John Cage Performs Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1960)

in Music, Television | December 30th, 2011

In 1952, John Cage com­posed his most con­tro­ver­sial piece, 4′33,″ a four-and-a-half minute reflec­tion on the sound of silence. Now fast for­ward eight years. It’s Feb­ru­ary, 1960, and we find the com­pos­er teach­ing his famous Exper­i­men­tal Com­po­si­tion cours­es at The New School in NYC, and pay­ing a vis­it to the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The TV show offered Cage some­thing of a teach­able moment, a chance to intro­duce the broad­er pub­lic to his brand of avant-garde music. Cage’s piece is called Water Walk (1959), and it’s all per­formed with uncon­ven­tion­al instru­ments, save a grand piano. A water pitch­er, iron pipe, goose call, bath­tub, rub­ber duck­ie, and five unplugged radios — they all make the music. And the audi­ence does­n’t quite know how to react, except with ner­vous laugh­ter. It was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly cour­te­ous. But, as one schol­ar has not­ed, it’s equal­ly remark­able that prime time TV gave ten min­utes of unin­ter­rupt­ed air­time to avant-garde music. You take the good with the bad.

via Bib­liok­lept/WFMU

Free Audio: Download the Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

in Audio Books, Literature | December 19th, 2011

Before the days of Har­ry Pot­ter, gen­er­a­tions of young read­ers let their imag­i­na­tions take flight with The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, a series of sev­en fan­ta­sy nov­els writ­ten by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis served on the Eng­lish fac­ul­ty at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty and took part in the Inklings, an Oxford lit­er­ary group ded­i­cat­ed to fic­tion and fan­ta­sy.

Pub­lished between 1950 and 1956, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia has sold over 100 mil­lion copies in 47 lan­guages, delight­ing younger and old­er read­ers world­wide. The sev­en vol­umes in the series include:

• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Prince Caspi­an: The Return to Nar­nia
• The Voy­age of the Dawn Tread­er
• The Sil­ver Chair
• The Horse and His Boy
• The Magi­cian’s Nephew
• The Last Bat­tle

Now, with the appar­ent bless­ing of the C.S. Lewis estate, the sev­en vol­ume series is avail­able in a free audio for­mat. There are 101 audio record­ings in total, each aver­ag­ing 30 min­utes and read by Chris­si Hart. Down­load the com­plete audio via the web or RSS Feed. Or start lis­ten­ing to the open­ing chap­ters of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe right below.

We have added The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia record­ings to our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books, where you will find many oth­er great clas­sics. h/t metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Down­load Copy of New Steve Jobs Biog­ra­phy

Free Audio: Down­load George Orwell’s 1984 and Ani­mal Farm for Free

Down­load 20 Pop­u­lar High School Books Avail­able as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

in Physics, Science | December 13th, 2011

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty has had many famous grad­u­ates, but per­haps none is more famous than Isaac New­ton (class of 1665). This week, Cam­bridge con­tin­ues to hon­or New­ton by open­ing a dig­i­tal archive of New­ton’s per­son­al papers, which includes an anno­tat­ed copy of the Prin­cip­ia, the land­mark work where the physi­cist devel­oped his laws of motion and grav­i­ty. The ini­tial archive fea­tures 4,000 pages of scanned mate­ri­als (rough­ly 20% of the com­plete New­ton archive), and even­tu­al­ly Cam­bridge will add mate­r­i­al from Charles Dar­win, anoth­er famous alum, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic fig­ures.

In Octo­ber, The Roy­al Soci­ety opened its his­tor­i­cal archives to the pub­lic, bring­ing 60,000 peer-reviewed papers to the web, includ­ing Isaac Newton’s first pub­lished research paper. You can dive into this par­al­lel dig­i­tal archive here.

Bonus: If you’re look­ing to bone up on Physics, you can find many free physics cours­es in our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es. Leonard Susskind’s class on Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics may be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est here.

via The Guardian / ht @eugenephoto

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intellectuals

in Philosophy, Podcasts | December 12th, 2011

How many of the great philoso­phers have you actu­al­ly heard speak? This clip comes from the 1976 doc­u­men­tary Sartre by Him­self, which fea­tures dis­cus­sions with Jean-Paul Sartre and his near-equal­ly famous part­ner Simone de Beau­voir, among oth­ers. The film was released with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles in 1979, a year before Sartre died.

In this clip, Sartre crit­i­cizes mod­ern intel­lec­tu­als as “spe­cial­ist work­ers in prac­ti­cal knowl­edge,” who apply “uni­ver­sal notions and prac­tices” to par­tic­u­lar pur­pos­es deter­mined by a polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment. This can cause a con­flict of con­science: Sartre gives the exam­ple of sci­en­tists work­ing on the atom­ic bomb, but also pro­fes­sors whose efforts sole­ly ben­e­fit a small group of pros­per­ous stu­dents. Sartre thinks intel­lec­tu­als use this kind of con­flict to feel bet­ter about themselves–they may sign peti­tions, side with the work­ing class, etc.–while still not seri­ous­ly ques­tion­ing them­selves. Intel­lec­tu­als rage against the machine but are still play­ing their assigned role in it. “[They are] very pleased to have an unhap­py con­science, because that is what allows [them] to denounce.”

This is an exam­ple of his famous notion of “bad faith,” where we dis­as­so­ci­ate our­selves from our actions, or more com­mon­ly where we claim to have more lim­it­ed choic­es than we actu­al­ly do. Bad faith is pos­si­ble because of the nature of the self, accord­ing to Sartre: there is no pre­de­ter­mined “human nature” or “true you,” but instead you are some­thing built over time, by your own freely cho­sen actions, too often using the roles and char­ac­ter­is­tics oth­ers assign to you.

Ear­ly in his career, he con­struct­ed a the­o­ry of con­scious­ness and the self that makes this plau­si­ble. The work in which he did this, “The Tran­scen­dence of the Ego,” is the sub­ject of the most recent episode of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life phi­los­o­phy pod­cast, pro­filed in this ear­li­er Open Cul­ture post. The pod­cast has since tak­en off: it’s cur­rent­ly fea­tured on the main pod­cast page in the iTunes store and has bro­ken the top 40 in “top audio pod­casts,” reach­ing #1 in the phi­los­o­phy cat­e­go­ry.

Vis­it the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life web page, get the episodes on iTunes, and sub­scribe to the PEL blog feed.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er hosts The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life and fronts a band called New Peo­ple.

Conformity Isn’t a Recipe for Excellence: Wisdom from George Carlin & Steve Jobs (NSFW)

in Comedy, Life, Psychology | December 6th, 2011

Dur­ing the 1960s, George Car­lin had some­thing of an epiphany. Con­front­ed by the coun­ter­cul­ture, the young come­di­an real­ized that he was­n’t stay­ing true to him­self — that he was try­ing to be Dan­ny Kaye, a very main­stream star, when he was real­ly an out­law and a rebel at heart. (Watch him on The Tonight Show in 1966). Even­tu­al­ly, Car­lin learned “not to give a shit,” to break with mil­que­toast con­ven­tions that restrained oth­er come­di­ans, and that’s when his com­ic genius bloomed. Note that some of Car­lin’s com­ments here are … not sur­pris­ing­ly … not safe for work.

Steve Jobs, anoth­er child of the coun­ter­cul­ture, did­n’t learn Car­lin’s les­son over time. As Wal­ter Isaac­son makes clear in his new biog­ra­phy, Jobs under­stood from the begin­ning that excel­lence is rarely achieved by walk­ing down the path of con­for­mi­ty. In a 1995 inter­view, Jobs boiled down his basic approach to life. The mas­ter­mind behind the leg­endary Think Dif­fer­ent tele­vi­sion cam­paign (watch the ver­sion nar­rat­ed by Jobs him­self) said:

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice fam­i­ly, have fun, save a lit­tle mon­ey.

That’s a very lim­it­ed life. Life can be much broad­er once you dis­cov­er one sim­ple fact: Every­thing around you that you call life was made up by peo­ple that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influ­ence it, you can build your own things that oth­er peo­ple can use. Once you learn that, you’ll nev­er be the same again.

You can find more pearls of wis­dom from Jobs over at Brain­Pick­ings, and we’ll leave you below with more cul­tur­al fig­ures med­i­tat­ing on life:

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18

Paulo Coel­ho: Suc­cess Nev­er Hap­pens With­out Tak­ing Risks

One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cau­tious…

Bono Tells Grad­u­ates “Pick a Fight, Get in It” (2004)

Conan O’Brien: Through Dis­ap­point­ment You Can Gain Clar­i­ty

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grad­u­ates What They Need to Know

Stanford Launching 14 Free Online Courses in January/February: Enroll Today

in Online Courses, Stanford | November 28th, 2011

Two weeks ago, we men­tioned that Stan­ford will be rolling out sev­en new cours­es in its exper­i­ment with online learn­ing. Fast for­ward to today, and yet anoth­er sev­en cours­es have been added to the win­ter line­up, bring­ing the total to 14.

Imme­di­ate­ly below, you’ll find the lat­est addi­tions. All of these cours­es fea­ture inter­ac­tive video clips; short quizzes that pro­vide instant feed­back; the abil­i­ty to pose high val­ue ques­tions to Stan­ford instruc­tors; and feed­back on your over­all per­for­mance in the class.

Cours­es start in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. Enroll today for free. And, if some­thing does­n’t pique your inter­est below, don’t miss our big list of 400 Free Online Cours­es.

New­ly added:

Tech­nol­o­gy Entre­pre­neur­ship
Mak­ing Green Build­ings
Anato­my
Infor­ma­tion The­o­ry
Design and Analy­sis of Algo­rithms I
The Lean Launch­pad
Cryp­tog­ra­phy

Orig­i­nal­ly men­tioned:

Com­put­er Sci­ence 101
Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing for SaaS
Human Com­put­er Intere­ac­tion
Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing
Game The­o­ry
Prob­a­bilis­tic Graph­i­cal Mod­els
Machine Learn­ing

More Free Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Yale Rolls Out 10 New Cours­es – All Free

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

Stanford Opens Seven New Online Courses for Enrollment (Free)

in Online Courses, Stanford | November 18th, 2011

This fall, Stan­ford launched a high­ly-pub­li­cized exper­i­ment in online learn­ing. The uni­ver­si­ty took three of its most pop­u­lar com­put­er sci­ence cours­es and made them freely avail­able to the world. Each course fea­tures inter­ac­tive video clips; short quizzes that pro­vide instant feed­back; and the abil­i­ty to pose high val­ue ques­tions to Stan­ford instruc­tors. The response? It has been noth­ing short of amaz­ing. One course alone (Intro­duc­tion to Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence) pulled in more than 58,000 enroll­ments.

Start­ing in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary 2012, Stan­ford will offer sev­en new cours­es, and they’re all open for enroll­ment today. Here’s the new list (and don’t for­get to browse through our col­lec­tion of 400 Free Online Cours­es):

Com­put­er Sci­ence 101
Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing for SaaS
Human Com­put­er Inter­faces
Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing
Game The­o­ry
Prob­a­bilis­tic Graph­i­cal Mod­els
Machine Learn­ing

Anoth­er sev­en cours­es have recent­ly been added. Find the updat­ed list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cre­ate iPhone/iPad Apps in iOS 5 with Free Stan­ford Course

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire?

in History | November 15th, 2011

It all start­ed as a thought exper­i­ment on Reddit.com when a user posed the ques­tion: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire dur­ing the reign of Augus­tus if I trav­eled back in time with a mod­ern U.S. Marine infantry bat­tal­ion or MEU?”

Then the Red­dit user offered a more pre­cise sce­nario:

Let’s say we go back in time with a Marine Expe­di­tionary Unit (MEU) … could we destroy all 30 of Augus­tus’ legions?

We’d be up against near­ly 330,000 men since each legion was com­prised of 11,000 men. These men are typ­i­cal­ly equipped with limb and tor­so armor made of met­al, and for weapon­ry they car­ry swords, spears, bows and oth­er stab­bing imple­ments. We’d also encounter siege weapons like cat­a­pults and crude incen­di­ary weapons.

We’d be made up of about 2000 mem­bers, of which about half would be par­tic­i­pat­ing in ground attack oper­a­tions. We can use our mech­a­nized vehi­cles (60 Humvees, 16 armored vehi­cles, etc), but we can­not use our attack air sup­port, only our trans­port air­craft.

We also have medics with us, mod­ern med­ical equip­ment and drugs, and engi­neers, but we no longer have a mag­i­cal time-trav­el­ing sup­ply line (we did have but the timelords frowned upon it, sad­ly!) that pro­vides us with all the ammu­ni­tion, equip­ment and sus­te­nance we need to sur­vive. We’ll have to suc­ceed with the stuff we brought with us.

So, will we be vic­to­ri­ous?

The ques­tion touched off a fren­zy of dis­cus­sion. One user, James Erwin, wrote a short sto­ry, Rome Sweet Rome, imag­in­ing how the bat­tles might play out, and Warn­er Bros. came along and bought the movie rights to the sto­ry.

And now pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ri­ans are weigh­ing in. Inter­viewed in Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics, his­to­ri­an Adri­an Goldswor­thy, an expert on the Roman army, offered these thoughts:

Obvi­ous­ly, there is a mas­sive dif­fer­ence in fire­pow­er. Not only would Roman armor be use­less against a rifle round—let alone a grenade launch­er or a .50 cal­iber machine gun—it would prob­a­bly dis­tort the bullet’s shape and make the wound worse.

But here comes the dif­fi­cul­ty:

In the short term and in the open, mod­ern infantry could mas­sacre any ancient sol­diers at lit­tle risk to them­selves. But you could not sup­port mod­ern infantry. So all of these weapons and vehi­cles could make a brief, dra­mat­ic, and even dev­as­tat­ing appear­ance, but would very quick­ly become use­less. Prob­a­bly in a mat­ter of days.… Marines are the best war­riors ever trained. But they can’t fight an end­less wave of sol­diers. No one can.

You can find the rest of Goldswor­thy’s thoughts here, and sev­er­al good Roman his­to­ry cours­es in our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

via Andrew Sul­li­van

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Leymah Gbowee Talks @Google

in Books, Google | October 12th, 2011

Last Wednes­day, Liber­ian peace activist Leymah Gbowee paid a vis­it to Google to talk about her mem­oir, Mighty Be Our Pow­ers: How Sis­ter­hood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Two days lat­er, she was award­ed the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Ellen John­son Sir­leaf and Tawakkol Kar­man. The Googlers pro­vide a quick intro­duc­tion to her activism before the con­ver­sa­tion begins.…

via Google Book Blog

R.E.M.‘s Final Encore (and an Early Concert from Germany)

in Music | September 23rd, 2011

They weren’t quite The Bea­t­les, and they did­n’t go out in the same style. (Catch The Bea­t­les’ rooftop gig here.) But R.E.M. gave us 30 good years (ok, maybe 15), and, after call­ing it quits ear­li­er this week, we thought it worth­while to present their final live moments. So here it goes: R.E.M.‘s final encore played in Mex­i­co City back in Novem­ber, 2008. It’s a 36 minute set that fea­tures “Super­nat­ur­al Super­se­ri­ous,” “Los­ing My Reli­gion,” “I Believe,” “Coun­try Feed­back,” “Life and How to Live It,” and “Man on the Moon.”

Thanks to @opedr for the great find and, for good mea­sure, we’re throw­ing in a vin­tage R.E.M. con­cert record­ed in Ger­many in 1985 from the Fables of the Recon­struc­tion tour. These were good old days.