India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012

Dur­ing the 1940s, when India won its inde­pen­dence from Britain, the lead­ers of the new­ly-formed nation began imag­in­ing the Indi­an Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­o­gy, oth­er­wise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cul­ti­vate some of the world’s top sci­en­tists and engi­neers. And they’d make tech­nol­o­gy key to the future of Indi­a’s eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indi­an edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and, like their peer insti­tu­tions in the US, they’re mak­ing a point of putting free cours­es on the web. Rather qui­et­ly, they’ve amassed some 268 cours­es, giv­ing any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion access to 10,000+ video lec­tures. As you might expect, the course line­up skews heav­i­ly toward sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, the stuff that con­tributes to Indi­a’s indus­tri­al base — Intro­duc­tion to Basic Elec­tron­ics, High Per­for­mance Com­put­er Archi­tec­ture, Space Flight Mechan­ics, Steel Mak­ing, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few con­tem­pla­tive cours­es to the mix, cours­es like Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture, Quan­tum Physics, the His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry, and Game The­o­ry and Eco­nom­ics.

You can start rum­mag­ing through the com­plete list of IIT cours­es on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT web­site, which gives you the abil­i­ty to down­load videos straight to your com­put­er. Nat­u­ral­ly we’ve added many essen­tial IIT cours­es to our list of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties — Har­vard, Yale, Stan­ford, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Har­vard Presents Free Cours­es with the Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive

MIT Intro­duces Com­plete Cours­es to Open­Course­Ware Project

The Final Descent of NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity Captured in High Resolution

in Astronomy, Video - Science | August 21st, 2012

A few weeks back, we showed you the first grainy footage of NASA’s rover, Curios­i­ty, land­ing on the dusty sur­face of Mars. And we promised to fol­low up with high­er res footage when it became avail­able. Well, it’s now online and on dis­play above. Just to recap, the video shows the final descent of Curios­i­ty, from the point where it jet­ti­sons its heat shield to the moment when it touch­es down on the mar­t­ian sur­face. The video was stitched togeth­er with 666 images tak­en at a rate of four per sec­ond.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find Astron­o­my cours­es in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Online Cours­es

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

Ray Brad­bury Reads Mov­ing Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mis­sion

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

Parking Garage Door Does Impression of Miles Davis’ Jazz Album, Bitches Brew

in Music | August 21st, 2012

Clas­sic. And if you’re not famil­iar with the ref­er­ence — Miles Davis’ 1970 exper­i­men­tal jazz album, Bitch­es Brew — you can catch it on YouTube, or snag a copy online.

H/T Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Child’s Intro­duc­tion to Jazz by Can­non­ball Adder­ley (with Louis Arm­strong & Thelo­nious Monk)

‘The Sound of Miles Davis’: Clas­sic 1959 Per­for­mance with John Coltrane

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Remembering The Clash’s Frontman Joe Strummer on His 60th Birthday

in Music | August 21st, 2012

It’s hard to imag­ine him as an old man, but Joe Strum­mer would have turned 60 today. Strum­mer was the heart and soul of the leg­endary punk group The Clash, the rea­son many peo­ple called it “The only band that mat­ters.”

He was a man with a Bob Dylan-like instinct for self-inven­tion. Born John Gra­ham Mel­lor on August 21, 1952 in Ankara, Turkey (his father was in the British diplo­mat­ic ser­vice), he changed his name to Joe Strum­mer in the ear­ly 1970s while play­ing in a rhythm and blues band called the 101’ers. When the Sex Pis­tols opened for the 101’ers, Strum­mer was so impressed with the band’s take-no-pris­on­ers atti­tude that he threw him­self into the punk move­ment, accept­ing an offer from gui­tarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and man­ag­er Bernie Rhodes to join what would even­tu­al­ly become The Clash.

With the Clash, Strum­mer helped move punk beyond the self-absorbed nihilism of its ear­ly days to embrace polit­i­cal and social aware­ness. After the band dis­in­te­grat­ed in the mid 1980s, Strum­mer spent over a decade in semi-retire­ment before return­ing in the late 1990s for what he called his “Indi­an sum­mer,” with a pop­u­lar BBC radio show and a new band, The Mescaleros. But just as he was regain­ing his old momen­tum, Strum­mer died unex­pect­ed­ly of heart fail­ure on Decem­ber 22, 2002, at the age of 50.

In the video above, Strum­mer sings the title song to the The Clash’s 1980 album Lon­don Call­ing, which Rolling Stone ranked  Num­ber 8 on its list of the 500 Great­est Albums of All Time. “Record­ed in 1979 in Lon­don,” writes the mag­a­zine, “which was then wrenched by surg­ing unem­ploy­ment and drug addic­tion, and released in Amer­i­ca in Jan­u­ary 1980, the dawn of an uncer­tain decade, Lon­don Call­ing is 19 songs of apoc­a­lypse, fueled by an unbend­ing faith in rock & roll to beat back the dark­ness.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Clash: West­way to the World

The Clash Star in 1980’s Gang­ster Par­o­dy: Hell W10

Mick Jones, The Clash Gui­tarist, Sings ‘Train in Vain’ at the Library

What If Everyone Jumped at Once? What Color is a Mirror? Big Questions Answered in Viral Videos

in Video - Science | August 21st, 2012

Michael Stevens knows some­thing about viral videos. Yes, he’s a Googler who works on Pro­gram­ming Strat­e­gy at YouTube. That gives him some pro­fes­sion­al bona fides. But he also rolls up his sleeves and pro­duces his own wild­ly pop­u­lar videos under the Vsauce ban­ner. Per­haps you’ll remem­ber when Stevens asked the ques­tion late last year: Just how much does the entire inter­net — all 5 mil­lion ter­abytes of infor­ma­tion — actu­al­ly weigh?  (That got 1.3 mil­lion views, putting it cer­tain­ly into viral ter­ri­to­ry.) Two weeks ago, Stevens returned with anoth­er tan­ta­liz­ing ques­tion: What col­or is a mir­ror? Hint: It’s not what you think. And now, just two days ago, he dropped this ques­tion on us: What would hap­pen if every­one on the plan­et jumped at once? Catch it below.

“Learn English With Ricky Gervais,” A New Podcast Debuts (NSFW)

in Comedy, Language Lessons | August 21st, 2012

Bom­bas­ti­cal­ly billed as “a new land­mark in human com­pre­hen­sion,” Ricky Ger­vais’ video pod­cast, “Learn Eng­lish with Ricky Ger­vais” does, in a way, break new ped­a­gog­i­cal ground. The trail­er above pro­vides a brief glimpse of the series’ first episode, cur­rent­ly avail­able for free on iTunes. The premise of the show is that Ger­vais and his part­ner Karl Pilk­ing­ton, in a posh-look­ing study with globe and fire­place, par­o­dy video lan­guage cours­es for non-Eng­lish speak­ers. Ger­vais’ obnox­ious grandios­i­ty and the almost method­i­cal obtuse­ness of Pilk­ing­ton have become leg­endary to fans of HBO’s The Ricky Ger­vais Show. Miss­ing here is the third mem­ber of that pro­gram, co-cre­ator of the orig­i­nal British The Office, Stephen Mer­chant, but what­ev­er the rea­son for his absence, this con­cept prob­a­bly works bet­ter as a duo, with Ger­vais play­ing the over­bear­ing and some­what abu­sive teacher and Pilk­ing­ton stand­ing in for the hypo­thet­i­cal “stu­dents,” who would no doubt find this method as bewil­der­ing as he does.

The full episode includes sub­ti­tles in a lan­guage that resem­bles Welsh but most­ly seems like gib­ber­ish (cor­rect me, Welsh speak­ers, if I’m wrong), and Ger­vais and Pilkington’s exchanges are chock-full of non-sequiturs and insults, some benign, some skirt­ing the bound­aries of the uncom­fort­ably xeno­pho­bic, but that’s kind of the point, and the source of much of the humor. The char­ac­ters here are too cul­tur­al­ly insen­si­tive and dense to teach any­one any­thing. Gervais—with Mer­chant and Pilkington—uses a sim­i­lar shtick in his An Idiot Abroad series, and it works, I think, but you’ll need to decide for your­self in the case of “Learn Eng­lish,” and you’ll need to down­load iTunes (on the off chance you don’t have it) and sub­scribe to the pod­cast to view the full first episode, which debuted on August 14^th. Ger­vais has said that future episodes may involve either a small fee or adver­tis­ing to cov­er costs.

In the mean­time, stop by our col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons, where you can down­load seri­ous lessons in 40 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, includ­ing French, Span­ish, Ital­ian, Man­darin, Ara­bic, and, yes, Eng­lish and Welsh.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Sonny Rollins’ Enduring Musical Power: A Vintage 1965 Performance and Beyond

in Music | August 20th, 2012

“No one knows why exact­ly Son­ny Rollins, the tenor sax­o­phone colos­sus, hasn’t record­ed a good stu­dio album since the 1960s,” writes New York Review of Books blog­ger Christo­pher Car­roll. “Yet any­one who has seen Rollins per­form on a good night knows that, even at eighty-one, he is still capa­ble of play­ing with the same bril­liance that first made giants like Char­lie Park­er, Miles Davis, and Thelo­nious Monk take an inter­est in him in the 1950s.” “I haven’t heard every note that Rollins has ever record­ed, but I’ve heard lots of them,” writes New York­er film blog­ger Richard Brody, “and if I had to car­ry just one record­ed per­for­mance of his to the here­after, it would be one from Copen­hagen, from 1965.” You’ll find a clip of this very show above, 45 min­utes that might give you a sense of just what Rollins enthu­si­asts like Car­roll and Brody are enthus­ing about.

As Brody describes the full show, “Rollins plays almost unin­ter­rupt­ed­ly for near­ly an hour, pick­ing up heat and whim­sy as he goes along. His full, hearty sound is excep­tion­al­ly sculp­tured, bluff, and pli­able; the notes of the ris­ing phrase in the open­ing num­ber, ‘There Will Nev­er Be Anoth­er You,’ seem to hang in the air like bal­loons. Daw­son sets a brisk, light tem­po, Rollins makes room for [bassist Niels-Hen­ning Ørst­ed] Pedersen’s solo, and then sidles over into the har­mon­ic wilds and lets fly cas­cades of notes and bro­ken, mod­ernistic tones while trad­ing fours with the drum­mer, before end­ing with a suave solo caden­za.” For a more recent show­case of Rollins’ musi­cal pow­ers at work, see also the video just above, a 1992 per­for­mance from his sex­tet in München, Ger­many. Some­times well-respect­ed jazz play­ers spend long stretch­es in the artis­tic wilder­ness — Rollins in par­tic­u­lar hav­ing been “irrepara­bly dam­aged by years spent exper­i­ment­ing with funk, dis­co, and fusion in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies,” in Car­rol­l’s words — but you can nev­er real­ly take your ears off them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins’ New York City Bridge Sab­bat­i­cal Recre­at­ed in 1977 Pio­neer Elec­tron­ics Ad

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Leonard Bernstein Explains Modern Music, From Stravinsky to Cage, with Baseball Analogies (1957)

in Music | August 20th, 2012

We’ve blogged before about Leonard Bernstein’s appear­ances on a 1950s tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Omnibus, “the most suc­cess­ful cul­tur­al mag­a­zine series in the his­to­ry of U.S. com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion,” which fea­tured sci­en­tists and artists pre­sent­ing orig­i­nal ideas and com­po­si­tions. In this doc­u­men­tary, Bern­stein intro­duces his audi­ence to “mod­ern music,” includ­ing such a more or less clas­si­cal com­pos­er as Stravin­sky to the avant-garde instru­men­ta­tion of John Cage’s pre­pared piano and ear­ly elec­tron­ics of Pierre Hen­ry’s musique con­crete. After watch­ing a sex­tet of “musi­cians” “play­ing” tran­sis­tor radios, Bern­stein admits, “Now com­pared with all these wildest out­posts of exper­i­men­ta­tion… Stravin­sky prob­a­bly sounds tame or more like, well… music.” Bern­stein then goes on to make a case for mod­ern, exper­i­men­tal music, hop­ing to per­suade his audi­ence to “hate it less, or hate it more intel­li­gent­ly, or even grow to like it.” He’s a very patient teacher, and he antic­i­pates his stu­dents’ first objec­tion to the mod­ernism of his time: “What has hap­pened to beau­ty?” The beau­ty of Mozart, say, or Tchaikovsky?

In order to answer this ques­tion, Bern­stein uses eas­i­ly visu­al­ized analo­gies to base­ball and numer­ous more or less famil­iar sym­phon­ic pas­sages to explain basic music theory—tonality, har­mon­ics, chord struc­ture, scale pat­terns, melody, dis­so­nance. By the time he comes to describe the con­flict, post-Wag­n­er, between aton­al com­posers and more con­ser­v­a­tive “tonal­ists” around the twen­ty minute mark, you’ve got a pret­ty good idea of what he’s talk­ing about, even if this debate is entire­ly new to you. It’s a cap­ti­vat­ing lec­ture trac­ing the his­to­ry and log­ic of musi­cal com­po­si­tion, and despite Bernstein’s range of ref­er­ences, he’s nev­er eso­teric. He had the patience of a Fred Rogers and media per­son­al­i­ty of a musi­cal Carl Sagan (and, odd­ly, some of the man­ner­isms of Rod Ser­ling). Like Rogers and Sagan, he was part of an age when tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ters could be edu­ca­tors first, enter­tain­ers sec­ond, and solip­sists not at all. Luck­i­ly for us, we’ve got him on Youtube.

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:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed in 1973)

Glenn Gould and Leonard Bern­stein Play Bach

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens Poems — “The Planet on The Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”

in Film, Poetry | August 20th, 2012

On June 11th, Poets House host­ed The 17th Annu­al Poet­ry Walk Across the Brook­lyn Bridge. The event fea­tures “read­ings of the poet­ry of Walt Whit­man, Mar­i­anne Moore, Langston Hugh­es and oth­er greats,” all in order to raise funds for the New York City non-prof­it ded­i­cat­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing a wider audi­ence for poet­ry. And the event is reg­u­lar­ly attend­ed by the great­est cin­e­mat­ic sup­port­er of Poets House — the actor Bill Mur­ray.

In 2001, Mur­ray took part in the fes­tiv­i­ties and read three poems: Sarah Man­gu­so’s “What We Miss,” Cole Porter’s “Brush Up,” and Bil­ly Collins’ “For­get­ful­ness.” (Click links to see the read­ings.)  This year, he returned and delight­ed the audi­ence with a read­ing of two poems by Wal­lace Stevens: “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts.”

But if you’re look­ing for my favorite read­ing, then I’ll steer you back to 2009, when Mur­ray read poems by Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er and Emi­ly Dick­in­son to con­struc­tion work­ers build­ing the new home for Poets House. It’s a charm­ing, very Bill Mur­ray moment.

Find more poet­ry in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

h/t @webacion

Russian Punk Band, Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Deriding Putin, Releases New Single

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | August 18th, 2012

Yes­ter­day was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly a good day for the free­dom of expres­sion in Rus­sia. On the same day that a top court banned gay pride march­es in Moscow for the next 100 years, three young mem­bers of the punk band Pussy Riot were sen­tenced to two years in a penal colony. Their crime?  Stag­ing an anti Putin protest on the altar of the Cathe­dral of Christ the Sav­ior in Moscow. Protests sup­port­ing Pussy Riot were held in 60 cities world­wide (includ­ing one in the cap­i­tal where chess cham­pi­on Gar­ry Kas­parov was beat­en by police); West­ern gov­ern­ments called the sen­tence dis­pro­por­tion­ate; and already the band has released a new sin­gle called “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” The Guardian has cre­at­ed an accom­pa­ny­ing video. Watch it above.…

via Boing­Bo­ing