,” through a break­down of Nighthawks, an expres­sion of all of the artist’s themes: “lone­li­ness, alien­ation, voyeurism, qui­et con­tem­pla­tion, and more.”

The effec­tive­ness of the paint­ing’s com­po­si­tion, in Puschak’s analy­sis, comes from such ele­ments as the ambi­gu­i­ty of the rela­tion­ships between its char­ac­ters, the strong diag­o­nal lines of the din­er’s archi­tec­ture, the use of light in the dark­ness, and the win­dows so clear as to look “as if they’re not even there,” all so mem­o­rably real­ized by Hop­per’s painstak­ing ded­i­ca­tion to his work. (His long and involved process, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here, even includ­ed a kind of sto­ry­board­ing.) “As slow­ly and delib­er­ate­ly as he paint­ed,” Puschak says, “he want­ed us to look — real­ly look, and to be made vul­ner­a­ble, as a view­er always is.”

Many Amer­i­cans must have felt such vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty with a spe­cial acute­ness at the time Hop­per fin­ished paint­ing Nighthawks, “the weeks and days fol­low­ing the bomb­ing of Pearl Har­bor, when every­one in New York City was para­noid about anoth­er attack.” Every­one, that is, except Edward Hop­per, who kept his stu­dio light on and kept on paint­ing beneath it. “The future was very uncer­tain at this moment in time, as uncer­tain as the dark­ness that frames the patrons of this din­er, a dark­ness they’re launched into by Hop­per’s com­po­si­tion and our gaze.” Some might say that times, in Amer­i­ca and else­where, haven’t become much more cer­tain since. We, like Hop­per, could do much worse than con­tin­u­ing to cre­ate ever more delib­er­ate­ly, and to see ever more clear­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Edward Hop­per “Sto­ry­board­ed” His Icon­ic Paint­ing Nighthawks

Painters Paint­ing: The Defin­i­tive Doc­u­men­tary Por­trait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

Whit­ney Muse­um Puts Online 21,000 Works of Amer­i­can Art, By 3,000 Artists

The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 65,000 Works of Mod­ern Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner: A Free Yale Course

in Literature, Online Courses, Yale | December 26th, 2016

This course taught by Yale pro­fes­sor Wai Chee Dimock exam­ines major works by three icon­ic Amer­i­can authors–Ernest Hem­ing­way, F. Scott Fitzger­ald, and William Faulkn­er. Along the way, Dimock explores these authors’ “inter­con­nec­tions on three ana­lyt­ic scales: the macro his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States and the world; the for­mal and styl­is­tic inno­va­tions of mod­ernism; and the small details of sen­so­ry input and psy­chic life.” You can access the 24 lec­tures in Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er on YouTube, or on iTunes in video and audio. Texts dis­cussed in the course include:

Faulkn­er, William. As I Lay Dying.

Faulkn­er, William. Light in August.

Faulkn­er, William. The Sound and the Fury.

Fitzger­ald, F. Scott. The Great Gats­by.

Fitzger­ald, F. Scott. The Short Sto­ries of F. Scott Fitzger­ald: A New Col­lec­tion.

Fitzger­ald, F. Scott. Ten­der is the Night.

Hem­ing­way, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Hem­ing­way, Ernest. In Our Time.

Hem­ing­way, Ernest. To Have and Have Not.

Find more infor­ma­tion about this course, includ­ing the syl­labus, over at this Yale site.

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er has been added to our list of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

How to Make a Replica of 1900-Year-Old Glass Fish: A Brilliant Video from the British Museum

in Art, History, Museums | December 26th, 2016

All due respect to the British Muse­um, but the title of its “How to Make a Glass Fish Repli­ca” video, above is a tad mis­lead­ing.

I’m sure no mal­ice was intend­ed, but “mak­ing” a DIY fish-shaped ves­sel rem­i­nis­cent of some 22 found in the ancient Kushan store­rooms at Begram, Afghanistan is no one’s def­i­n­i­tion of an easy craft project. (Unless you’re will­ing to fudge with some Elmer’s, some blue felt, and an emp­ty peanut but­ter jar…)

Glass Spe­cial­ist Bill Guden­rath of the Corn­ing Muse­um of Glass is an his­to­ri­an of glass­work­ing tech­niques from ancient Egypt through the Renais­sance and clear­ly expert at his craft, but he doesn’t appear to be too keen on sup­ply­ing explana­to­ry blow-by-blows. Nor would I be, bustling around a red hot glass oven, with­out so much as a John­ny Tremain-style leather apron to pro­tect me. I’m not even sure I’d want the dis­trac­tion of a video cam­era in my face.

But if, as the title implies, the goal is to pro­duce a dupli­cate of this whim­si­cal 1900-year-old gup­py, the process must be bro­ken down.

From what this casu­al view­er was able to piece togeth­er, the steps would go some­thing like:

1. Twirl a red hot met­al pipe in the forge until you have a healthy glob of molten glass. Appar­ent­ly it’s not so dif­fer­ent from mak­ing cot­ton can­dy.

2. Roll the glass blob back and forth on a met­al tray.

3. Blow into the pipe’s non-glow­ing end to form a bub­ble.

4. Repeat steps 1–3

5. Roll the pipe back and forth on a met­al sawhorse while seat­ed, apply­ing pinch­ers to taper the blob into a rec­og­niz­ably fishy-shape.

(Don’t wor­ry about its prox­im­i­ty to your bare fore­arms and kha­ki-cov­ered thighs! What could pos­si­bly go wrong?)

6. Twirl it like a baton.

(Depend­ing on the length of your arms, your nascent glass fish may come dan­ger­ous­ly close to the cement floor. Try not to sweat it.)

7. Use scis­sors and pinch­ers to tease out a nip­ple-shaped appendage that will become the fish’s lips.

8. Use anoth­er pok­er to apply var­i­ous bloops of molten glass. (Novices may want to prac­tice with a hot glue gun to get the hang of this — it’s trick­i­er than it looks!)  Pinch, prod and drape these bloops into eye and fin shapes. A non-elec­tric crimp­ing iron will prove handy here.

9. Use blue glass, tweez­ers and crimp­ing iron to per­son­al­ize your fish-shaped vessel’s dis­tinc­tive dor­sal and anal fins.

10. Tap on the pipe to crack the fish loose. (Care­ful!)

11. Score the dis­tal end with a glass cut­ting tool.

 (This step should prove a cinch for any­one who ever used a craft kit to turn emp­ty beer and soda bot­tles into drink­ing glass­es!)

12. Smooth rough edges with anoth­er loop of molten glass and some sort of elec­tric under­wa­ter grind­ing wheel.

Option­al 13th step: Read this descrip­tion of a fur­nace ses­sion, to bet­ter acquaint your­self with both best glass­blow­ing prac­tices and the prop­er names for the equip­ment. Or get the jump on Christ­mas 2017 with this true how-to guide to pro­duc­ing hand blown glass orna­ments.

Not plan­ning on blow­ing any glass, fish-shaped or oth­er­wise, any time soon?

Explore the some­what mys­te­ri­ous his­to­ry of the 1900-year-old fish-shaped orig­i­nal here, com­pli­ments of the British Museum’s St John Simp­son, senior cura­tor for its pre-Islam­ic col­lec­tions from Iran and Ara­bia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Glass: The Oscar-Win­ning “Per­fect Short Doc­u­men­tary” on Dutch Glass­mak­ing (1958)

How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dat­ing Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.