Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

in Film | January 14th, 2008

1964. Direct­ed by Stan­ley Kubrick. Star­ring Peter Sell­ers and George C. Scott. The Trail­er. Action:

Added to our YouTube Playlist.

Smart Links

in Uncategorized | January 14th, 2008

Below, we’ve listed some links that will hopefully pique your interest. Some were sent in by readers. Many thanks for them (and feel free to send good stuff our way. Contact us here.)

* How Google Earth Unearths Ancient Cities: Yes, Google is rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing even archae­ol­o­gy.

* Nor­man Mail­er Archive Opens: It took the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas two years to orga­nize 1,000 box­es of let­ters and unpub­lished man­u­scripts writ­ten by Nor­man Mail­er. And it’s now ready, just a short two months after the author’s death. Among oth­er things, the archive hous­es cor­re­spon­dence that shows a warmer side of a writer often known for his surli­ness.

* 2007 Dar­win Awards Announced: Here’s a lit­tle dark humor. The Dar­win Awards, which “com­mem­o­rate those who improve our gene pool by remov­ing them­selves from it,” has released its awards for 2007. You can find some of the “hon­or­able men­tions” here.

* Islam, the West and the Bhut­to Lega­cy: Fol­low­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Benazir Bhut­to, FORA.tv has assem­bled a video chan­nel “built around three pub­lic talks she gave in the year before her recent return to Pak­istan. Fif­teen pro­grams relat­ing to Pak­istan, Islam and approach­es to extrem­ism are now there, more will be added.”

* Clas­sic Film Clips: Over on YouTube, one of our read­ers has assem­bled a video col­lec­tion that fea­tures seg­ments from many clas­sic films — Dr. Strangelove, Metrop­o­lis, etc. It nice­ly com­ple­ments our own col­lec­tion, to which you might want to sub­scribe.

* Lost Star Wars Intro: Here’s the lost intro that mer­ci­ful­ly nev­er made it into the final film.

* Print Pub­lic Domain Books on Paper: This inter­me­di­ary ser­vice makes it easy to print paper copies of free pub­lic domain books found on the inter­net. The books are free; the print­ing is not. But it nets out well over­all. Via Red­Fer­ret

*  Best Online Doc­u­men­taries: Title is fair­ly self-explana­to­ry.

*  Sir Edmund Hillary: A Life in Pic­tures — From Nation­al Geo­graph­ic.

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17 Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels

in Books | January 8th, 2008

A quick fyi: From this page, you can down­load or view 17 graph­ic nov­els. This genre, which mesh­es com­ic book art­work with sophis­ti­cat­ed lit­er­ary plots, has under­gone a major resur­gence late­ly. So we’re not shocked (but we are pleased) to find these kinds of col­lec­tions tak­ing shape.

David Lynch on iPhone

in Film, Video - Arts & Culture | January 7th, 2008

Very fun­ny. And he’s spot on…

When 165 Thinkers Changed Their Minds

in Science | January 6th, 2008

What Have You Changed Your Mind About? — That is the ques­tion that the web­site, Edge.org, posed this year to 165 lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic minds. The answers, which are all over the map, can be found here. (Make sure that you scroll down the page a lit­tle.) Some of the more well-known thinkers to offer their thoughts include: Richard Dawkins, J. Craig Ven­ter, Daniel Gole­man, Sher­ry Turkle, Daniel Den­nett, Steven Pinker and Stew­art Brand. And then even Alan Alda is added to the mix.

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One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

in Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech | January 5th, 2008

The New York Times ran a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child pro­gram run by MIT’s Nicholas Negro­ponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the ini­tia­tive is intend­ed to devel­op a rea­son­ably priced ($200) lap­top for pri­ma­ry school chil­dren in the third world. The mod­el they’re sell­ing now comes with a lot of cool fea­tures: mesh tech­nol­o­gy so a group of stu­dents can share one wifi con­nec­tion; low pow­er con­sump­tion and the abil­i­ty to recharge bat­ter­ies with solar cells or even a hand crank; a lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem and open source soft­ware.

I sus­pect that last fea­ture is caus­ing the biggest prob­lem for Intel. Accord­ing to the Times, com­pa­ny sales reps actu­al­ly tried to per­suade sev­er­al coun­tries to ditch the OLPC in favor of a more expen­sive machine run­ning Microsoft Win­dows. I don’t know about you but I have a hard time imag­in­ing dis­ad­van­taged Peru­vian first-graders keep­ing up with their secu­ri­ty updates, trou­bleshoot­ing the less-than-stel­lar Win­dows wifi util­i­ty or shelling out for that upgrade to Vista.

Maybe those kids need oth­er things more than they need lap­tops, but it can’t hurt. In any case it’s hard to believe how bad­ly Intel man­aged this saga in terms of pub­lic rela­tions. Think of the chil­dren, guys!

Ipod Radio

in Apple | January 5th, 2008

The Ipod Radio Remote — Here’s a small gad­get worth check­ing out. Sim­ply attach it to your iPod and you can start lis­ten­ing to the radio (some­thing that always seemed miss­ing). I just got one, and it works real­ly well. So I fig­ured that I’d give it a quick plug. In case you’re inter­est­ed, Ama­zon sells it cheap­er than Apple, although you may want to read the reviews on the Apple site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Bet­ter Learn­ing Gad­get

Mailer on the Ali-Foreman Classic

in Uncategorized | January 4th, 2008

I was won­der­ing how I’d even­tu­al­ly work sports into Open Cul­ture, and I’ve final­ly done it.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1974. In Zaire. Muham­mad Ali takes on George Fore­man in the clas­sic “Rum­ble in the Jun­gle.” Nor­man Mail­er, the great writer and box­ing enthu­si­ast (who recent­ly left us), nar­rates how the fight went down. This is an out­take from the great doc­u­men­tary When We Were Kings. (We added the video clip to our YouTube Playlist, to which you can sub­scribe.)

Classics from The Atlantic Monthly

in Uncategorized | January 2nd, 2008

The Atlantic Month­ly has been around a long time. Since 1857 to be exact. And, over the many years, it has pub­lished works by leg­endary authors. Quite nice­ly, The Atlantic web site makes avail­able some of these clas­sic writ­ings for free (although if you’re a sub­scriber you’ll get access to much more). Here are a few that we uncov­ered:

• The Aure­lian — Vladimir Nabokov (1941)
• A True Sto­ry, Repeat­ed Word for Word As I Heard It — Mark Twain (1874)
• The Facts Con­cern­ing the Recent Car­ni­val of Crime in Con­necti­cut — Mark Twain (1876)
• Some Ram­bling Notes of an Idle Excur­sion — Mark Twain (1877)
• A Tele­phon­ic Con­ver­sa­tion — Mark Twain (1880)
• The Dis­turber of the Traf­fic — Rud­yard Kipling (1891)

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The Best Photoblogs of 2007

in Art | January 2nd, 2008

The best pho­to­blogs of last year, as declared by Photoblogsawards.com. Some beau­ti­ful images here:

• [dai­ly dose of imagery] — https://wvs.topleftpixel.com
• c h r o m a s i a — https://www.chromasia.com/iblog
• fotograf by imran — https://www.fotobyimran.com
• J.R. Pho­to­Blog — https://www.j‑roumagnac.net
• Pho­to-Pas­sion — https://www.photo-passion.eu
• Shazeen Samad Pho­tog­ra­phy — https://www.shazeensamad.com
• Seek­ing Focus — https://www.seekingfocus.com
• SHOTZZ.EU™ — https://shotzz.eu
• The G8 — https://g8.no
• Wink — https://wink.nixone.com

Via: Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy: The Nikon Way

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