What Makes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid a Masterpiece?: A Video Introduction
Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer’s tranquil domestic scenes draw larger crowds than nearly any other European painter; he, like Rembrandt, is synonymous with the phrase “Dutch Master.” But for much of its existence, his work lay in near-obscurity. After his death, some of his most-renowned paintings passed through the hands of patrons and collectors for next to nothing. In 1881, for example, Girl with a Pearl Earring sold for two guilders, thirty cents, or about $26.
While other Vermeer masterpieces languished, one painting never lost its value. The Milkmaid – “probably purchased from the artist by his Delft patron Pieter van Ruijven,” who owned twenty-one of the artist’s works, notes the Met — was described at its 1696 auction as “exceptionally good.” It fetched the second highest price of Vermeer’s works (next to View of Delft). In 1719, “The famous milkmaid, by Vermeer of Delft” (described as “artful”) began its journey through a series of significant Amsterdam collections.
The Milkmaid eventually landed in the hands of “one of the great woman collectors of Dutch art, Lucretia Johanna van Winter,” who married into the wealthy Six family of art collectors. Finally, in 1908, the Rijksmuseum purchased the painting from her sons with help from the Dutch government. The Milkmaid, that is to say, has remained part of the cultural heritage of the Netherlands from its beginnings. In the Great Art Explained video above, you can learn what makes this early work, painted between 1657–58, so special.
The Baroque art that preceded Vermeer’s generation “came from conflict,” namely the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. “The art being produced in Catholic countries had become a powerful tool of propaganda, characterized by a heightened sense of drama, movement and theatricality that had never been seen before.” We see the dramatic transition in Dutch art in the movement from Peter Paul Rubens to Vermeer, as “simple domestic interiors of middle-class life” became dominant: “secular works that contain stories of real human relationships.” Those works arose in a Calvinist culture that banned religious imagery and stressed “simplicity in both worship and decorative style.”
The Dutch break with Catholic tradition meant a total reinvention of Dutch art; thus came the realist tradition, produced not for the church but the wealthy merchant class, with Vermeer as one of its early masters because of his near-photographic rendering of natural light and naturalistic composition. Vermeer epitomized the new Dutch art, despite the fact that he was a Catholic convert through marriage. After his marriage, he spent his life “in the same town, the same house, slowly producing paintings in the same room… at a rate of two or three a year.” His output, perhaps 60 paintings — 36 of which survive — pales in comparison to that of his peers. But of all the artists producing domestic scenes, “there were none quite like Vermeer.”
These scenes hardly seem radical to viewers today. They are prized for everything they are not — they are not Rubens: wild, fleshy, passionate, lascivious, exuberant… but that does not mean they are devoid of eroticism. There are obvious signifiers, such as a tile showing Cupid “brandishing his bow.” (Reminding us of a once-hidden Cupid in another famous Vermeer.) There are signs much less obvious to us, such as the foot warmer, employed to “frequently suggest feminine desire in Dutch genre paintings,” the Met writes. And then there is the resemblance of Vermeer’s “milkmaid” — with her downcast eyes, white bonnet, and yellow blouse — to a figure in The Procuress, painted the year previous, a work composed almost entirely of leers and gropes (and said to feature the only self-portrait of the artist himself.)
Vermeer’s Milkmaid “exudes a very earthy appeal,” a quality that comes through not only in its sexual undertones but also in its ideal depiction of Dutch “domestic virtue.” Both are suggested at once by the pitcher and the milk, common symbols of female sexuality. But it is a painting that transcends the genre, which often enough shaped itself for the gaze of male employers in a society that “acknowledged and accepted that maids engaged in love affairs with their masters,” Giordana Goretti writes,” with consent or without it.” The “earthiness” of Vermeer’s middle-class domestic paintings — perhaps most profoundly in The Milkmaid as you’ll learn above — comes from a triumph of painterly technique and perspective, creating scenes so seemingly real that they resist objectification.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Why 99% Of Smithsonian’s Specimens Are Hidden In High-Security
Museums are the memory of our culture and they’re the memory of our planet. — Dr. Kirk Johnson, Director, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
For many of us natural history museums are emblematic of school field trips, or rainy day outings with (or as) children.
There’s always something to be gleaned from the reconstructed dinosaur skeletons, dazzling minerals, and 100-year-old specimens on display.
The educational prospects are even greater for research scientists.
The above entry in Business Insider’s Big Business series takes us behind the scenes of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, a federally-funded institution where more than 99% of its vast collection is housed in the basement, on upper floors and employees-only wings of exhibition floors, or at an offsite facility in neighboring Maryland.
The latter is poised to provide safe space for more of these treasures as climate change-related flooding poses an increasingly dire threat. The museum’s National Mall location, which draws more than 6 million visitors annually, is now virtually at sea level, and Congress is moving at a pace formerly known as glacial to approve the expensive but necessary structural improvements that would safeguard these precious collections.
The museum currently boasts some 147 million specimens, and is continually adding more, by means of field collections, donations, and purchases made with endowments, though as a non-profit institution, it’s rarely able to outbid deep-pocketed private collectors at auctions of hot-ticket items like large dinosaur bones.
The Division of Birds’ daily mail brings samples of “snarge” — whatever’s left over when a bird makes impact with an aircraft.
Upon arrival at the Smithsonian, whatever its size or market value, every item is subjected to a process of inspection known as “accessioning”.
After that, it is meticulously cleaned.
Beetles in an offsite Osteo Prep Lab get to work on residual organic materials like skin and tissue.
Human experts use a handheld air scrape tool to incrementally separate fossils from the rocky matrix in which they were discovered
The goal is permanent storage state.
Geological specimens are classified according to Dana’s System of Mineralogy and stored in drawers. High-value items are assigned to the Blue Room or the Gem Vault.
Bones that are looking to spend the better part of eternity on a shelf are fitted for custom fiberglass and plastic cradles to protect against pests, moisture, and gravity-related stress fractures.
The Department of Entomology dries and pins incoming insects, arachnids, and myriapods, and stores them in hydraulic carriages.
Mammals, reptiles, fish and birds are stuffed or pickled in alcohol.
Many items in the museum’s collection date back to the early 20th century.
These days, staff strive to preserve as much as they can, using every tool and scientific advancement at their disposal. As ornithologist and feather identification specialist Carla Dove, states, “It’s our responsibility to do as much as we can with the specimen if we’re going to take it from the wild for research.”
These careful preparations ensure that the world’s largest natural history collection can continue to serve as a living library for thousands of visiting scientists…climate change permitting.
Access to the Museum of Natural History’s collections and databases result in the publication of hundreds of research papers and the identification of hundreds of new species every year.
In addition to providing valuable intelligence for research initiatives on such topics as disease transmission, volcanic activity, and of course, the effects of bird strikes on airplanes, museum staff is working toward a goal of preserving each item with a digital scan — 9 million and counting…
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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Free: Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Films by Sergei Eisenstein, the Revolutionary Soviet Filmmaker
When it launched fifteen years ago, the movie podcast Battleship Pretension took its name from two well-known sources: an attitude popularly associated with cinephiles, and a 1925 motion picture by Sergei Eisenstein. To some, merely referencing a silent film made by a Soviet auteur in 1925 constitutes sufficient evidence of pretension in and of itself. But most, even those who’ve never seen a frame of Eisenstein’s work, do recognize that Battleship Potemkin has an important place in cinema history — and if they actually watch the movie, which is embedded just above, they’ll find that it looks and feels more familiar than they’d expected.
Like any work of wide and deep influence, Battleship Potemkin has often been parodied over its nearly 100 years of existence. But none of its scenes has been paid as much homage, tongue in cheek or elsewhere, than the massacre on the Odessa Steps, the symbolic entryway to that city in what’s now Ukraine.
“Czarist troops march down a long flight of steps, firing on the citizens who flee before them in a terrified tide,” as Roger Ebert describes it. “Countless innocents are killed, and the massacre is summed up in the image of a woman shot dead trying to protect her baby in a carriage — which then bounces down the steps, out of control.”
The content of this sequence is as harrowing as its form is revolutionary. That’s true in the propagandistic sense, but even more so in the artistic one: the Odessa Steps massacre, like the whole of Battleship Potemkin, functions as a proof-of-concept for Eisenstein’s theories of montage. Today we take for granted — and in some cases have even come to resent — that movies so expertly juxtapose their images so as to provoke the most intense emotional response possible within us. That wasn’t so much the case a century ago, when most examples of the still-novel art form of cinema used their visuals simply to make their narratives legible.
Eisenstein, however, understood cinema’s true potential. He explored it in a range of pictures that also included Ten Days That Shook the World, a dramatization of the 1917 October Revolution; Alexander Nevsky, on the repulsion of invaders by the eponymous thirteenth-century prince; and the epic historical drama Ivan the Terrible, the story of the first tsar of all Russia (and idol of Stalin, who commissioned the project).
You can watch these films, as well as Eisenstein’s unfinished tribute to the Mexican Revolution ¡Que viva México!, free on the Youtube channel of Mosfilm, the preeminent studio in the Soviet era. That Eisenstein’s techniques have survived not just him but the Soviet Union itself underscores a truth he might have suspected, but never admitted: cinema is more powerful than politics.
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Sergei Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1928)
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101 Free Silent Films: The Great Classics
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics
For her groundbreaking research on radioactivity, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize. Or rather, she won two, one for physics and another for chemistry, making her the only Nobel Laureate in more than one science. What’s more, her first Nobel came in 1903, the very same year she completed her PhD thesis at the Sorbonne. In Recherches sur les substances radioactives (or Research on Radioactive Substances), Curie “talks about the discovery of the new elements radium and polonium, and also describes how she gained one of the first understandings of the new physical phenomenon of radioactivity.”
So says science Youtuber Toby Hendy in the introduction below to Curie’s thesis–a thesis that made her the first woman in France to receive a doctoral degree in physics. “Following on from the discovery of X‑rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895 and Henri Becquerel’s discovery that uranium salts emitted similar penetration properties,” says The Document Centre, Curie “investigated uranium rays as a starting point, but in the process discovered that the air around uranium rays is made to conduct electricity.”
Her deduction that “the process was caused by properties of the atoms themselves” — a revolutionary finding that overturned previously held notions in physics — led her eventually to discover radium and polonium, which would get her that second Nobel in 1911.
Unlike her Nobel Prize in physics, which she shared with her husband Pierre and the physicist Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie won her Nobel Prize in chemistry alone. By 1911 Pierre had been dead for half a decade, but Marie’s scientific genius couldn’t be stopped from continuing their pioneering research as far as she could take it in her own lifetime. She clearly knew how vast a field her work, with and without her husband, had opened up: “Our researches upon the new radio-active bodies have given rise to a scientific movement,” she writes at the end of Recherches sur les substances radioactives. That movement continues to make discoveries more than a century later — and her original thesis itself remains radioactive.
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An Animated Introduction to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Laureate
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Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive 100+ Years Later
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Lou Reed Album With Demos of Velvet Underground Classics Getting Released: Hear an Early Version of “I’m Waiting for the Man”
In 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old graduate stalled in a music and art career he wasn’t sure would take off. A few years earlier a doo-wop single recorded with high school friends had been released to no avail. More recently, a parody of dance-craze singles “Do the Ostrich”, created by Reed and performed by a pick-up band of musicians, had also made its way onto wax and then right out of people’s memories. However, John Cale was in that pick-up band, and soon the two were fast friends. It was Cale who helped record Reed’s demo tape of songs that year. And it was Reed who took the tape and mailed it back to himself as a “poor man’s copyright.”
That demo tape has now been unsealed and these never-before heard recordings are heading to LP and CD and streaming. Above you can hear a very early version of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” that would get radically reworked for the Velvet Underground’s debut album.
Over rudimentary guitar plucking, Reed’s demo is slower, has harmonies, and a more decided folk bent. Reed acts out the various parts, including the “Pardon me sir, it’s the furthest from my mind” line in a faux-Brit accent. There’s even a Dylan-esque harmonica solo.
The demo tape contains other future Velvet Underground classics like “Heroin” and “Pale Blue Eyes,” but also songs that would turn up on Berlin (“Men of Good Fortune”) and a favorite cover “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” that would pop up in Velvets sets. But there’s also songs that were never released in any format: “Stockpile,” “Buzz Buzz Buzz,” and “Buttercup Song.”
Reed had been influenced by poet Delmore Schwartz, who he’d studied under at Syracuse University. Schwartz had instilled in Reed the idea that the simplest words could have the maximum effect in the right hands. Reed’s style of street documentary and repetition came out of his relationship with Schwartz, whom Reed paid tribute to on the first Velvets album with “European Son.”
The album, all nicely remastered, will be available in the usual formats on August 26, including a bonus ep of earlier demos, including 1963 home recordings and a 1958 rehearsal. For now enjoy this glimpse into the mind of an artist about to find his place in the world, and he doesn’t even know it yet.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...The Only Surviving Manuscript of John Milton’s Paradise Lost Gets Published in Book Form for the First Time
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake adds a note to the text that became a famous adage about John Milton’s Paradise Lost: the 10,000-line, 17th century blank verse epic about the war between heaven and hell and the failed testing of God’s premium product, human beings. Milton “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote Devils & Hell,” Blake declared, “because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The statement inspired “other Romantic and Gothic writers to view Satan as a hero,” the British Library writes.
Blake himself illustrated Paradise Lost in three separate commissions over the course of his career as an engraver and printer. His deep admiration for the poem helped it become a “Bible of the Romantic movement,” writes the manuscript publisher SP Books in their introduction to a rare new book publication of the only surviving manuscript of the work.
Only 1,000 numbered, large format copies of this printing are available. (We do hope a subsequent edition will appear, maybe with a transcription and annotations. But it will not be as beautiful as this sky-blue cloth-covered book with Blake’s full-color illustrations.)
The book preserves the only part of the poem that survives in manuscript: 798 lines from Book One of Paradise Lost. These are not in Milton’s hand — he had been blind since 1652, and the poem was first published in 1667. He conceived the epic in his 50s, his career in government over after the English Civil Wars and the brief period of the Cromwells’ Protectorate ended in the Restoration of Charles II. “Milton composed ‘Paradise Lost’ aloud, in bed or (per witnesses) ‘leaning backwards obliquely in an easy chair,’ ” Lauren Christensen writes at The New York Times, “memorizing the stanzas to be transcribed in another’s hand.”
These first few hundred lines show why Satan seems so noble to Milton’s readers; speeches by and about him portray his doomed campaign as a righteous assault on heavenly tyranny. The Romantics’ use of Paradise Lost reflects their own preoccupations, while also echoing contemporary suspicions of the poem. “The authorities were concerned,” for example, Tom Paulin notes at The London Review of Books, by an image in Book One describing Satan:
as when the sun new ris’n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of changePerplexes monarchs.
“According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive,” Paulin points out, “and wanted to suppress the whole poem.” It’s surprising he was able to publish at all. Milton had vociferously supported the Puritan revolutionaries who overthrew the king’s father, Charles I, and removed his head. Milton later published several pamphlets in defense of regicide. In 1660, when Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate fell apart and Charles II returned, Milton’s works were banned by royal decree and the poet went into hiding until a general pardon.
Later critics have pointed to Milton’s political writings as evidence that he knew exactly whose party he was of. California State University’s Michael Bryson has gone so far as to argue that Milton was a secret atheist. In any case, he was a passionate believer in the overthrow of kings and the establishment of republics (for which he has become a libertarian hero). Paulin sums up the critical case for Paradise Lost as an allegory for the “lost cause” of the revolution:
Milton knew that the poem he was dictating to his amaneuensis would be scrutinized by the recently restored monarch’s Licenser of the Press, so he coded the English people’s formation of a republic as the creation of the “heavens and earth.” The idea passed the censor by, just as it has passed by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic.
The charge that Milton made Satan a hero is hard to ignore when, reading Book One, we find the poet giving the Chief of Fallen Angels the best lines, as anyone who’s read Paradise Lost will remember. If you haven’t, just see the classic example below.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
Learn more about this rare manuscript edition at The New York Times’ review and purchase one (if one remains) at SP Books.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)
Most 21st-century Brooklyn public elementary schoolers have taken or will take a field trip to the Wyckoff House, a modest wooden cabin surrounded by tire shops and fast food outlets.
The oldest building in NYC by a longshot, it was also the first structure in the five boroughs to achieve historic landmark status.
Primary sources place the original occupants, Pieter Claesen Wyckoff and his wife, Grietje Van Ness-Wyckoff, in the original part of the house around 1652. A single room with a packed earth floor, unglazed windows, a large open hearth, and doors at either end, it would have been pretty tight quarters for a family of 13, as host Thijs Roes of the history series New Netherland Now notes, during his above tour of the premises.
Two parlors were added in the 18th-century, and three bedrooms in the early 19th. Typical Dutch Colonial features include an H frame structure, shingled walls, split Dutch doors, and deep, flared “spring” eaves.
Its survival is a miracle in a metropolis known for its constant flux.
In the early 20th-century, descendants of Pieter and Grietje partnered with community activists to save the home from demolition, eventually donating it to the New York City Parks Department.
A late 70s fire (possibly not the first) necessitated major renovations. (And last year, flooding from Hurricane Ida clobbered its HVAC and electrical system, putting a temporary kibosh on public visits to the interior.)
Back in 2015, Roes’ companion, architectural historian Heleen Westerhuijs, was invited to inspect the attic, where she discovered impressive original beams alongside 20th-century reinforcements.
While the directors of the homestead actively recognize the community that now surrounds it with events like an upcoming celebration of Haitian culture and Vodou, and hands on activities include urban farming and composting, the original settlers of New Netherland (aka New Amsterdam, aka New York City) remain a major focus.
Any American or Canadian with the surname Wyckoff (or one of its more than 50 variants) can and should consider it their ancestral home, as they are almost certainly descended from Pieter and Grietje. While many thousands now bear the name, Pieter was the first. Volunteer genealogist Lynn Wyckoff explains:
After the English assumed control of New Netherland, residents practicing patronymics (a naming system that utilized one’s father’s name in place of a surname) were required to adopt, or freeze, surnames that could be passed down each generation. Pieter Claesen chose the name Wykhof, which most of his descendants have spelled Wyckoff. Despite many unfounded claims over the years regarding both Pieter’s ancestry and choice of surname, there is no record of Pieter’s parentage; but there is substantial evidence that he chose the name Wykhof in recognition of a farm by the same name outside of Marienhafe, Germany where his family were likely tenants.
A handful of Wyckoff family members left comments on the New Netherland Now video, including Donald, who wrote of his visit:
It was an odd feeling to touch the hand-hewn surface of a supporting beam cut and installed by my ancestor, hundreds of years ago. Since I am a Wyckoff, I was allowed to see some of the “off tour” bits of the house. I live over 3k miles away, so my feet will probably never touch the ground there again. But I’m glad NY and a lot of wonderful people have maintained my ancestral home so well and for so many years. Hopefully it has many hundreds of years of life remaining so that people can recall a time when Flatbush was more of a farm than a city.
If you are a Wyckoff (or one of its variants), you’re invited to keep the Wyckoff Association’s family tree up to date by sending word of births, deaths, marriages, and any pertinent genealogical details such as education, military service, profession, places of residence and the like.
Explore a collection of educational activities, lessons, and color pages related to the Wyckoff House here.
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- Ayun Halliday is the author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Her family’s trips to the Wyckoff House were included in the latest, NYC museum-themed issue of her zine, the East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Rapper Post Malone Performs a 15-Song Set of Nirvana Songs, Paying Tribute to Kurt Cobain
Nirvana’s cultural staying power is a testament to the cross-generational magic that happened when Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselić, and Dave Grohl played together for only a handful of years in the 90s. Their influence goes far deeper than 90s nostalgia for a grunge trend or the celebrity status of the late Cobain. Now almost 30 years after the frontman’s 1994 suicide, we see that influence on a generation born too late to see him live — one influenced more by hip hop than guitar rock and far less interested in challenging the capitalist status quo.
For artists like rapper Post Malone, born July 4, 1995, Cobain is a major songwriting influence, even if Post Malone’s music sounds little like Nirvana. “I loved Kurt so much,” says Malone, “and he’s been such an inspiration to me, musically.” To prove his love, he’s tattooed Cobain on “two different parts of his body,” Sheldon Pearce writes at The New Yorker, though Cobain might not have “reciprocated the love — the rapper’s stint shilling for Bud Light probably wouldn’t fly, and Cobain once said white artists should leave rap to Black artists because ‘the white man ripped off the Black man long enough.’ ”
But that’s the thing about idols: once they’re gone, they no longer get a say in who worships them and how. Last year, Post delivered a Nirvana tribute to benefit the UN’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization. He did so respectfully. Backed by Travis Barker on drums, Brian Lee on bass, and Nic Mack on guitar, he honored Cobain by donning a flower print dress, and by asking his daughter, Francis Bean Cobain, for permission to do the 15-song set. “I could never want to offend anybody,” he told Howard Stern, “by trying to show support, so I just wanted to make sure that everything was okay — and it was okay, and we raised money for a good cause, and we got to play some of the most f*cking epic songs ever.”
Courtney Love expressed support, writing, “Goosebumps… Go have a margarita Post Malone. Nothing but love from here.” Grohl and Novoselić also gave Malone their full approval. The former Nirvana bassist wrote that he was “holding emotions back the whole show.” In a later interview, Grohl commented, “Even the die-hard Nirvana people that I know were like, ‘dude, he’s kind of killing it right now.’ ” And they were right. Above, see the one-off band play “Francis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle,” “Come As You Are,” “About a Girl,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” and more classic Nirvana songs. The livestream raised $500,000 (including matching funds from Google) to help fight COVID-19 around the world.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Computer Scientist Andrew Ng Presents a New Series of Machine Learning Courses–an Updated Version of the Popular Course Taken by 5 Million Students
Back in 2017, Coursera co-founder and former Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng launched a five-part series of courses on “Deep Learning” on the edtech platform, a series meant to “help you master Deep Learning, apply it effectively, and build a career in AI.” These courses extended his initial Machine Learning course, which has attracted almost 5 million students since 2012, in an effort, he said, to build “a new AI-powered society.”
Ng’s goals are ambitious, to “teach millions of people to use these AI tools so they can go and invent the things that no large company, or company I could build, could do.” His new Machine Learning Specialization at Coursera takes him several steps further in that direction with an “updated version of [his] pioneering Machine Learning course,” notes Coursera’s description, providing “a broad introduction to modern machine learning.” The specialization’s three courses include 1) Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification, 2) Advanced Learning Algorithms, and 3) Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning. Collectively, the courses in the specialization will teach you to:
- Build machine learning models in Python using popular machine learning libraries NumPy and scikit-learn.
- Build and train supervised machine learning models for prediction and binary classification tasks, including linear regression and logistic regression.
- Build and train a neural network with TensorFlow to perform multi-class classification.
- Apply best practices for machine learning development so that your models generalize to data and tasks in the real world.
- Build and use decision trees and tree ensemble methods, including random forests and boosted trees.
- Use unsupervised learning techniques for unsupervised learning: including clustering and anomaly detection.
- Build recommender systems with a collaborative filtering approach and a content-based deep learning method.
- Build a deep reinforcement learning model.
The skills students learn in Ng’s specialization will bring them closer to careers in big data, machine learning, and AI engineering. Enroll in Ng’s Specialization here free for 7 days and explore the materials in all three courses. If you’re convinced the specialization is for you, you’ll pay $49 per month until you complete the three-course specialization, and you’ll earn a certificate upon completion of a hands-on project using all of your new machine learning skills. You can sign up for the Machine Learning Specialization here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter
Given his achievements in the realms of both poetry and painting, to say nothing of his compulsions to religious and philosophical inquiry, it’s tempting to call William Blake a “Renaissance man.” But he lived in the England of the mid-eighteenth century to the near mid-nineteenth, making him a Romantic Age man — and in fact, according to the current historical view, one of that era’s defining figures. “Today he is recognized as the most spiritual of artists,” say the narrator of the video introduction above, “and an important poet in English literature.” And whether realized on canvas or in verse, his visions have retained their power over the centuries.
That power, however, went practically unacknowledged in Blake’s lifetime. Most who knew him regarded him as something between an eccentric and a madman, a perception his grandly mystical ideas and vigorous rejection of both institutions and conventions did little to dispel.
Blake didn’t believe that the world is as we see it. Rather, he sought to access much stranger underlying truths using his formidable imagination, exercised both in his art and in his dreams. Cultivating this capacity allows us to “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”
Those words come from one of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence.” Despite being one of his best-known poems, it merely hints at the depth and breadth of his worldview — indeed, his view of all existence. His entire corpus, written, painted, and printed, constitutes a kind of atlas of this richly imagined territory to which “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake” provides an overview. Though very much a product of the time and place in which he lived, Blake clearly drew less inspiration from the world around him than from the world inside him. Reality, for him, was to be cultivated — and richly — within his own being. Still today, the chimerical conviction of his work dares us to cultivate the reality within ourselves.
Related content:
William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations
William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)
William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost
William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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