The Art History Web Book

in Art | February 16th, 2009

Now there’s a nice alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tion­al, expen­sive art his­to­ry text­book. The folks at smARThis­to­ry have cre­at­ed a free mul­ti-media web-book that offers a dynam­ic sur­vey of art his­to­ry. The online resource com­bines tra­di­tion­al images with audio and videos, and the beau­ty is that you don’t have to read this web-book in a lin­ear fash­ion. Rather, you can sort through things by time peri­od, style and artist and find the infor­ma­tion that you want. In case you’re won­der­ing about the cred­i­bil­i­ty of this resource, it does­n’t hurt to men­tion that one of its founders, Beth Har­ris, is the Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Learn­ing at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York City, and the oth­er, Steven Zuck­er, is Dean of the School of Grad­u­ate Stud­ies at the Fash­ion Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, part of the State Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. Have a look.

Harper’s Index Now Open

in Media | February 16th, 2009

From Harper’s:

In cel­e­bra­tion of its 25th year, the Harper’s Index–12,058 lines span­ning 300 issues–is now open to all for search­ing and brows­ing, with more than one thou­sand linked cat­e­gories. Some start­ing points: Adul­tery, Chi­na, Beer, Veg­eta­bles, Sweets,Amer­i­can Men, Amer­i­can Women, Cats, Dogs, Frogs, Bears, and Pan­das.

The Odds on America’s Collapse

in Current Affairs, Economics, History | February 13th, 2009

Jared Dia­mond became a house­hold name with his Pulitzer Prize-win­ning book Guns, Germs & Steel (2003). Lat­er, the UCLA geo­g­ra­ph­er climbed the charts again with Col­lapse: How Soci­eties Choose to Fail or Suc­ceed (2005). Now, based on this last book, he’s putting odds on whether the Unit­ed States will sur­vive this cri­sis, and he’s putting them only at 51–49. Not too great. And he goes on to say that our best chance of sur­viv­ing is if Amer­i­ca’s wealthy elite suf­fers far more than it already has. For more, lis­ten here.

via Big Think’s Twit­ter Feed. Get our Twit­ter Feed here.

Bridging the Science-Religion Divide

in Religion, Science | February 11th, 2009

Is there “a philo­soph­i­cal incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between reli­gion and sci­ence. Does the empir­i­cal nature of sci­ence con­tra­dict the rev­e­la­to­ry nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two insti­tu­tions must be con­sid­ered essen­tial­ly antag­o­nis­tic?” These were the ques­tions raised by Jer­ry Coyne, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, in a long and meaty book review (“See­ing and Believ­ing”) appear­ing in The New Repub­lic. Over at the Edge.org, a num­ber of sci­en­tif­ic thinkers, who reg­u­lar­ly engage with these essen­tial ques­tions, have offered their own thoughts on the mat­ter. You’ll find short pieces by Stephen Pinker, Daniel Den­nett, Sam Har­ris, George Dyson and oth­ers. This one pas­sage by Karl Giber­son par­tic­u­lar­ly struck me (though it’s not exact­ly a reflec­tion of my world­view):

Empir­i­cal sci­ence does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Dar­win showed only too clear­ly. But empir­i­cal sci­ence also trumps oth­er empir­i­cal sci­ence. Ein­stein’s dethrone­ment of New­ton was not the whole­sale under­min­ing of the sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise, even though it showed that sci­ence was clear­ly in error. It was, rather, a glo­ri­ous and appro­pri­ate­ly cel­e­brat­ed advance for sci­ence, albeit one not under­stood by most peo­ple. Why is this dif­fer­ent than mod­ern the­ol­o­gy’s near uni­ver­sal rejec­tion of the tyran­ni­cal anthro­po­mor­phic deity of the Old Tes­ta­ment, so elo­quent­ly skew­ered by Dawkins? How is it that “sci­ence” is allowed to toss its his­tor­i­cal bag­gage over­board when its best informed lead­ers decide to do so, even though the ideas con­tin­ue to cir­cu­late on main street, but reli­gion must for­ev­er be defined by the ancient bag­gage car­ried by its least informed?

The world dis­closed by sci­ence is rich and mar­velous, but most peo­ple think there is more to it. Our reli­gious tra­di­tions embody our fit­ful and imper­fect reflec­tions on this mys­te­ri­ous and tran­scen­dent intuition—an intu­ition that, as artic­u­lat­ed by some of our most pro­found thinkers, seeks an under­stand­ing of the world that is goes beyond the empir­i­cal.
 

Milton Friedman on Greed

in Current Affairs, Economics | February 10th, 2009

The new Trea­sury Sec­re­tary unveiled his plan this morn­ing, and appar­ent­ly the mar­kets hate it, which pret­ty much guar­an­tees that we’ll be liv­ing with our finan­cial mess for a good while longer. As we know, this cri­sis could have been avoid­ed. But greed got the bet­ter of us. So, I won­der what read­ers think when they see Mil­ton Fried­man’s 1979 defense of cap­i­tal­ism and greed. Is it a mod­el, a line of argu­ment, that’s now dis­cred­it­ed? Or do we grudg­ing­ly con­cede his points and say that cap­i­tal­ism is the worst eco­nom­ic mod­el except for all the oth­ers that have been tried (a cheap play here on Churchill), and then fig­ure out how to mop it up?

via Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish

The Obama “Hope” Poster & The New Copyright Controversy

in Current Affairs, Law | February 10th, 2009

By now, every­one knows the famous Oba­ma “Hope” poster pro­duced by Shep­ard Fairey. Recent­ly, Fairey has acknowl­edged that the poster was orig­i­nal­ly inspired by a pho­to­graph belong­ing to the AP Press, and now the AP is claim­ing that Fairey has infringed on its copy­right and wants “pay­ment for the use of the pho­to and a por­tion of any mon­ey he makes from it.” (see arti­cle in the New York Times). In response, Fairey has filed a pre­emp­tive law­suit, claim­ing that he used the AP pho­to as a mere start­ing point and then trans­formed it into a “stun­ning, abstract­ed and ide­al­ized visu­al image that cre­at­ed pow­er­ful new mean­ing and con­veys a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent mes­sage.” If you put the two images side by side (see here), it’s pret­ty instant­ly clear that Fairey took an admit­ted­ly well done news pho­to and did some­thing quite trans­for­ma­tive with it, which makes things fair game. That’s obvi­ous to almost any­one (includ­ing hope­ful­ly judges), and it’s a shame to see the AP, which lives by its First Amend­ment rights, look­ing to use the copy­right clause to lim­it free­dom of expres­sion. Bad move guys.

As a quick side note, Fairey is being rep­re­sent­ed in court by The Fair Use Project at Stan­ford Law School’s Cen­ter for Inter­net and Soci­ety (to which I have zero con­nec­tion.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry Behind the Icon­ic Oba­ma Cam­paign Poster

Bill Gates on Changing the World

in Current Affairs | February 9th, 2009

The 2009 TED con­fer­ence, which fea­tured a long list of well-known speak­ers, wrapped up on Fri­day. And now you can watch two of the key pre­sen­ta­tions online. First, and fea­tured above, you’ll get Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and now major phil­an­thropist, talk­ing about how to change the world through edu­ca­tion and dis­ease pre­ven­tion. It’s a good 20 min­utes, and it will par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est any edu­ca­tors who read this blog. Next, Bill Gross, founder of Ide­al­ab, gives you 20 min­utes on the ground­break­ing work being done in solar ener­gy.

We’ve added the Gates talk to our list of YouTube Favorites. Also, you’ll find videos from TED on our list: YouTube Edu­ca­tion: 80 Intel­li­gent Video Col­lec­tions.

Lincoln on Flickr

in History | February 8th, 2009

The Library of Con­gress has added a series of images to Flickr that will “let you see how Lin­coln looked over 20 years—from the ear­li­est known pho­to­graph­ic like­ness in 1846, through the U.S. pres­i­den­tial cam­paign of 1860, and the pres­sures of the Civ­il War years. Views from Lincoln’s funer­al in 1865 and por­traits of his imme­di­ate fam­i­ly are also includ­ed.”

via The Library of Con­gress Blog

Extra Goodies on Twitter

in Uncategorized | February 7th, 2009

As I gath­er mate­r­i­al for the blog, I often come across con­tent that’s inter­est­ing, but not quite right for the blog. It seemed like Twit­ter might be a good place to add this bonus mate­r­i­al. So from here on out, I’ll casu­al­ly add some extra con­tent there. Today, I just men­tioned how you can get 50% off of some clas­sic Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. Check out our Twit­ter feed here.

Amazon: New Kindle and Free E‑Books

in Amazon Kindle, e-books | February 6th, 2009

Google announced yes­ter­day that it’s mak­ing a large num­ber of books avail­able via web-enabled mobile phones. Now, Ama­zon has said that it will unveil a new ver­sion of the Kin­dle next week and also make Kin­dle titles avail­able on a vari­ety of mobile phones. You can get more info here.

UPDATE: We have cre­at­ed a large col­lec­tion of Free eBooks, which includes ebooks pro­vid­ed by Google. Please vis­it this page to access free ebooks on your com­put­er, smart phone (includ­ing iphone), or kin­dle.