The Beatles Remastered: An Inside Look

in Music | September 20th, 2009

On Sep­tem­ber 9th, EMI released a remas­tered ver­sion of the entire Bea­t­les cat­a­logue — the first remix since 1987. And now the Bea­t­les are once again back on top of the charts. If you’re won­der­ing whether to buy the remas­tered ver­sions at all, or whether to buy the stereo or mono box sets (or some com­bi­na­tion of the two), or if you’re sim­ply won­der­ing what goes into remas­ter­ing the Fab Four’s com­plete body of work, then you will be inter­est­ed in this inter­view with Bea­t­les his­to­ri­an Kevin Howlett, who helped write the lin­er notes for the new releas­es. In this con­ver­sa­tion with NPR’s All Songs Con­sid­ered (MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed), Howlett describes what the remas­ter­ing involved, and then com­pares the old ver­sions to the new ver­sions (both mono and stereo). When you’re done lis­ten­ing to this 20+ minute inter­view, you’ll have a much bet­ter sense of what this long-await­ed remas­ter­ing deliv­ers. You can lis­ten with the play­er below, or via the links post­ed above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What New York­ers Heard on the Radio the Night John Lennon was Shot

The Bea­t­les: Pod­casts from Yes­ter­day

The Grey Video: Mix­ing the Bea­t­les with Jay‑Z

The Google Book Downloader

in e-books, Google | September 18th, 2009

A quick heads up: Life­hack­er is high­light­ing today some new soft­ware (Win­dows only) that will let you down­load free access/public domain texts from Google Book Search and then turn them into neat PDF files. To get tips on how to use the soft­ware cre­at­ed by a third par­ty, not Google, head on over to Life­hack­er. I haven’t per­son­al­ly used the Down­loader, main­ly because I work on a Mac. If you try it out, let us know how the soft­ware works for you.

The End of Wall Street?: Michael Lewis

in Current Affairs, Economics | September 17th, 2009

Here we are. One year after the fall of Lehman Broth­ers. And here we have Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Pok­er, talk­ing about his next book — The Big Short: Inside the Dooms­day Machine (2010) — that looks at those peo­ple who actu­al­ly under­stood that Wall Street was going to blow up. Most of the bank­ing com­mu­ni­ty did­n’t see it com­ing. (Hap­py anniver­sary Dick Fuld.) But a hand­ful saw the writ­ing on the wall and took the big short bet. You can get Lewis’ com­plete talk here.

Philosophy Still Matters

in Philosophy | September 17th, 2009

Har­vard phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Michael Sandel appeared on the Today Show this morn­ing, and got four min­utes to make the case for phi­los­o­phy. If you’re not famil­iar with him, Sandel is a very pop­u­lar Har­vard pro­fes­sor. Some 15,000 stu­dents have tak­en his cours­es over 30 years, and to get a feel for his teach­ing, you can watch his 30-minute lec­ture online. It’s called Jus­tice: A Jour­ney into Moral Rea­son­ing, and it’s one of the very few open lec­tures that Har­vard has put online. (A dis­ap­point­ment, I must say.) The lec­ture also oth­er­wise appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es. Final­ly, I’d also encour­age you to lis­ten to the series of lec­tures that Sandel pre­sent­ed through the BBC. We fea­tured them here before, and we’re glad that Tamas, one of our read­ers, has remind­ed us of them.

Something for Mary

in Music | September 16th, 2009

RIP

Google Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars?

in e-books, Google | September 14th, 2009

Crit­ics of Google Book Search (and its class-action set­tle­ment with pub­lish­ers) are pop­ping up every­where. Euro­pean gov­ern­ments have voiced their dis­plea­sure. The US Jus­tice Depart­ment has placed the set­tle­ment under review. Ama­zon is protest­ing. Yahoo and Microsoft have piled on too. And now you can add aca­d­e­mics to the list. Writ­ing in The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, Geof­frey Nun­berg, a promi­nent UC Berke­ley lin­guist (who also often appears on NPR), won­ders what will hap­pen to schol­ar­ship if Google Book Search becomes the world’s largest dig­i­tal library (some­thing the class action set­tle­ment would vir­tu­al­ly guar­an­tee). The prob­lem comes down to this:  The aver­age per­son will be able to “google” the dig­i­tal library (“When was the Fran­co-Pruss­ian War?”) and find use­ful infor­ma­tion. But schol­ars will run into prob­lems when they try to ask more fine­ly tuned ques­tions. (“When did the word hap­pi­ness start to replace the word felic­i­ty in the Eng­lish lan­guage?) And that’s because Google’s meta­da­ta is a “train wreck: a mish­mash wrapped in a mud­dle wrapped in a mess.” For exam­ple, accord­ing to Nun­berg, Google meta­da­ta says that all of the fol­low­ing texts were pub­lished in 1899. Ray­mond Chan­dler’s Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Park­er, André Mal­raux’s La Con­di­tion Humaine, Stephen King’s Chris­tine, The Com­plete Short­er Fic­tion of Vir­ginia Woolf, Ray­mond Williams’s Cul­ture and Soci­ety 1780–1950, and Robert Shel­ton’s biog­ra­phy of Bob Dylan. And it dates Tom Wolfe’s Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties back to 1888. You don’t real­ly need to be an aca­d­e­m­ic to get the gist. Google has some kinks to work out, espe­cial­ly if it’s going to be the only major online library in town. For more, you can read Nun­berg’s longer piece here.

Beethoven’s 5th: The Animated Score

in Music | September 13th, 2009

On Fri­day, we gave you this ani­mat­ed piece that shows the genius of Bach. Now, we give you an ani­mat­ed score of Beethoven’s 5th, and here you can find a chart that explains what the col­ors in the score mean. Essen­tial­ly each col­or rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar instru­ment. Get the chart here, and don’t for­get that you can find more free clas­si­cal music in our Music Pod­cast Col­lec­tion. (We’ve added this clip to our YouTube Favorites.)

via The Dai­ly Dish

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

in Literature | September 10th, 2009

A quick note: The Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter, a human­i­ties research library and muse­um at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin, is com­mem­o­rat­ing the 2009 bicen­ten­ni­al of Edgar Allan Poe, Amer­i­can poet, crit­ic and inven­tor of the detec­tive sto­ry, with the exhi­bi­tion “From Out That Shad­ow: The Life and Lega­cy of Edgar Allan Poe.” To mark the occa­sion, the Cen­ter’s web site has launched The Edgar Allan Poe Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion, and it nice­ly fea­tures Poe’s man­u­scripts, his let­ters and doc­u­ments, pho­tographs and even cryp­tographs that Poe liked to solve. (You can try to solve them too.) Have a look, and then feel free to down­load read­ings of Poe’s work in our col­lec­tion of  Free Audio Books.

Be a 2010 TED Fellow!

in Life | September 9th, 2009

Want to attend the 2010 TED Con­fer­ence and hang with some of the world’s great­est minds? Here’s your chance. Apply to the TED Fel­lows pro­gram.  Orga­niz­ers of the TED Con­fer­ence are look­ing for 25 promis­ing Fel­lows from around the world to par­tic­i­pate in TED 2010, and they’re accept­ing appli­ca­tions through Sep­tem­ber 25, 2009. Fel­low­ships include con­fer­ence admis­sion, round-trip trans­porta­tion, hous­ing and all meals. Fel­lows will also par­tic­i­pate in a pre-con­fer­ence with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to present a short talk for con­sid­er­a­tion for TED.com. Appli­cants should gen­er­al­ly between 21–40 years of age, though any­one over 18 and over 40 may apply. They must also be flu­ent in Eng­lish. Click here and get start­ed with your appli­ca­tion today!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every TED Talk Under the Sun

The Obama School Nontroversy

in Education | September 8th, 2009

Any­one look­ing for con­tro­ver­sy in Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s school speech will be dis­ap­point­ed. No “social­ist indoc­tri­na­tion” here. Just a good ol’ red, white & blue pep talk to stu­dents. The talk gets start­ed at 2:10

In case you’re won­der­ing what ground school talks cov­ered in 1988, here’s a look back.