The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Moving Images

in History | November 10th, 2009

When I trav­eled to East Berlin in 1988, my first time as a young­ster, I read reports of a split between the hard­line East Ger­man regime and the open­ing Sovi­et gov­ern­ment. But nobody real­ly paid much atten­tion to that news. Less than a year lat­er, the Iron Cur­tain and the Berlin Wall would be gone, all of it. Above, you can watch footage that shows how East Ger­mans expe­ri­enced that moment, and here, cour­tesy of @courosa, you can find a series of vivid his­tor­i­cal images that com­mem­o­rate the events that took place 20 years ago.

World War I Remembered in Second Life

in History, Literature | November 9th, 2009

Excel­lent find by Stephen Grant… You can now expe­ri­ence the bat­tle lines of World War I in Sec­ond Life, thanks to The First World War Poet­ry Dig­i­tal Archive and the Learn­ing Tech­nolo­gies Group at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty. WWI shocked the West­ern world with its land­scape-chang­ing war­fare and high tech car­nage. Remem­brances of “The Great War” live on in some remark­able poet­ry and lit­er­a­ture. And now Sec­ond Life too. Find more infor­ma­tion on this project here.

Philosophers Don’t Die Pretty

in Philosophy | November 9th, 2009

Cour­tesy of Simon Critch­ley, who teach­es phi­los­o­phy at The New School for Social Research…

SNL Shames Goldman Sachs

in Comedy | November 8th, 2009

Man, I love plu­to­crat humor in the morn­ing…

Carl Sagan’s Last Interview

in Science | November 5th, 2009

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was inter­viewed by Char­lie Rose and dis­cussed the trou­bled state of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge in Amer­i­ca, and how it threat­ens our democ­ra­cy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, mak­ing the case for sci­en­tif­ic think­ing, argu­ing that it let us make progress and keeps our repub­lic vital. (Whether our repub­lic actu­al­ly remains vital at this point, it’s cer­tain­ly hard to say.) We need more fig­ures like Sagan, and we par­tic­u­lar­ly need the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem to care more about pub­lic engage­ment — an area where it depress­ing­ly comes up short. But we’ll talk more about that at some oth­er point. Part 1 is above. Click for Part 2 and Part 3.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing and Carl Sagan Remixed

Asteroids: Deadly Impact

in Film, Science | November 4th, 2009

Ear­li­er this week, we high­light­ed Snagfilms.com in our col­lec­tion “20 Places to Watch Free Movies Online.” When you dig into their col­lec­tion, you will find some well known, recent films, includ­ing Mor­gan Spur­lock­’s Super Size Me and Nao­mi Wolf’s The End of Amer­i­ca. And then you can also stum­ble upon some worth­while edu­ca­tion­al doc­u­men­taries. Above, we fea­ture “Aster­oids: Dead­ly Impact,” a Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary that asks whether the Earth could expe­ri­ence anoth­er cos­mic col­li­sion with an aster­oid (as hap­pened 65 mil­lion years ago), what the after­math might look like, and whether can we do any­thing to pre­vent it. You can find more doc­u­men­taries along these lines in Snag­Films’ Sci­ence and Nature Chan­nel.

“The Wire” @ Harvard

in Current Affairs, Life, Television | November 3rd, 2009

David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a polit­i­cal tract mas­querad­ing as a cop show.” Think of it as a five sea­son, 3600 minute, artis­tic depic­tion of the esca­lat­ing break­down of urban soci­ety. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense. And it’s why some thinkers have likened the epic series to (or even ele­vat­ed it above) Tol­stoy’s War & Peace. Now comes this… Accord­ing to The Har­vard Crim­son, William J. Wil­son, a Har­vard soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, will teach a new course that uses The Wire as “a case study for pover­ty in Amer­i­ca,” say­ing that “The Wire has done more to enhance our under­stand­ing of the sys­temic urban inequal­i­ty that con­strains the lives of the poor than any pub­lished study.” If you haven’t seen this series, and if this whets your appetite, you can find a nice deal on Ama­zon. The full series now goes for $125.00, 50% off the list price.

Film Version of Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire Now Online

in Science, Television | October 31st, 2009

Michael Pol­lan’s best-sell­ing book, Botany of Desire, is now a film, and you can watch it online, cour­tesy of PBS. (Click to watch com­plete film.) The film takes you inside our rela­tion­ship with the plant world, and shows “how four famil­iar species — the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the pota­to — evolved to sat­is­fy our yearn­ings for sweet­ness, beau­ty, intox­i­ca­tion and con­trol.” Accord­ing to a piece in The San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, it took eight years to pull togeth­er the fund­ing for the film, and that’s sim­ply because mar­i­jua­na was in the mix. The film runs close to two hours. The pre­view is above, the full film is here. For more films, please vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Stephen Colbert on Particle Physics

in Comedy, Science | October 30th, 2009

Got­ta love com­e­dy that riffs on the Large Hadron Col­lid­er. I’ll have some more seri­ous things to say about the LHC in the com­ing weeks. In the mean­time, enjoy the com­ic bit. Have a good week­end…

This American Life Demystifies the American Healthcare System

in Business, Current Affairs, Politics | October 27th, 2009

When the glob­al finan­cial sys­tem col­lapsed last year, This Amer­i­can Life and its sis­ter pro­gram, Plan­et Mon­ey (iTunes — RSS Feed — Web Site) began doing some­thing that few oth­ers could pull off. They took very com­plex prob­lems and made them under­stand­able, often demys­ti­fy­ing dif­fi­cult con­cepts in a reli­ably engag­ing way. Now, they’re at it again. This time, they’re break­ing down the Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem and get­ting at the core ques­tion. Why can’t we con­trol ever-ris­ing health­care costs? That’s what the rag­ing health­care debate is effec­tive­ly all about. And, if you want to be an informed par­tic­i­pant in the debate, it’s worth lis­ten­ing to these two episodes that tease things out. The first episode, called More is Less, looks at doc­tors, patients, insur­ance com­pa­nies and their tan­gled rela­tion­ship. (Click here, then scroll down and find the “Full Episode” icon.) The sec­ond episode, Some­one Else’s Mon­ey, gets you inside the world of drug and insur­ance com­pa­nies and patients. Have a lis­ten, and thanks to Bob in Brook­lyn for the tip here.