Celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge with a Free iPad App

in History, iPad | May 26th, 2012

When it opened to vehi­cle traf­fic in May, 1937 the Gold­en Gate Bridge was the longest sus­pen­sion bridge in the world. Since then eight bridges have sur­passed it in length, but the icon­ic inter­na­tion­al orange span is still the most pho­tographed bridge in the world. This month marks the Gold­en Gate’s 75^th anniver­sary and the Cal­i­for­nia His­tor­i­cal Society’s exhib­it, A Wild Flight of the Imag­i­na­tion, cel­e­brates the event with a look at the bridge’s con­struc­tion. The exhib­it has also been made avail­able as a free eBook for the iPad, which includes his­toric pho­tographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange as well as a short film of bridge design­er Joseph Strauss speak­ing to a reporter dur­ing the bridge’s con­struc­tion. At the time, experts said that the Gold­en Gate strait’s fero­cious winds and strong, swirling cur­rents would make con­struc­tion impos­si­ble. But the design intro­duced deflec­tion the­o­ry, which uti­lizes a thin, flex­i­ble road­way and long cables that reduce struc­tur­al stress.

The inter­ac­tive app is accom­pa­nied by a musi­cal score—the open­ing selec­tion from com­pos­er Rob Kapilow’s Chrysopy­lae, Greek for “Gold­en Gate.” Ear­ly users of the eBook report­ed glitch­es with the app’s audio. The cul­prit may have been the side mute switch, which must be flipped off for the audio to work. Also, make sure your iPad’s vol­ume is up. Like the exhib­it in the society’s San Fran­cis­co muse­um, the app includes access to images of some 350 objects and ephemera relat­ed to the span’s con­struc­tion. Almost as nice as a walk across the bridge’s 1.7 miles, and not near­ly as windy.

Kate Rix writes about k‑12 instruc­tion and high­er ed. 

ZeroN: An Amazing, Gravity-Defying New Interactive Technology at M.I.T.

in MIT, Technology | May 25th, 2012

In Stephen Spiel­berg’s film E.T. The Extra-Ter­res­tri­al there is a mem­o­rable scene in which a group of chil­dren ask a strand­ed vis­i­tor from out­er space where he is from, and he tries to com­mu­ni­cate by using an unseen force to lift a group of balls into mid-air and move them around to sim­u­late a solar sys­tem. Now a researcher at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy has tapped into the physics of mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion to cre­ate some­thing sim­i­lar: a com­put­er-con­trolled sys­tem that allows users to manip­u­late a met­al sphere float­ing in space.

“I think there is some­thing fun­da­men­tal behind moti­va­tions to lib­er­ate phys­i­cal mat­ter from grav­i­ty and enable con­trol,” writes Jin­ha Lee on his Web site. “The moti­va­tion has exist­ed as a shared dream amongst humans for mil­len­nia. It is an idea found in mytholo­gies, desired by alchemists, and visu­al­ized in Sci­ence Fic­tion movies. I have aspired to cre­ate a space where we can expe­ri­ence a glimpse of this future.”

Lee’s device is part of the M.I.T. Tan­gi­ble Media Group’s larg­er project of giv­ing phys­i­cal form to dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion. The group strives to bring togeth­er the sep­a­rate worlds of bits and atoms in a Tan­gi­ble User Inter­face, or TUI, to allow peo­ple to use their nat­u­ral­ly evolved phys­i­cal dex­ter­i­ty to visu­al­ize and manip­u­late com­pu­ta­tion. To help achieve this, Lee devel­oped a pro­gram­ma­ble inter­face ele­ment he calls “ZeroN.” He describes it in the abstract of a paper pub­lished last Octo­ber with col­lab­o­ra­tors Reh­mi Post and Hiroshi Ishii:

ZeroN serves as a tan­gi­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a 3D coor­di­nate of the vir­tu­al world through which users can see, feel, and con­trol com­pu­ta­tion. To acom­plish this we devel­oped a mag­net­ic con­trol sys­tem that can lev­i­tate and actu­ate a per­ma­nent mag­net in a pre-defined 3D vol­ume. This is com­bined with an opti­cal track­ing and dis­play sys­tem that projects images on the lev­i­tat­ing object. We present appli­ca­tions that explore this new inter­ac­tion modal­i­ty. Users are invit­ed to place or move the ZeroN object just as they can place objects on sur­faces. For exam­ple, users can place the sun above phys­i­cal objects to cast dig­i­tal shad­ows, or place a plan­et that will start revolv­ing based on sim­u­lat­ed phys­i­cal con­di­tions.

You can access the com­plete paper as a PDF. And you can find sim­i­lar videos when you explore our Tech­nol­o­gy sec­tion.

David Rees and His One-Man Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Service

in Comedy | May 25th, 2012

This is for any­one with a love of old school wood­work­ing — luthiers, ébénistes and the rest. In 2009, the humorist David Rees gave up car­toon­ing and opened up his one-man arti­sanal pen­cil sharp­en­ing ser­vice in Bea­con, New York, an old fac­to­ry town along the Hud­son Riv­er. Just a man, some high qual­i­ty cedar, a knife, and an occa­sion­al pen­cil sharp­er revive a bygone era and a dis­ap­pear­ing instru­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. 400 pen­cils lat­er, at $15 a pop, Rees has some­thing good going. You can learn more about Rees and his crafts­man­ship by read­ing (seri­ous­ly) his new book, How to Sharp­en Pen­cils, with a for­ward by John Hodg­man.

Note: Rees uses some NSFW lan­guage dur­ing the video.

New Great Gatsby, On the Road Adaptations Revive an Old Debate: Can Great Books Make Great Movies?

in Film, Literature | May 24th, 2012

Two of the great­est Amer­i­can nov­els of the 20th century–F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s The Great Gats­by and Jack Ker­ouac’s On the Road–are head­ed for the big screen lat­er this year, and lit­er­ary fans are brac­ing for the worst.

Or at least that’s very much the case with Baz Luhrman­n’s 3‑D ver­sion of The Great Gats­by, star­ring Leonar­do DiCaprio as Jay Gats­by, Carey Mul­li­gan as Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire as nar­ra­tor Nick Car­raway. The trail­er was released ear­li­er this week (see above) and the Inter­net has been buzzing. A head­line writer at the New York Dai­ly News observed that the new adap­ta­tion by the Aus­tralian film­mak­er who brought us Moulin Rouge! “won’t be your high school teacher’s F. Scott Fitzger­ald.” Over at the Wall Street Jour­nal’s “Speakeasy” blog, Lyne­ka Lit­tle described the music in the trail­er (by those Jazz Age lumi­nar­ies Kanye West, Jay‑Z and Jack White) as “awful­ly con­tem­po­rary.” But when it comes to the per­fect choice of words, the prize must go to actor James Urba­ni­ak, who said yes­ter­day on Twit­ter, “The Great Gats­by 3D: Borne back cease­less­ly into your face.”

Lit­er­ary purists are a bit more hope­ful when it comes to the first-ever film of Ker­ouac’s On the Road. In The New York Times yes­ter­day, Steve Chagol­lan described the painstak­ing research con­duct­ed by direc­tor Wal­ter Salles, best known for his 2004 film about Che Gue­vara, The Motor­cy­cle Diaries. The Brazil­ian direc­tor retraced Ker­ouac’s jour­neys across North Amer­i­ca and inter­viewed schol­ars and sur­viv­ing mem­bers of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion. “I was well aware that my pas­sion for the book was not suf­fi­cient to jus­ti­fy launch­ing into an adap­ta­tion straight away,” Salles told the Times. “In fact, mak­ing the fea­ture film ceased to be my main con­cern at the time. Under­stand­ing and get­ting to know these peo­ple bet­ter became my main goal.” Still, as Chagol­lan put it, Beat afi­ciona­dos will be watch­ing the film very close­ly, “cer­tain to cast an unfor­giv­ing eye.”

There’s an old say­ing: Good books make bad movies, and vice ver­sa. But is it true? It’s not dif­fi­cult to come up with the names of a few good books that have been made into mem­o­rable movies. Phillip Noyce’s adap­ta­tion of Gra­ham Greene’s The Qui­et Amer­i­can comes to mind. So does Blake Edward­s’s film of Tru­man Capote’s Break­fast at Tiffany’s and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s film of Antho­ny Burgess’s A Clock­work Orange. It’s even pos­si­ble to think of a great film made from a lit­er­ary mas­ter­piece, as in the case of Kubrick­’s adap­ta­tion of Vladimir Nabokov’s Loli­ta. Kubrick expressed his thoughts on trans­lat­ing books into films in a 1960–1961 essay, “Words and Movies”:

It’s some­times said that a great nov­el makes a less promis­ing basis for a film than a nov­el which is mere­ly good. I don’t think that adapt­ing great nov­els presents any spe­cial prob­lems which are not involved in adapt­ing good nov­els or mediocre nov­els; except that you will be more heav­i­ly crit­i­cised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it’s good. I think almost any nov­el can be suc­cess­ful­ly adapt­ed, pro­vid­ed it is not one whose aes­thet­ic integri­ty is lost along with its length. For exam­ple, the kind of nov­el in which a great deal and vari­ety of action is absolute­ly essen­tial to the sto­ry, so that it los­es much of its point when you sub­tract heav­i­ly from the num­ber of events or their devel­op­ment. Peo­ple have asked me how it is pos­si­ble to make a film out of Loli­ta when so much of the qual­i­ty of the book depends on Nabokov’s prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is sim­ply mis­un­der­stand­ing just what a great book is. Of course, the qual­i­ty of the writ­ing is one of the ele­ments that make a nov­el great. But this qual­i­ty is a result of the qual­i­ty of the writer’s obses­sion with his sub­ject, with a theme and a con­cept and a view of life and an under­stand­ing of char­ac­ter. Style is what an artist uses to fas­ci­nate the behold­er in order to con­vey to him his feel­ings and emo­tions and thoughts. These are what have to be drama­tised, not the style. The drama­tis­ing has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it real­ly grasps the con­tent. And in doing this it will bring out anoth­er side of the struc­ture which has gone into the nov­el. It may or may not be as good as the nov­el; some­times it may in cer­tain ways be even bet­ter.

What do you think? Are you look­ing for­ward to see­ing the new Great Gats­by and On the Road films? And can you think of a great book that has been made into an equal­ly great–or even greater–movie?

Watch: New Film by Roman Polanski, Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Sir Ben Kingsley & Prada Shoes

in Film | May 24th, 2012

At the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val this week, Roman Polan­s­ki screened a restored ver­sion of his 1979 film, Tess. And then he tan­ta­lized the audi­ence, at least momen­tar­i­ly, when he offered a sneak pre­view of his new film, which turned out to be a cin­e­mat­ic com­mer­cial for Pra­da. A Ther­a­py stars Hele­na Bon­ham Carter and Sir Ben Kings­ley, with Pra­da shoes and coat serv­ing as the props. Or actu­al­ly it’s the oth­er way around.

Film­mak­ers putting their tal­ents in the ser­vice of fash­ion design­ers isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly new. Just two years ago, David Lynch shot his own film, Lady Blue Shang­hai, for Dior. It starred the Oscar-win­ning French actress Mar­i­on Cotil­lard. You can find it online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

Ing­mar Bergman’s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

The Idea TED Didn’t Consider Worth Spreading: The Rich Aren’t Really Job Creators

in Current Affairs, TED Talks | May 23rd, 2012

Late last week, The Nation­al Jour­nal pub­lished a sto­ry called The Inequal­i­ty Speech That TED Won’t Show You, along with a relat­ed sto­ry explain­ing the con­tro­ver­sy, which boils down to this:

TED orga­niz­ers invit­ed a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire Seat­tle ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist named Nick Hanauer – the first non­fam­i­ly investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED Uni­ver­si­ty con­fer­ence. Inequal­i­ty was the top­ic – specif­i­cal­ly, Hanauer’s con­tention that the mid­dle class, and not wealthy inno­va­tors like him­self, are America’s true “job cre­ators.”…

You can’t find that speech online. [Note: it has now been inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished on YouTube.]  TED offi­cials told Hanauer ini­tial­ly they were eager to dis­trib­ute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e‑mail in late April. But ear­ly this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “polit­i­cal” and too con­tro­ver­sial for post­ing.

The Nation­al Jour­nal and Hanauer present it as a case of cen­sor­ship. But TED’s lead cura­tor Chris Ander­son respond­ed in a blog post, say­ing: “Our pol­i­cy is to post only talks that are tru­ly spe­cial. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dis­mal par­ti­san head-butting peo­ple can find every day else­where in the media.” He went on to offer this anal­o­gy: Some­times you send an op-ed to The New York Times and they don’t pub­lish it. Does that mean your ideas are being cen­sored? Or does it maybe mean your ideas aren’t very well put? Or did some­one else do a bet­ter job of fram­ing the argu­ment?

One way or anoth­er, TED did­n’t see Hanauer’s ideas as being “worth spread­ing.” The video now appears on YouTube. You can watch it above and decide what you think: Cen­sor­ship or selec­tiv­i­ty? Or, let me add a third option: a desire to please any­one and every­one at the expense of open­ing deeply-held beliefs and oft-stat­ed mantras to real debate?

via Fora

Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map

in History, Stanford | May 19th, 2012

Schol­ars of ancient his­to­ry and IT experts at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty have col­lab­o­rat­ed to cre­ate a nov­el way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospa­tial net­work mod­el, allows vis­i­tors to expe­ri­ence the strat­e­gy behind trav­el in antiq­ui­ty. (Find a handy tuto­r­i­al for using the sys­tem on the Web and YouTube). The ORBIS map includes about 750 most­ly urban set­tle­ments of the Roman peri­od. Users of the mod­el can select a point of ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion for a trip and then choose from a num­ber of options to deter­mine either the cheap­est, fastest or short­est route. Select riv­er or  open sea trans­port for the cheap­est route. Pick road trav­el by pack ani­mal or wag­on for the short­est, but most expen­sive, trip. In cre­at­ing ORBIS, his­to­ri­ans used ancient maps and records along with mod­ern-day weath­er infor­ma­tion and results from exper­i­ments sail­ing in ancient-style ships to cal­cu­late the trav­el con­di­tions of 2,000 years ago.

Aside from the site’s inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, there’s enough dis­cus­sion in ORBIS about ancient Roman trans­port to sat­is­fy the biggest his­to­ry buff but the real fun is in explor­ing how peo­ple and goods were moved across the empire. Cities on the edge of the empire, for exam­ple, were more expen­sive to trans­port to, even if they weren’t that far away. All trips vary in time and cost, how­ev­er, depend­ing upon the time of year and mode of trav­el. The fastest route to deliv­er wheat from Cartha­go (mod­ern-day Tunisia) to Lon­dini­um (Lon­don) would take more than 27 days under the best trav­el con­di­tions (dur­ing July). Car­go would move across the Mediter­ranean by open sea, across south­west­ern France by river­boat and along the coast to south­east­ern Eng­land. The cost? A lit­tle less than 8 dinarii per kilo­gram of wheat using a don­key for land trans­port. Com­pare that to oth­er routes that elim­i­nate the open sea dur­ing win­ter months, or road trav­el to save mon­ey, and you’re close to under­stand­ing why it was no pic­nic rul­ing the Roman Empire.

The Miracle of Flight, the Classic Early Animation by Terry Gilliam

in Animation, Comedy, Film | May 18th, 2012

As Michael Palin once put it, “there’s no get­ting away from the wit, won­der and wiz­ardry of the man Cahiers du Ciné­ma once described as Ter­ry Gilliam.”

Those qual­i­ties are clear­ly vis­i­ble in this very fun­ny ear­ly film by Gilliam called The Mir­a­cle of Flight. The film was made in 1971 for the Amer­i­can-British TV show The Mar­ty Feld­man Com­e­dy Machine. Mon­ty Python was on hia­tus that year, so Gilliam went to work for the short-lived Com­e­dy Machine, cre­at­ing the open­ing cred­it sequence and var­i­ous ani­mat­ed fea­tures using his trade­mark air­brush and paper cutout tech­niques. (Watch his primer on doing your own cutout ani­ma­tion here.) The mate­r­i­al for The Mir­a­cle of Flight was appar­ent­ly pack­aged as a stand-alone film in 1974, right after Gilliam’s first film, Sto­ry­time.  It was lat­er used as a bonus fea­ture before the­atri­cal screen­ings of Gilliam movies, and dur­ing live Python per­for­mances. The film ver­sion is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the one aired on the Com­e­dy Machine. Accord­ing to Smarter Than The Aver­age, “for the the­atri­cal ver­sion it lost a griz­zly punch­line where a man who had failed at his attempt to fly by emu­lat­ing the ergonom­ics of a bird takes his revenge by rip­ping the bird to pieces.” The writer then goes on to describe details only a Python fanat­ic could notice:

The Mir­a­cle of Flight in par­tic­u­lar is a cor­nu­copia of odd­i­ties for the Python con­nois­seur, con­tain­ing as it does one line record­ed by Ter­ry Jones, the tarred-and-feath­ered char­ac­ter who appears in Ani­ma­tions of Mor­tal­i­ty, the moun­tain in the finale of the Mean­ing of Life com­put­er game and the ani­mat­ed woman from Python who says “Turn that tele­vi­sion off–you know it’s bad for your eyes”. Most baf­fling of all is the muzak in the air­port ter­mi­nal, which is the same as used in the Den­tal sequence of the Mean­ing of Life CD-Rom near­ly thir­ty years lat­er. For sheer num­bers of Python iconog­ra­phy appear­ing in a non-Python pro­duc­tion, The Mir­a­cle of Flight’s only rival is Eric Idle’s music video for George Har­rison’s Cracker­box Palace. But I digress.

Indeed. But we enjoyed it. And you’ll enjoy The Mir­a­cle of Flight, which might more accu­rate­ly be called The Tri­umph of Grav­i­ty.

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!

Morgan Freeman Teaches Kids to Read in Vintage Electric Company Footage from 1971

in Education, K-12, Television | May 17th, 2012

Every actor has to start some­where, and Mor­gan Free­man (Dri­ving Miss Daisy, The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion, and Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby) could have done worse than join­ing the cast of The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny, the PBS chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The orig­i­nal cast includ­ed Bill Cos­by and Rita Moreno (not bad com­pa­ny), and the ver­sa­tile Free­man played a series of char­ac­ters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vin­cent the Veg­etable Vam­pire,” and then, of course, Easy Read­er. If you’re of my gen­er­a­tion, you might rec­og­nize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Read­er (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rid­er) in action, teach­ing kids to read in his effort­less­ly cool, hip­ster way. H/T Metafil­ter

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!

A Brief History of John Baldessari, Narrated by Tom Waits

in Art, Film | May 17th, 2012

Tom Waits nar­rates this whim­si­cal, fast-mov­ing intro­duc­tion to the life and work of West-Coast con­cep­tu­al artist John Baldessari. The film was direct­ed by Hen­ry Joost and Ariel Schul­man, the cre­ative team behind Cat­fish and Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty 3. It was made for the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art’s inau­gur­al Art & Film Gala, held last Novem­ber in hon­or of Baldessari and Clint East­wood. Baldessari mix­es a vari­ety of media in his art, includ­ing sculp­ture, paint­ing, print­mak­ing and video. “His work,” writes Elis­a­beth Roark of Grove Art Online, “is char­ac­ter­ized by a con­scious­ness of lan­guage evi­dent in his use of puns, seman­tics based on the struc­tural­ism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and by the incor­po­ra­tion of mate­r­i­al drawn from pop­u­lar cul­ture.” When Joost and Schul­man ask Baldessari how he will be remem­bered 100 years hence, he says dry­ly, “I’m the guy who puts dots over peo­ple’s faces.”

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:

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Makes Com­ic Appear­ance on Fer­n­wood Tonight (1977)

Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukows­ki Poems, “The Laugh­ing Heart” and “Nir­vana”