Nikola Tesla’s Grades from High School & University: A Fascinating Glimpse
In the history of science, few people got a rawer deal than Nikola Tesla. Cruelly cheated and overshadowed by Edison and Marconi (who patented the radio technology Tesla invented), the brilliant introvert didn’t stand a chance in the cutthroat business world in which his rivals moved with ease. Every biographer portrays Tesla as Edison’s perfect foil: the latter played the consummate showman and savvy patent hog, where Tesla was a reclusive mystic and, as one writer put it, “the world’s sorcerer.”
“Unlike Tesla,” writes biographer Michael Burgan, “Edison had barely gone to school: Tesla was amazed that a man with almost no formal education could invent so brilliantly.” (He would have a different opinion of Edison years later.)
Tesla began his own education, as you can learn in the survey of his high school and university grades above, with much promise, but he was forced to drop out after his third year in college when his father passed away and he was left without the means to continue. As PBS writes, Tesla showed precocious talent early on.
Passionate about mathematics and sciences, Tesla had his heart set on becoming an engineer but was “constantly oppressed” by his father’s insistence that he enter the priesthood. At age seventeen, Tesla contracted cholera and craftily exacted an important concession from his father: the older Tesla promised his son that if he survived, he would be allowed to attend the renowned Austrian Polytechnic School at Graz.
It was during his time at technical school that Tesla first devised the idea of alternating current, though he could not yet articulate a working design (he was told by a professor that the feat would be akin to building a perpetual motion machine). He solved the engineering challenge after leaving school and going to work for the Central Telephone Exchange in Budapest.
While walking through a city park with a friend, reciting Goethe’s Faust from memory, Tesla recounts in his autobiography, a passage inspired him “like a flash of lightening” and he “drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.” The story is one of many in which Tesla, a voracious reader and infinitely curious autodidact, draws on the extensive knowledge that he gathered through self-education.
His patent applications—Croatian scholar Danko Plevnik notes in the introduction to a series of essays on Tesla’s self-schooling—show “the erudition of a learned man, broad knowledge which by far surpassed the knowledge he could acquire through formal education only.” In his lectures, articles, and speeches, Tesla demonstrates a “familiarity with philosophy, science history and invention-related thought, methodology of science, as well as other areas of knowledge that were not included in the subjects and courses he attended through his schooling.”
Not only did he memorize entire books of poetry, but he could accurately foresee the future of technology, his keen insight honed both by his studies of the sciences and the humanities. Until fairly recently Plevnik writes, “Tesla’s education was referred to sporadically, as if it had not influenced his scientific reflection, experimenting and inventions.” That is in large part, many Tesla scholars now argue, because the best education Tesla received was the one he gave himself.
Related Content:
The Electric Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla: As Told by Technoillusionist Marco Tempest
Nikola Tesla Accurately Predicted the Rise of the Internet & Smart Phone in 1926
Electric Photo of Nikola Tesla, 1899
Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fascinating Look at His Report Cards
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Case for a Universal Basic Income in the Time of COVID-19
The idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been the subject of much debate in the past few years. The candidacy of Andrew Yang for U.S. President brought the issue to national prominence, where it has remained during the spread of COVID-19. What is UBI? Put simply, it proposes that the government give every citizen a certain amount of money each month to cover, at the least, basic living expenses. As the video above by YouTube channel Kurzgesagt explains, those citizens are then free to live their lives as they like.
Unlike most welfare state models, UBI usually does not involve any means testing. In most schemes, every citizen, no matter their current wealth or income, receives the benefit. (Though most studies of the program have only given it to poor or unemployed beneficiaries.) Those who do not need the money can do whatever they want with it, but so too can those who need it. UBI ensures that people do not have go homeless or hungry if they lose their livelihood, and that they can survive without paternalist state agencies breathing down their necks.
UBI is not a new idea but dates back at least to Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense inspired the American Revolution and whose Rights of Man defended the French a few years later. As Paine argued in another, little-read, pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, no one could be truly free if they had no means of subsistence. Since capitalism had placed most of those means under private ownership, he reasoned, citizens should be compensated for being deprived of resources that belonged to them by natural right as much as to anyone else.
This philosophical justification doesn’t always enter into the conversation, which is often framed in more pragmatic terms as a political and economic expedient in times of capitalist crisis: in times, for example, like the present moment. The COVID-19 crisis has intensified calls for a UBI, as millions of layoffs point toward the inevitability of a depression. Pushing people back to work during the pandemic seems to be the only thing the U.S. government plans to do, but no amount of coercion can stop the virus from forcing closures all over again.
Even the famously libertarian economist Milton Friedman once embraced a version of UBI—as an alternative to the liberal social programs he loathed. Under Richard Nixon, of all people, such a policy almost came into being in 1969. Neither Friedman nor Nixon believed in the natural right of all citizens to a share in the profits of a state’s natural resources. But they could see the wisdom of ensuring millions of U.S. citizens weren’t relegated to living in destitution.
The program required testing, so the administration set up a trial run. “Tens of millions of dollars were budgeted to provide a basic income for more than 8,500 Americans” in five states across the country, writes Rutger Bregman at The Correspondent. Researchers wanted to know: 1. if those who received a basic income would work significantly less, 2. if the program would be too expensive, and 3. if it would prove “politically unfeasible.” The findings? “No, no, and maybe.”
The chief objection, idleness, held no water. As the chief data analyst for the Denver experiment put it at the time, “The ‘laziness’ contention is just not supported by our findings.” The two groups who did cut back on hours, 20-somethings and mothers of young children, were people who most needed the money so they could go to college or devote time to their kids. Otherwise, recipients did not quit their jobs and lay around watching TV.
Yet there remains a powerful species of human busybody who cannot rest until they’re sure everyone’s working. Such people continue to object—whether in good faith or not—that “just giving people money” will turn everyone into a slacker, as though most people were only motivated by the threat of starvation. And so, trials continue decades later. Researchers at the University of Helsinki recently conducted a two-year study in Finland with a random selection of 2,000 unemployed people across the country. Each participant was given €560 (about $607) a month to ease their burden, and received the funds whether or not they sought or found a job.
“The scheme was not strictly speaking a universal basic income trial because the recipients came from a restricted group and the payments were not enough to live on,” points out Guardian correspondent Jon Henley. Nonetheless, the researchers found that recipients were significantly less stressed than a control group—and that they could make different choices than they might otherwise. “Some said the basic income allowed them to go back to the life they had before they became unemployed,” the study authors write. “While others said it gave them the power to say no to low-paid insecure jobs, and thus increased their sense of autonomy.”
Other findings also showed how UBI could radicalize our relationship to work. “Freelancers and artists and entrepreneurs had more positive views on the effects of the basic income, which some felt had created opportunities for them to start businesses.” People providing unpaid care for others felt their time was more valued. “The security of the basic income allowed them to do more meaningful things, as they felt it legitimized this kind of care work.” The findings are being taken seriously by many European governments.
In Spain, Scotland, and elsewhere, leaders are proposing or considering some form of UBI to combat massive unemployment due to the pandemic. While the idea may have little political future in the U.S. at the moment, where priorities are to use the country’s wealth to further enrich the wealthy, UBI is becoming tremendously popular elsewhere. (A recent poll found support among 71% of Europeans surveyed.) No one believes UBI is a panacea for the world’s ills, but as the Wired video above argues, there may be no better time than now to make the case for it.
Related Content:
Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Prediction That Automation Will Necessitate a Universal Basic Income
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Take a Virtual Tour of the Mütter Museum and Its Many Anatomically Peculiar Exhibits
A few months before Philaelphia’s Mütter Museum, exercising now familiar COVID-19 precautions, closed its doors to the public, it co-sponsored a parade to honor the victims to the previous century’s Spanish Flu pandemic, as well as “those who keep us safe today.”
The event was part of a temporary exhibition, Spit Spreads Death: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Philadelphia.
Another temporary exhibition, Going Viral: Infection Through the Ages, opened in November, and now seems even stronger proof that the museum, whose 19th-century display cabinets are housed in the historic College of Physicians, is as concerned with the future as it is with the past.
For now, all tours must be undertaken virtually.
Above, curator Anna Dhody, a physical and forensic anthropologist and Director of the Mütter Research Institute, gives a brief introduction to some of the best known artifacts in the permanent collection.
The museum’s many antique skulls and medical oddities may invite comparisons to a ghoulish sideshow attraction, an impression Dhody corrects with her warm, matter-of-fact delivery and respectful acknowledgment of the humans whose stories have been preserved along with their remains:
Mary Ashberry, an achondroplastic dwarf, died from complications of a Cesarean section, as doctors who had yet to learn the importance of sterilizing instruments and washing hands, attempted to help her deliver a baby who proved too big for her pelvis. (The baby’s head was crushed as well. Its skull is displayed next to its mother’s skeleton.)
Madame Dimanche is represented by a wax model of her face, instantly recognizable due to the 10-inch cutaneous horn that began growing from her forehead when she was in her 70s. (It was eventually removed in an early example of successful plastic surgery.)
Albert Einstein and the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker are among the household names gracing the museum’s collection.
One of the most recent additions is the skeleton of artist and disability awareness advocate Carol Orzel, who educated the public and incoming University of Pennsylvania medical students about fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), a rare disorder that turned her muscle and connective tissue to bone. She told her physician, Frederick Kaplan, below, that she wanted her skeleton to go to the Mütter, to join that of fellow FOP sufferer, Harry Eastlack… provided some of her prized costume jewelry could be displayed alongside. It is.
Get better acquainted with the Mütter Museum’s collection through this playlist.
The exhibit Spit Spreads Death is currently slated to stay up through 2024. While waiting to visit in person, you can watch an animation of the Spanish flu’s spread, and explore an interactive map showing the demographics of the infection.
h/t Tanya Elder
Related Content:
Take a Virtual Tour of 30 World-Class Museums & Safely Visit 2 Million Works of Fine Art
Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Here latest project is a series of free downloadable posters, encouraging citizens to wear masks in public and wear them properly. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...500+ Beautiful Manuscripts from the Islamic World Now Digitized & Free to Download
Mathematics, astronomy, history, law, literature, architecture: in these fields and others, the Muslim world came up with major innovations before any other civilization did. This Islamic cultural and intellectual flowering lasted from the 11th through the 19th century, and many of the texts the period left as its legacy have gone mostly unresearched. So say the creators of Manuscripts of the Muslim World, a project of Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and Haverford College aimed at creating an online archive of “more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed.”
As UPenn Libraries Senior Curator of Special Collections Mitch Fraas tells Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp, “The aim of this project was to find and digitize all the Islamicate manuscripts in Philadelphia collections and along the way we partnered with Columbia on a grant to take a multi-city approach.”
To the sources of its manuscripts it also takes a multi-culture approach, including “texts related to Christianity (Coptic and Syriac mss. galore), Hinduism (epics translated into Persian in Mughal India), science, technology, music, etc. but which were produced in the historic Muslim world.” There are also texts, he adds, “in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish of course but also in Coptic, Tamazight, Avestan, etc.”
If you can read those languages, Manuscripts of the Muslim World obviously amounts to a gold mine. (You may also find something of interest in the digital archives of 700 years of Persian manuscripts and 10,000 books in Arabic we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.) But even if you don’t, you’ll find in the collection marvels of book design that will appeal to anyone with an appreciation of the lush aesthetics, both abstract and figurative, of these places and these times. Some of them aren’t even as old as they may seem: take the manuscript at the top of the post, “overpainted in the 20th century to mimic Mughal style.” Or the one below that, whose colophon “says the copy was completed in 1121 A.H. (1709 or 1710 CE),” which “does not make sense given the author likely lived in the 19th century.”
The other pages here come from a set of “illustrations from Qur’ānic stories” (this one depicting “Abraham sacrificing his son”) and a “Persian calligraphy and illustration album.” You’ll find much more in Manuscripts of the Muslim World, hosted on OPENN, the University of Pennsylvania’s online repository of “high-resolution archival images of manuscripts” accompanied by “machine-readable TEI P5 descriptions and technical metadata,” all released into the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Though each manuscript’s entry comes with basic notes, the collection is, in the main, not yet a thoroughly studied one. If you have an interest in the Islamic world at its peak of cultural and intellectual influence so far, you may just find your next big research subject here — or at the very least, material for a few hours’ admiration. Enter the collection.
via Hyperallergic
Related Content:
The Complex Geometry of Islamic Art & Design: A Short Introduction
How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition
700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online
Download 10,000+ Books in Arabic, All Completely Free, Digitized and Put Online
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Benedict Cumberbatch, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry & Others Read Letters of Hope, Love & Support During COVID-19
Though the coronavirus pandemic has put a stop to many formerly normal activities around the world, it’s hardly put a stop to global communication. In fact, it’s almost certainly intensified global communication, what with all the attention the struggle against COVID-19 commands from 24-hour media professionals — and all the time and energy the rest of us have put into social media as a substitute for socialization. But how would we have communicated amid a pandemic of this kind in an age before the internet? Assuming postal services remained in good working order, we would, of course, have written letters to each other.
We can still write letters to each other in the 21st century, but now we can also read them to each other, wherever in the world we may be. This is the basis for the #ReadALetter campaign, which actor Benedict Cumberbatch introduces in the video at the top of the post. “I really hope this letter finds you in good spirits as we navigate our way through this truly surreal crisis, where upheaval and uncertainty are daily realities,” he says, reading aloud a missive composed at his home and meant for the world at large.
“But so, thankfully, is the totally inspiring self-sacrifice, togetherness, courage, generosity, and camaraderie the people are exhibiting.” It is those honorable qualities, Cumberbatch continues, that “we at Letters Live are looking for a way to celebrate through our favorite medium of the letter.”
You may remember Letters Live, a series of events inspired by Letters of Note, from when we’ve previously featured Cumberbatch’s appearances there interpreting correspondence by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, and Alan Turing. The stars of Letters Live have heretofore been historically important letter-writers and the skilled professional performers who read their words. But now, Cumberbatch says, “we want to hear you read letters. They can be letters to the heroes on the front line. They could be letters to relatives in need. They could be letters to strangers who have stepped up and made a difference. They could be letters to neighboring families or streets or towns or countries.” To participate, you need only use a camera phone to record yourself reading a letter aloud, then post that video on Twitter or Instagram and send it to re**@*********ve.com.
What you read on camera (or off it, if you prefer) could be “an important letter you have always wanted to send, or a cherished letter you once received. It could be a favorite letter of yours that offers hope in our current crisis or a prescient warning too important to be ignored.” Here we’ve included the #ReadALetter videos so far contributed by other notables including Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, and Griffin Dunne, who reads a letter his father Dominick Dunne wrote when he put himself into isolation for creative purposes in 1980. Other participants from all walks of life include a rabbi, a college student, an emergency department doctor, and even a couple of nonagenarians. If you need more inspiration to #ReadALetter yourself, revisit Cumberbatch’s Letters of Live performance of Sol Lewitt’s 1965 letter to Eva Hesse, the one in which he delivers invaluable words of advice: “Stop It and Just DO.”
Related Content:
An Animated Margaret Atwood Explains How Stories Change with Technology
Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Story “The Happy Prince”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Vintage Book & Record Covers Brought to Life in a Mesmerizing Animated Video
The state of virtual and augmented reality technology has reached the threshold of a time in which VR meetings will be the norm. Apart from other applications, this may soon allow consumers to stroll through virtual aisles rather than clicking boxes on a screen, picking up products and viewing them from every angle. Still, designers recognize that an essence of the human experience is lost without the sense of touch. There may even be a future in which we wear clothes with haptic feedback systems embedded in them, to feel the pages of a virtual book beneath our fingers…
Yet our slow transition from the physical to the virtual world leaves out intangibles. Something is lost from both. Big box stores still devote significant floor space to books and records, for example. But I submit that a glossiness prevails in print design, perhaps a consequence of competing with screens. There’s a wabi-sabi quality to browsing a used bookstore or record shop in person, thumbing through an old collection of vintage paperbacks and LPs, that cannot be simulated or enhanced in any way. On the internet, however, where video is king, it can be made the subject of some hypnotic video art.
As the sensible majority of us are hopefully staying put for the long haul (if we can), we may find ourselves curiously edified by the video art of Henning M. Lederer. We’ve previously featured Lederer’s animations of mid-century minimalist book covers and vintage psychology and philosophy books. He turns the abstract geometric patterns beloved by book and record company designers of the latter half of the 20th century into moving images that hint at how proper cover design can set the imagination whirring (even if it’s a cover design for Basic Accounting).
If Lederer’s mesmerizing videos simulate anything, it’s the experience of wandering into a used bookstore next to a liberal arts college—full of professors’ fascinatingly outdated hand-me-downs—after having ingested a small quantity of LSD. Maybe you’ll have a slightly different association. But the point is that Lederer’s art suggests a scenario rather than attempting to recreate one. His studies of modernist cover designs also recall Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, conceptual art pieces intended for popular use as optical illusions.
Duchamp’s spinning disks became features of early Surrealist cinema, iconic symbols of dreams on film. There is a mysterious opacity to his physical objects onscreen, just as Lederer’s book and record covers seem to have a weight of their own, a use of digital technology to highlight the strange uniqueness of physical objects, rather than their endless reproducibility.
Related Content:
157 Animated Minimalist Mid-Century Book Covers
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Mark Knopfler Plays a Poignant, Overdriven Version of “The Last Post,” Remembering the Many Lives Lost in World War I
World War I symbolism gets lost on Americans. Our historical memories are short and selective, and the War has “largely vanished from view,” as historian Geoffrey Wawro writes at Time magazine. But in Europe, of course, where some armies suffered ten times the casualties as U.S. troops, and where millions of civilian died and towns were bombed into oblivion, the memory of the Great War is very much alive.
In Ypres, Belgium, the War has been memorialized every day since 1928 (with the exception of four years of German occupation during WWII) by the Last Post Association, a devoted company of buglers who play the military song at the Menin Gate memorial every evening to commemorate the British dead at the Battle of Ypres. As of this writing, they’ve held their 31,748th ceremony.
In Britain itself, and around the world, the tune has a long history as a symbol, like the poppy, of Remembrance Day. Just like Taps in the U.S., the Last Post is “a bugle call,” writes the Last Post Association, “played in the British Army (and in the armies of many other lands) to mark the end of the day’s labours and the onset of the night’s rest…. It has come to represent a final farewell to the fallen at the end of their earthly labours and at the onset of their eternal rest.”
Robert Graves summed up the song’s association with death in his 1918 poem, “The Last Post”:
The bugler sent a call of high romance—
“Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
“God, if it’s this for me next time in France…
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the other broken ones
Lying so stiff and still under the sky,
Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die.”
I imagine Mark Knopfler, a lover of poetry, might be familiar with Graves’ verse. In his own rendition of the Last Post, above, Knopfler commemorates 17,000 Northumberland Fusiliers killed in the War, who came from his home region and suffered more casualties than any other regiment. Recorded on Remembrance Day, November 8, 2018, the 100th anniversary of the War’s end, Knopfler’s version is both restrained and fiercely overdriven, recalling Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” in some of its flashier moments of vibrato. Rather than one of his usual iconic guitars, he plays a custom instrument that howls like a keening bugle.
The recording was part of a project in which musicians around the world played the ceremonial call on a variety of instruments. For comparison with Knopfler’s creative interpretation, see a straightforward rendition played above by a member of the Australian Royal Military College Band. The bugle call reminds us of the war dead we may have forgotten, and the millions killed by starvation and influenza after the armistice. And perhaps it also reminds us of the importance of collective mourning for the dead in our own extraordinary historical moment.
Related Content:
Guitar Stories: Mark Knopfler on the Six Guitars That Shaped His Career
Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Masterclass on His Favorite Guitars & Guitar Sounds
The Great War: Video Series Will Document How WWI Unfolded, Week-by-Week, for the Next 4 Years
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Louis Armstrong Remembers How He Survived the 1918 Flu Epidemic in New Orleans
Born into poverty in New Orleans in 1901, and growing up during some of the most brutal years of segregation in the South, Louis Armstrong first lived with his grandmother, next in a “Colored Waif’s Home” after dropping out of school at age 11, then with his mother and sister in a home so small they had to sleep in the same bed. After already living through the first World War, he would go on to witness the Spanish Flu epidemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s and the Vietnam conflict.
That’s a lot for one lifetime, though for much of it, Armstrong was a star and living legend who beat the odds and rose above his origins with will and talent. Even so, he suffered some severe ups and downs during the hard times, touring so much to cover his debts in the lean 1930s, for example, that he injured his lips and fingers, and finally moving to Europe when the mob came after him.
Armstrong’s descriptions of his experience of the 1918 influenza pandemic—as he remembers it in his 1954 memoir Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans—are almost jaunty, as you can partly see in the typescript page above from the Louis Armstrong House. But he remembered it from the perspective of a 17-year-old musician in robust health—who seemed to have some kind of resistance to the flu.
He devotes no more than two paragraphs to the flu, which hit the city hard in October of that year. According to the Influenza Encyclopedia, an online project documenting the flu in the U.S. between 1918–1919, New Orleans city authorities “acted immediately,” once they discovered the outbreak, arrived by cargo ship the month before.
On October 9th, the New Orleans Superintendent of Health, “with Mayor Martine Behrman’s consent and the blessing of state authorities… ordered closed all schools (public, private, and parochial, as well as commercial colleges), churches, theaters, movie houses, and other places of amusement, and [prohibited] public gatherings such as sporting events and public funerals and weddings.”
For a struggling young musician making a living playing clubs and riverboats, the closure of “other places of amusement” took a serious toll. The loss of livelihood is what seems to have hurt Armstrong the most when he returned to the city from touring, still unsure if the Great War would end.
When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaiser’s monkey business was getting worse, and, what is more, a serious flu epidemic had hit New Orleans. Everybody was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-minded. I never missed a week without a physic, and that kept all kinds of sickness out of me.
Whatever “physic” helped Armstrong’s avoid infection, it wasn’t for lack of exposure. In lieu of playing the trumpet he began caring for the sick, since all of the hospitals, even those that would take black patients, were completely overcrowded.
Just when the government was about to let crowds of people congregate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With everybody suffering from the flu, I had to work and play the doctor to everyone in my family as well as all my friends in the neighborhood. If I do say so, I did a good job curing them.
We might imagine some of those “odd jobs” were what we now call “essential”—i.e. low paid and high risk under the circumstances. He persevered and finally got a gig playing a “honky-tonk” that avoided a shut-down because it was “third rate,” and he “could play a lot of blues for cheap prostitutes and hustlers.” Few things could get Satchmo down, it seemed, not even a flu pandemic, but he was one of the lucky ones—luckily for the future of jazz. Only, we don’t have to imagine how hard this must have been for him. We just have to take a look around.
Learn more about the 1918 influenza epidemic in the U.S. at the Influenza Encyclopedia and read the rest of Armstrong’s account of his formative years at the Internet Archive.
Related Content:
Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Coursera Makes Courses & Certificates Free During Coronavirus Quarantine: Take Courses in Psychology, Music, Wellness, Professional Development & More Online
Over the past decade or two, developments in the technology of the World Wide Web have made learning at home possible in a way it wasn’t before. Over the past month or two, learning at home has gone from option to necessity, prevented as many of us are from going out to a classroom by the coronavirus pandemic. If you’ve taken courses on the internet before — and especially if you’ve picked them from our selection of 1,500 you can take for free — you’ve no doubt heard of Coursera, one of the major online learning platforms. Now through May 31st, a period during which the number of potential students will surely remain high, Coursera has made more of its classes free for the taking.
“To help our community during this critical time, we’re launching new, free resources, as well as surfacing interesting course collections, community discussions, and expert interviews,” says the official Coursera blog. “While many courses on Coursera are already available for free without a certificate, this promotion enables you to not only access lectures and quizzes, but also to earn a free certificate for courses that offer them.” The blog highlights these collections of courses, describing them as follows:
- Free online courses for mental health and well-being: from de-mystifying mindfulness to understanding the science of happiness, we’ve collected top wellness courses to help you prioritize mental health and well-being during these uncertain times.
- Free online courses for high school students: from calculus to guitar for beginners, we’ve rounded up courses to help high school students everywhere keep learning.
- Free online courses for college students: from preparing for an interview to learning data science, we’ve collected courses to make it easier to keep learning.
- Free online courses for career development: from creative problem solving to personal branding, we identified courses to help you build important career skills.
- Free online courses for building your cloud technology career: from machine learning to cloud computing, we’ve curated a set of courses to help you grow your career in an increasingly digital world.
- Free online courses for understanding public health: from the science behind COVID-19 to communicating during global emergencies, we’re making popular public health courses completely free.
- Free online courses in Spanish: from wellness to professional development, we’re making popular Spanish-language courses available for free.
The post also includes the following instructions for how to redeem a free course:
- First, click the link to visit a promotion page.
- From the promotion page, click to visit a specific course and wait for the page to fully load. Once loaded, you will see a promotion banner at the top of the page. If you don’t see the banner, please refresh the page.
- Next, click the “Enroll for free” button.
- Select “Purchase Course.” Note that with the promotion applied, there will be a message in parentheses that says “Your promotion will automatically be applied at checkout.”
- At checkout, your purchase total will read “$0.”
- Complete check out and start learning!
Among Coursera’s current free offerings you’ll find a host of courses including “Getting Started with Music Theory” from Michigan State University, “Social Psychology” from Wesleyan University, and “Cloud Computing Basics” from LearnQuest. You’re as likely to come across subject areas into which you’ve long been meaning to get deeper as practical education pertinent to the times we now live in. Take “Sit Less, Get Active” from the University of Edinburgh, or “Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19” from Imperial College London, a virus-related course of the kind we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. The University of California, San Diego’s “Converting Challenges into Opportunities” is also not without its relevance, to the future as well as the present. After all, the coronavirus will hardly be the last challenge in which we’ll need to find our own opportunities.
Related Content:
1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Free Courses on the Coronavirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerging Pandemic
Dyson Creates 44 Free Engineering & Science Challenges for Kids Quarantined During COVID-19
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Ingenious Improvised Recreations of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Using Materials Found Around the House
One can only tolerate so many educational videos in self-isolation before the brain begins to rebel.
Hands-on learning. That’s what we’re craving.
And ultimately, that’s what the Getty provides with an addictive challenge to captive audiences on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to re-create iconic artworks using three household objects.
Participants are encouraged to look at the Getty’s downloadable, digitized collection and beyond for a piece that speaks to them, possibly because of their ability to match it by dint of hair color, physique or perfect prop.)
Certain works quickly emerged as favorites, with Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) the clear front runner.
The Mauritshuis, where Girl with a Pearl Earring is quarantined, along with other Hague-dwellers such as Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp and Fabritius’ The Goldfinch, describes it thusly:
Girl with a Pearl Earring is Vermeer’s most famous painting. It is not a portrait, but a ‘tronie’ – a painting of an imaginary figure. Tronies depict a certain type or character; in this case a girl in exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in her ear.
Johannes Vermeer was the master of light. This is shown here in the softness of the girl’s face and the glimmers of light on her moist lips. And of course, the shining pearl.
Let’s have a look, shall we?
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
Vermeer’s extraordinary application of light and shadow is a tall order for most amateurs, but it’s wonderful to see how much careful consideration has been given to the original subject’s expression, the cant of her head, the arrangement of her garments.
It seems the best way to study a work of art is to become that work of art… especially when one is trapped at home, seeking distraction, and forced to improvise with available objects.
Let us pray we’ll be set loose long before Halloween, but also that the challenge takers won’t forget how ingenious, easily sourced, and cost-effective their costumes were: a pillowcase, a button, an inverted party dress, the hem of a sibling’s blue t‑shirt, rescued from the rag bag still smelling faintly of vinegar from pre-coronavirus household cleaning.
That off-the-rack “sexy cat” won’t stand a chance.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
No one’s disqualified if the number of items used in service of these recreations exceeds the originally stiuplated 3. As long as the participants are having (educational!) fun, this is one of those challenges where everybody wins… especially the baby, the dog, the guy with the mustache and the lady with the turkey on her head, even though the baby and the guy with the mustache forgot their earrings.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
Some tips for participants accompany a handful of memorable entries on the Getty’s behind-the-scenes blog, The Iris. We’ve got links to a number of world class museums’ and libraries’ digital collections here and can’t wait to see what you come up with.
Meanwhile, enjoy even more recreations by searching for #gettychallenge or having a look at the Instagram of Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine, whose attempt to conjure Girl With A Pearl Earring using a placemat, a towel and a garlic bulb, launched the project that prompted the Getty and the Rijksmuseum to follow suit.
Extra points if you accept the #neckruffchallenge inspired by our history-loving artist friend, Tyler Gunther’s take on the #gettychallenge, below.
View this post on Instagram
Related Content:
Flashmob Recreates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shopping Mall
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She has been crowdsourcing art in isolation, most recently a hastily assembled tribute to the classic 60s social line dance, The Madison. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
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.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
