JFK’s Inauguration: 50 Years Ago Today

in History, Politics | January 20th, 2011

We have been going a lit­tle vin­tage late­ly, and we’ll have to do it one more day. For today marks the 50th anniver­sary of John F. Kennedy’s inau­gu­ra­tion, the begin­ing of a pres­i­den­cy that inspired many, even though it last­ed scarce­ly more than 1000 days. Kennedy’s inau­gur­al speech ran 1364 words and took 14 min­utes to deliv­er. That makes it sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­er than the longest inau­gur­al address (William Hen­ry Har­ri­son took 8,445 words in 1841) but longer than the ters­est one – George Wash­ing­ton spoke mere­ly 135 words dur­ing his sec­ond address. With 50 years of hind­sight, we still con­sid­er Kennedy’s speech one of the finest inau­gur­al address­es because, as E.J. Dionne writes this week, it chal­lenged the nation (and still does today) “to har­ness real­ism to ide­al­ism, patri­o­tism to ser­vice, nation­al inter­est to uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion,” espe­cial­ly with the eter­nal line: “And so, my fel­low Amer­i­cans: ask not what your coun­try can do for you — ask what you can do for your coun­try.” You can revis­it the speech in full above, and also find oth­er great archival footage with­in the new YouTube Chan­nel spon­sored by the JFK Pres­i­den­tial Library.

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

in Apple, Life, Philosophy | January 18th, 2011

Every so often, we like to bring back a favorite talk of ours, and today seemed like a bet­ter day than most. Speak­ing at Stan­ford’s com­mence­ment in 2005, Steve Jobs gives the grad­u­ates a glimpse of his life phi­los­o­phy. Some pearls of wis­dom here for the young, to be sure. But if you have some more life under your belt, you’ll appre­ci­ate the mes­sage even more. The talk ends with Jobs telling the stu­dents to “stay hun­gry, stay fool­ish,” a line from The Whole Earth Cat­a­log, the Bible of Steve Jobs’ gen­er­a­tion, which became freely avail­able online back in 2009…

Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age

in History, Literature, Media, Technology | January 18th, 2011

There’s noth­ing new about it. Major peri­ods of tech­no­log­i­cal change have always engen­dered dis­lo­ca­tion and debate. Some resist the changes wrought by new tech­nol­o­gy, and oth­ers embrace them. 1968 brings us back to one such moment, when the Amer­i­can nov­el­ist Nor­man Mail­er and com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist Mar­shall McLuhan appeared on the CBC pro­gram, The Sum­mer Way, to debate the rel­a­tive mer­its of our Electronic/Information Age. Are we alien­at­ing our­selves as we push the elec­tron­ic enve­lope? Or have we entered a val­ue neu­tral state (if not some­thing bet­ter)? The two big thinkers hash out the ques­tion for 28 min­utes. You can watch the con­ver­sa­tion in its entire­ty (28 min­utes) 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:

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan’s 1969 Deck of Cards, Designed For Out-of-the-Box Think­ing

William F. Buckley Threatens to “Smash” Noam Chomsky in the Face (1969)

in History, Politics | January 15th, 2011

So much for the Gold­en Age of Civil­i­ty in Amer­i­ca – but at least it was said with a lit­tle smile and the ensu­ing debate had some sub­stance…

Note: A read­er sug­gests in our com­ments that Buck­ley was jok­ing­ly allud­ing here to a pre­vi­ous con­fronta­tion­al moment with Gore Vidal, and it sounds about right. (“I’ll sock you in the god­damn face and you’ll stay plas­tered.”)

Water Sculpture

in Art | January 14th, 2011

Shinichi Maruya­ma, a Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­ph­er now liv­ing in New York, uses sim­ply his hands, glass­es of water and a Phase One P45 cam­era to cre­ate ele­gant water sculp­tures. “No mat­ter how many times I repeat the same process of throw­ing [water] in the air, I nev­er achieve the same result. And I am so fas­ci­nat­ed by this unex­pect­ed inter­ac­tion of liq­uids col­lid­ing … that I am over­whelmed by its beau­ty.” Find an inter­view with Maruya­ma here and more images of his work here. On a rather relat­ed note, don’t miss our pre­vi­ous post, Water Drop Filmed in 10,000 Frames Per Sec­ond. Anoth­er thing of beau­ty.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

in Film, Literature, Sci Fi | January 13th, 2011

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown, a doc­u­men­tary from 2008, is avail­able online. Named the Best Doc­u­men­tary at the 2008 Com­ic-Con Inter­na­tion­al Inde­pen­dent Film Fes­ti­val, the film revis­its the life and writ­ings of H.P. Love­craft, the father of mod­ern hor­ror fic­tion. And it fea­tures impor­tant con­tem­po­rary artists (from film­mak­ers John Car­pen­ter and Guiller­mo Del Toro, to writ­ers along the lines of Neil Gaiman), all talk­ing about Love­craft’s influ­ence on their dark fan­ta­sy tra­di­tion.

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!

MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

in MIT, Online Courses | January 13th, 2011

This week, MIT’s Open­Course­Ware project launched OCW Schol­ar, a new series of cours­es “designed for inde­pen­dent learn­ers who have few addi­tion­al resources avail­able to them.” To date, MIT has giv­en stu­dents access to iso­lat­ed mate­ri­als from MIT cours­es. Now, with this new ini­tia­tive, life­long learn­ers can work with a more round­ed set of resources. OWC Schol­ar takes video lec­tures, home­work prob­lems, prob­lem solv­ing videos, sim­u­la­tions, read­ings, etc., and stitch­es them into a struc­tured cur­ricu­lum. Per­fect for the self-dis­ci­plined stu­dent.

Below we have list­ed the first five cours­es in the OWC Schol­ar col­lec­tion. (They’re entire­ly free.) Fast for­ward three years and you will find 20 cours­es online, says MIT. All will be added to our big list of Free Online Cours­es.

Physics 1: Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics
Physics II: Elec­tric­i­ty and Mag­net­ism
Intro­duc­tion to Sol­id State Chem­istry
Sin­gle Vari­able Cal­cu­lus
Mul­ti­vari­able Cal­cu­lus

How Musical Are You?

in Music | January 12th, 2011

Are you blessed with a musi­cal brain? If you care to find out, the BBC is now run­ning an exper­i­ment – How Musi­cal Are You? – that assess­es your over­all rela­tion­ship with music. It includes ques­tion­naires and tests designed to see whether you can group togeth­er dif­fer­ent musi­cal styles, mem­o­rize tunes and rec­og­nize the beat in a piece of music. It all takes about 25 min­utes, and, when you’re done, you will receive some (desir­able or unde­sir­able) feed­back. This exper­i­ment was designed by researchers at the Music, Mind and Brain Research Group, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, and your par­tic­i­pa­tion will con­tribute to their research into the musi­cal brain. Note: You will need to reg­is­ter with the BBC to par­tic­i­pate.

A Brief History of Product Placement in Movies

in Film | January 11th, 2011

Prod­uct place­ment — it became com­mon­place dur­ing the 1980s, but it has a much longer his­to­ry, one that goes right back to the begin­ning of film. Oliv­er Noble’s video light­ly (empha­sis on light­ly) traces the evo­lu­tion of con­spic­u­ous prod­uct place­ment in film. A lit­tle tale of the not-so-good, the bad and the ugly…

World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair

in Science, Video - Science | January 10th, 2011

Fun with sci­ence. The world’s small­est peri­od­ic table etched onto a strand of hair belong­ing to chem­istry Pro­fes­sor Mar­tyn Poli­akoff (Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham). This clip comes from the Peri­od­ic Videos col­lec­tion and it comes rec­om­mend by the great @OliverSacks.

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:

Inter­ac­tive Peri­od­ic Table of Ele­ments Shows How the Ele­ments Get Used in Mak­ing Every­day Things

A Peri­od­ic Table Visu­al­iz­ing the Year & Coun­try in Which Each Ele­ment Was Dis­cov­ered

The Peri­od­ic Table of Ele­ments Pre­sent­ed as Inter­ac­tive Haikus

The Peri­od­ic Table of Endan­gered Ele­ments: Visu­al­iz­ing the Chem­i­cal Ele­ments That Could Van­ish Before You Know It