Christmas Audio Tales: Orson Welles’ Christmas Carol (and More)

in Audio Books | December 25th, 2007

Let me serve up a quick few bits of audio for the hol­i­day.

Let’s start with a free pod­cast of Charles Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol. Writ­ten in 1843, Dicken’s tale remains one of the most pop­u­lar Christ­mas sto­ries of all time. It gave us the indeli­ble char­ac­ters of Ebenez­er Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christ­mas Past, Present, and Future. And it invent­ed the notion of “christ­mas spir­it.”

You can lis­ten to a fair­ly straight­for­ward read­ing of the text on iTunes. But you may want to spend your time with this 1939 radio pre­sen­ta­tion staged by Orson Welles, which notably fea­tures Lionel Bar­ry­more. (Or you can lis­ten to Welles’ 1938 ver­sion here.)

Also, over at Boing­Bo­ing today, Cory Doc­torow has post­ed a record­ing he made of Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice in Won­der­land (etext here). You can down­load it in mp3 or oth­er for­mats. I’ve also added Doc­torow’s read­ing to our Audio­Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion, where you can find an alter­na­tive read­ing of Car­rol­l’s work, plus 100 oth­er clas­sic works on free audio. (For our com­plete col­lec­tion of enrich­ing pod­casts, see our Pod­cast Library.)

How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: The #2 Podcast on iTunesU

in MIT, Uncategorized | December 23rd, 2007

Dur­ing a week when uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts received wide­spread atten­tion (thanks to a very pop­u­lar arti­cle in the NY Times), we’ve kept a close eye on the high-rank­ing pod­casts on iTune­sU. Quite con­sis­tent­ly, one pod­cast — How Did Han­ni­bal Cross the Alps? — has ranked at the top. It cur­rent­ly sits in the #2 posi­tion, right behind What is Exis­ten­tial­ism?.

The Han­ni­bal lec­ture was pre­sent­ed at Stan­ford by Patrick Hunt, an archae­ol­o­gist who recent­ly wrote Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry (see relat­ed post) and whose long term project is to fig­ure out how the great mil­i­tary leader crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with his large army, which includ­ed dozens of war ele­phants. I had a chance to catch up with Patrick and ask him why, over 2,000 years lat­er, the adven­tures of Han­ni­bal still man­age to cap­ture our imag­i­na­tion. Here is what he had to say:

“Here are some rea­sons I think the Han­ni­bal top­ic is mes­mer­iz­ing. First, the logis­tics of mov­ing a large army — at least 25,000 sur­viv­ing sol­diers — over some­times ter­ri­fy­ing moun­tain bar­ri­ers is very daunt­ing and immense­ly chal­leng­ing. Sec­ond, this is expo­nen­tial­ly com­pound­ed by the fact that even with able scouts the increas­ing­ly steep ter­rain and bad weath­er en route to the sum­mit were threat­en­ing­ly unfa­mil­iar to the vast major­i­ty of Han­ni­bal’s army in this ear­ly win­ter of 218 BCE. Even in sum­mer, the weath­er can be harsh and wild­ly unpre­dictable. In win­ter, it can be that much worse. Third, there were Celtic tribes to con­tend with, who would roll boul­ders down on troops and ambush them from (more…)

Andy, Are You Goofing on Apple?

in Apple, Comedy | December 23rd, 2007

Fake Steve Jobs, a wild­ly pop­u­lar blog writ­ten by Daniel Lyons, an edi­tor at Forbes, has been goof­ing on the real Steve Jobs all year. And now things have tak­en an odd turn. Dur­ing the same week that Apple appar­ent­ly shut down ThinkSecret.com (an Apple rumor site) in exchange for cash, Apple may be apply­ing sim­i­lar pres­sure to Fake Steve Jobs. Or maybe not.

If today’s blog post can be tak­en at face val­ue, Apple lawyers have fol­lowed up hard-assed threats with a cash offer (of $500,000) to make FSJ go away. The recent posts all sound con­vinc­ing. But then you note the ref­er­ences to Andy Kauf­man, the mas­ter of walk­ing the line between com­plete sin­cer­i­ty and absur­di­ty. First, there’s the pic­ture of Kauf­man get­ting strong armed dur­ing one of his famous wrestling match­es with women. Next, there’s the ref­er­ence to a “Tony Clifton,” which is the name giv­en to a strange bit char­ac­ter Kauf­man played dur­ing the 1970s (see below).

FSJ is a satire site, and you should­n’t get fooled. But you do. Just like the inevitable dupe does every April 1. Good stuff.

The Final Cut of Blade Runner: Now Out on DVD

in Film | December 19th, 2007

Back in Octo­ber, Rid­ley Scott released a final and defin­i­tive direc­tor’s cut of Blade Run­ner, pre­sent­ing to audi­ences the film that he would have made if stu­dio execs had­n’t med­dled with things. A short two months lat­er, the final cut is now out on DVD. It was released yes­ter­day, bare­ly in time for the hol­i­days. For more on the mak­ing and remak­ing of Blade Run­ner, you can lis­ten to this recent inter­view with Rid­ley Scott.

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Yale Launches Open Courses

in Yale | December 13th, 2007

Click here for 250 Free Online Cours­es From Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Yes­ter­day, Yale announced that it is pro­vid­ing “free and open access to sev­en intro­duc­to­ry cours­es taught by dis­tin­guished teach­ers and schol­ars at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.” I’ve list­ed the course line­up below, with links to each course. You can access the home­page for the project here.

With this launch, Yale becomes the lat­est pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty to give glob­al users access to online edu­ca­tion­al con­tent. But its approach is rather dif­fer­ent. The high pro­file ini­tia­tives led by MIT and UC Berke­ley both deliv­er high vol­umes of con­tent, and they’re designed to be scal­able. (MIT gives users access to mass quan­ti­ties of course mate­ri­als cre­at­ed by its fac­ul­ty, while Berke­ley dis­trib­utes through iTunes and YouTube over 50 cours­es that the uni­ver­si­ty records at a rea­son­able cost.) In con­trast, Yale’s project is more bou­tique and high-touch.

Each course fea­tures a syl­labus, read­ing assign­ments, class notes, and pol­ished lec­tures, which, when tak­en togeth­er, con­tribute to a more round­ed learn­ing expe­ri­ence. The lec­tures can be down­loaded in one of five for­mats (text, audio, flash video, low band­width quick­time video, and high band­width quick­time video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the cours­es to be down­loaded fair­ly eas­i­ly, which means that you can put the lec­tures onto an mp3 play­er if you’re a lit­tle tech savvy. This does raise the ques­tion, how­ev­er: why aren’t the lec­tures also post­ed on Yale’s iTunes site? This would sure­ly facil­i­tate the down­load­ing of lec­tures for many users, and it would offer an easy way to dri­ve sub­stan­tial traf­fic to the cours­es.

As some have already not­ed (see the com­ments on this page), Yale isn’t offer­ing online cours­es in the truest sense, mean­ing you won’t get access to a live instruc­tor here. Nor will you be able to inter­act with oth­er stu­dents. It’s a one-way, soli­tary edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence. But there’s a rea­son for that. Not long ago, Yale exper­i­ment­ed with a more com­pre­hen­sive form of online learn­ing when it cre­at­ed, along with Stan­ford and Oxford, an e‑learning con­sor­tium called “The Alliance for Life­long Learn­ing” (a/k/a All­Learn). For many rea­sons, the ven­ture (where I spent five years) was­n’t ulti­mat­ley viable. And so Yale has opt­ed for anoth­er mod­el that has its own virtues — it’s less cap­i­tal inten­sive; it’s free (All­Learn charged for its cours­es); and it will get edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als into far more peo­ple’s hands, which is per­haps what mat­ters most.

As a quick note, let me add that this project was fund­ed by the Hewlett Foun­da­tion, and Yale expects to add up to 30 addi­tion­al cours­es over the next sev­er­al years.

To vis­it Yale’s open cours­es, vis­it the fol­low­ing links:

• Astron­o­my 160: Fron­tiers and Con­tro­ver­sies in Astro­physics
• Eng­lish 310: Mod­ern Poet­ry
• Phi­los­o­phy 176: Death
• Physics 200: Fun­da­men­tals of Physics
• Polit­i­cal Sci­ence 114: Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy
• Psy­chol­o­gy 110: Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy
• Reli­gious Stud­ies 145: Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment

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Led Zeppelin Reunion — First Images

in Music | December 10th, 2007

Last night in Lon­don, Led Zep­pelin played its first full show togeth­er since 1980 (though they did play a short set at Live Aid in 1985, which I was for­tu­nate enough to see). Here’s the first video clip to make its way onto YouTube.

Nobel Prize Winners on YouTube

in Video - Politics/Society | December 10th, 2007

YouTube gets smarter one painful­ly small step at a time. First cours­es from Berke­ley; next videos of Nobel Prize win­ners.  More com­ing?

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Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — Free Audiobook Podcasts

in Audio Books | December 9th, 2007

Joseph Con­rad would be turn­ing 150 years old, and to mark the occa­sion, The Guardian has tak­en a good look back at the Pol­ish-born writer who wrote some of Eng­land’s finest nov­els, even though Eng­lish was his third lan­guage. (Pol­ish and French were his first two.) Con­rad’s mas­ter­piece, of course, is The Heart of Dark­ness (1899), and we’ll take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to high­light two free audio­book ver­sions of the text. The first ver­sion comes rec­om­mend­ed by a read­er over at Metafil­ter. You can find the mp3 files here. A second/different ver­sion can be found on iTunes. (Both ver­sions per­ma­nent­ly reside in our Audio­book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.)

Learning Foreign Languages the Mango Way

in English Language, Language Lessons | December 4th, 2007

What’s an easy way to learn a new lan­guage at no cost, when­ev­er and wher­ev­er you want? One is to take advan­tage of our exten­sive col­lec­tion of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons. Anoth­er is to check out Man­go Lan­guages, a web site that offers free online lan­guage cours­es that will teach you the basics in French, Ger­man, Eng­lish, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Man­darin Chi­nese, Japan­ese and more.

We’d usu­al­ly out­line the pros and cons of learn­ing lan­guages the Man­go Way. But there’s no rea­son to rein­vent the wheel. So we’re direct­ing your atten­tion to Jon Gor­don, the host of Future Tense, whose recent broad­cast took a short look at Man­go’s offer­ing. You can lis­ten to it here (MP3 — RealAu­dio — Feed) and read some more here. You can also access Future Tense on iTunes.

NOTE: To get start­ed with Man­go Lan­guages, you will need to reg­is­ter with the web­site.

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On Hanukkah

in Comedy, Television | December 4th, 2007

For the first night of Hanukkah, we bring you a clas­sic bit from Sat­ur­day Night Live (1989) star­ring Jon Lovitz called “Hanukkah Har­ry Saves Christ­mas.” You can watch the video direct­ly on NBC’s site along with oth­er vin­tage SNL videos. (Sor­ry, I could­n’t find an embed for this one.)