File This Under “I Don’t Get It”

in Music | June 14th, 2008

YouTube is high­light­ing today a video that fea­tures a young girl play­ing Mozart around the world. Hence, the video’s title “Where in Heav­en is Mozart?” Now, the idea is nice. But why is Pachel­bel’s Canon the sound­track for the clip? Is Eine kleine Nacht­musik no longer rec­og­niz­able enough? Kind of sug­gests that we’ve offi­cial­ly achieved Pachel­bel Overkill (if it did­n’t hap­pen long, long ago). Per­haps this explains why you can now find com­ic rants against P’s Canon on YouTube as well.

Find free Clas­si­cal Music pod­casts here.

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Harry Potter Prequel Now Online

in Books | June 14th, 2008

The Har­ry Pot­ter pre­quel that JK Rowl­ing wrote for char­i­ty is now avail­able online. To read it, click here, then click “Read our authors’ sto­ries,” and then click JK Rowl­ing.

Relat­ed:

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

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Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

in Uncategorized | June 13th, 2008

In case you missed it, a new piece in the Atlantic Month­ly — Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid? — rais­es some ques­tions about whether the inter­net is chang­ing the way we think. Or, to para­phrase, is it tin­ker­ing with our brains, remap­ping the neur­al cir­cuit­ry, repro­gram­ming our mem­o­ry, short­en­ing our con­cen­tra­tion, mak­ing it hard­er to read books and long arti­cles, etc. Anec­dotes con­firm­ing this trend abound. But now there’s new sci­en­tif­ic research that seems to back it up. Have a read.

In the mean­time, if you want some inter­net con­tent that will unques­tion­ably make you smarter, check our list of 225 Free Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

via The Wired Cam­pus

Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds

in English Language | June 9th, 2008

Life­hack­er is run­ning a good piece today that high­lights a series of web-based lan­guage tools for any­one look­ing to fig­ure out a word’s def­i­n­i­tion, trans­la­tion, pro­nun­ci­a­tion, syn­onym, or antonym. Word nerds, this could be your lucky day…

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J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Grads Why Success Begins with Failure

in Harvard, Life | June 7th, 2008

Here’s J.K. Rowl­ing speak­ing with elo­quence at Har­vard’s grad­u­a­tion, 2008. You’ll find a lit­tle wit (although far dif­fer­ent than the kind on dis­play when Sacha Baron Cohen — a.k.a. Ali G & Borat — spoke at Har­vard grad­u­a­tion fes­tiv­i­ties in 2004). And then there’s the sage advice that she dis­pens­es. Some good thoughts on why suc­cess is ulti­mate­ly pred­i­cat­ed on fail­ure (thoughts that call to mind Steve Jobs’ now famous talk at Stan­ford), and why we need to exer­cise the pow­er of imag­i­na­tion — and empa­thy — in the broad­est sense. We have oth­er fine grad­u­a­tion speech­es post­ed below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dart­mouth Grad­u­a­tion

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

Stephen Col­bert Dish­es Out Wis­dom & Laughs at North­west­ern

Puppets Deconstruct Orwell’s 1984

in Random | June 6th, 2008

Since we high­light­ed a free audio book of George Orwell’s 1984 ear­li­er in the week, it seemed worth post­ing this bit from Boing­Bo­ing TV — a nice pup­pet decon­struc­tion of Orwell’s clas­sic. What a way to start the week­end.

Learn a Language Online

in Language Lessons | June 5th, 2008

MSN-Sym­pa­ti­co has been run­ning a piece that cov­ers the ins-and-outs of learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage online. The piece high­lights free resources that you can access on the web, includ­ing our col­lec­tion of Free For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts, but also many oth­er worth­while mate­ri­als. Free lan­guage dic­tio­nar­ies, flash cards, inter­ac­tive games, lan­guage learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties, inter­na­tion­al news and radio shows, for­mal uni­ver­si­ty cours­es — they’re all list­ed here.

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How Not to Get Caught Reading at Work

in Books | June 4th, 2008

This is a clever web site cre­at­ed by the folks at the New Zealand Book Coun­cil. The site cre­ates a repli­ca of a PC desk­top envi­ron­ment, and, with­in the fold­ers, you’ll find texts that can be read on the sly.

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Remembering Bo Diddley on YouTube

in Music | June 3rd, 2008

Pio­neer­ing gui­tarist Bo Did­dley passed away yes­ter­day at 79. You can find a nice video trib­ute here. Among them, you’ll find this good old chest­nut:

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Robot Conducts The Detroit Symphony Orchestra

in Music, Random | May 28th, 2008

File this under “Ran­dom” …

Con­tribute to The Pow­er of Dreams Music Edu­ca­tion Fund at www.detroitsymphony.com and click on Edu­ca­tion or go here.

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