Celebrity Statistician Nate Silver Fields Questions from Data Wizards at Google
Maybe the biggest winner of the 2012 presidential election, other than Barack Obama, was Nate Silver, the young statistician who runs the 538 blog at the New York Times. As you may recall (it was only a few weeks ago), Silver gave President Obama roughly an 80% — 90% chance of winning during the final days of October. The talking heads railed against Silver, calling him an “ideologue” and a “joke.” But, just as Silver accurately predicted the outcome of every Senate race during the 2008 election cycle, so did he pretty much nail the big race of 2012. He estimated Obama would receive 313 electoral votes, a touch below the 332 the president actually received. Silver was vindicated. It was time to take a victory lap … and sell a few books.
In late September, Silver shrewdly published a new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t. The book tour eventually, if not inevitably, brought him to Google, where the celebrity statistician fielded questions from data-loving Googlers for an hour. A grand old time was had by all.
Free courses on Stats and Probability can be found in the Math section of our collection of 550 Free Online Courses.
via Gizmodo
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Artist Ken Butler Turns One Man’s Trash Into Another Man’s Quirky Stringed Instrument
Hey, hoarders, think you’re the only ones who see potential in a single crutch, an empty Scotch bottle, the jagged remains of a skateboard? Not so. Musician, artist, and all-around visionary Ken Butler has been turning such trash into treasure since 1978, when he fitted an ax with a tail piece, fingerboard and contact mic and snuggled it inside a 3/4 size violin case. Chop a cherry tree with it, or play it just like Buddy Guy plays his ax. Like most of the hybrids Butler creates in his Brooklyn studio, it’s a functioning musical instrument, though he’s quick to point out that for him, the sound is immaterial. What really counts is the poetic coupling of unlikely materials.
Things really get cookin’ at the 4:20 mark, when Butler plays a few licks on a three-stringed shovel before moving on to a bowable, electrified tennis racket. The results are far lovelier than the master would lead you to believe.
- Ayun Halliday can stumble her way through the Entertainer if there’s a piano handy.
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Making Fender Guitars, Then (1959) and Now (2012)
The Joy of Making Artistic Homemade Guitars
Read More...The Best Books of 2012: Lists by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian and More
If books figure into your holiday gift-giving plans, then we’ve got a little something for you — a meta list of the best books of 2012. It’s now December, the final month of the year, which means that newspapers and magazines can start taking stock of 2012 and declare their favorites.
The New York Times Book Review announced The 10 Best Books of 2012 this weekend, just a few days after naming the 100 Notable Books of 2012. Some familiar names appear on the winnowed down list — Robert Caro, Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith — but I’m most tempted by Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. The question has crossed my mind lately.
The Washington Post boils down three lists — The Best Graphic Novels of 2012, 50 Notable Works of Fiction, 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction — to one. Behold The Top 10 Books of 2012. Fiction-wise, I’m not blown away by the picks. But, when it comes to Nonfiction, they’re on the mark with House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid, the award-winning New York Times journalist who died earlier this year in Syria.
You can find more good reads with “Best of” lists created by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, HuffPo and The Guardian. And if you’re looking for a deal, don’t miss this: Amazon.com is now offering 40% off books appearing on its list of 2012 Editors’ Picks. Meanwhile Audible.com has produced its own list of favorites, and it’s worth highlighting if only because, when you sign up for a Free Trial, you can download one of their selections (or pretty much any other audiobook you want) for free. Learn more and initiate the free download here.
Now my dear fellow readers, it’s your turn. We want to hear what books (published in 2012) left the strongest impression on you. Give us your thoughts in the comments section below and we’ll publish the Open Culture Best of 2012 list later this week. We look forward to hearing your picks!
Read More...Conan O’Brien Plays Charlie Rose, Talks Presidential History with Edmund Morris
“This is my dream job,” Conan O’Brien says while in conversation with presidential biographer Edmund Morris. He didn’t say it when he brought Morris onto Conan, his late-night talk show on TBS. He says it on Serious Jibber-Jabber, an altogether different operation. On Conan, he talked to Morris for seven minutes; on Serious Jibber-Jabber, they talk for 47 minutes. Officially described as a web series wherein “Conan O’Brien has lengthy, uninterrupted conversations with interesting people on topics which fascinate him,” the show casts the icon of Gen‑X irreverence not as a purveyor of intelligent silliness, but as a conversationalist in the mold of Charlie Rose. In any case, he does it practically on the set of Charlie Rose: a table, chairs, a background of purest black, and no further distractions. (If you’re going to borrow, they say, borrow from the best.) O’Brien’s followers may not know he has a fervent interest in presidential history, but after watching his interview with the man who wrote three volumes on Theodore Roosevelt and one on Ronald Reagan, they’ll certainly have found out.
Though the show’s title contains the word Serious and O’Brien speaks with genuine curiosity throughout, it also contains the words Jibber-Jabber, and I doubt he has it in him not to crack jokes. This is welcome, and a reason why I’d like to see him direct all of Team Coco’s considerable resources to these interviews from now on. He even gets into the subject of presidential senses of humor — evidently presidents aren’t allowed to have them anymore — which he picks up again in the show’s second interview, with comedy writer and filmmaker Judd Apatow. Though we get a warning that O’Brien will only tape more of these conversations “whenever time and fate allow,” I personally await the next one with bated breath. Somehow, the man who gave the world the Horny Manatee, the Coked-Up Werewolf, and the immortal Masturbating Bear realized the most important thing about viewers like you and me: we’d much rather watch two people discuss enthusiastically and at length subjects that interest them rather than swiftly mangle subjects they guess might interest us.
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Conan O’Brien Writes Chicago Blues Songs With School Kids
Conan O’Brien Kills It at Dartmouth Graduation
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Radiohead-Approved, Fan-Made Film of the Band at Roseland for 2011’s The King of Limbs Tour
Having seen Radiohead a few times since their post-2000 Kid A transformation, I can tell you firsthand that while their last several records have trended toward bedroom rock, the live show is still a full-on experience. No twiddling behind laptops and drum machines. And if you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing them perform since their break with noisy alt-rock, now you can, thanks to the fans who produced the above film, shot at NYC’s Roseland Ballroom and the second of only three shows the band played in 2011 in support of The King of Limbs.
Edited together from the YouTube footage of ten different fans, the video is a remarkable example of crowdsourced dedication. Radiohead generously donated the audio straight from the soundboard, providing stellar sound, and the fan-editors obtained at least two camera angles for every song, giving this production the look of a professional concert film. It’s quite an achievement overall (and not the first time this has been done).
The producers of the film have made it available for free download (via torrent). You can find more information on the film at the project coordinator’s blogspot. The band and fan filmmakers ask that you consider donating any funds you might have used to purchase the film to organizations benefitting the Haiti Earthquake Fund, or to those helping Hurricane Sandy victims, such as Doctors without Borders or the Red Cross. The film is dedicated to Scott Johnson, the Radiohead drum technician who died in a stage collapse at an outdoor concert in Toronto last June.
Finally, in the spirit of fan collaboration, YouTube user MountainMan1092 helpfully typed up and posted the tracklist below:
0:00:58 Bloom 0:07:23 Little By Little 0:12:07 Staircase 0:17:02 The National Anthem 0:22:03 Feral 0:26:20 Subterranean Homesick Alien 0:31:24 Like Spinning Plates 0:34:50 All I Need 0:39:06 True Love Waits/ Everything In Its Right Place 0:44:49 15 Step 0:49:04 Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi 0:55:08 Lotus Flower 1:00:55 Codex 1:06:43 The Daily Mail 1:10:33 Good Morning Mr. Magpie 1:16:22 Reckoner 1:24:00 Give Up The Ghost 1:29:19 Myxomatosis 01:33:24 Bodysnatchers 1:41:28 Supercollider 1:47:17 Nude
via Slate
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Read More...Library of Congress Releases Audio Archive of Interviews with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons
Back in the mid-to-late 1980s, some of the figures we consider Rock and Roll icons were near or at the nadir of their popularity. With Duran Duran, The Police and Michael Jackson at the top of the charts, artists like George Harrison, Bob Dylan and even David Bowie had put out their last great records and were waiting for the nostalgia wheel to turn.
Enter Joe Smith, recording industry executive and former disc jockey. Over two years in the late 80s, while president of Capitol Records/EMI, Smith recorded nearly 240 hours of interviews with a catalog of major musical artists from Mick Jagger, Bowie and Paul McCartney to Yoko Ono, George Harrison and Linda Ronstadt.
Smith used excerpts of the interviews for the book Off the Record, published in 1988. Now retired, he has donated the archive of unedited audio interviews to the Library of Congress. The Joe Smith Collection will feature talks with more than 200 artists. As an industry insider Smith had extraordinary access. It’s not that these artists aren’t already heavily interviewed and documented. It’s the intimate tone of the conversations that pleases and surprises.
In a leisurely conversation with Smith, David Bowie (above) talks about taking classes from Peter Frampton’s father in art school. Yoko Ono, interviewed in late 1987, comes across as still living in the shadow of her late husband. By now, Ono has a bigger reputation as an artist in her own right. Linda Ronstadt, who Smith signed to a recording contract, reflects on her years performing at L.A.’s Troubadour nightclub during the rise of country rock.
By now each of these superstars has written his or her memoir and the golden era of major labels has been dissected by musical diggers. So listening to these interviews from the 1980s takes on a nostalgic feel of its own. Smith’s questions sound naive now. Isn’t it amazing, he remarks to the legendary producer George Martin, that the Beatles were so heavily influenced by African-American blues?! It’s sweet to hear legendary artists and an industry insider stumble upon observations like that one, which have now been so thoroughly digested.
Smith transitioned from broadcast radio to record promotions, eventually rising to executive ranks as president of Warner Brothers, Elektra/Asylum and Capitol Records/EMI. He signed the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Van Morrison, so it’s no surprise that Mickey Hart is interviewed, sharing an intimate story about his father.
So far, audio for only 25 interviews is available on the library’s site. More interviews will be uploaded over time, including one with Smith himself in which he talks dirt about his relationship with former business partner Frank Sinatra.
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.
Read More...Watch as Alberto Giacometti Paints and Pursues the Elusive “Apparition” (1965)
The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti is most often remembered for his famously thin, elongated sculptures of the human form. But Giacometti was a similarly brilliant and original draughtsman who maintained that drawing was the central skill of an artist. “One must stick exclusively to drawing,” he once said. “If one dominates drawing even a little bit then everything else becomes possible.”
Giacometti the draughtsman had a distinctive way of reworking a line, of going over it again and again as if he were sculpting in plaster. “When I make my drawings,” Giacometti said, “the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.” The resulting tangle of lines give his drawings a special vibrancy, a sense of motion and depth on the two-dimensional plane.
In this excerpt from the 1966 film Alberto Giacometti by the Swiss photographer Ernst Scheidegger, we watch as Giacometti paints the foundational lines of a portrait at his studio in Montparnasse. The footage was probably shot in 1965, the last year of Giacometti’s life. The artist reportedly saw the film not long before his death on January 11, 1966. Watching the film, we get a sense of Giacometti’s care for geometry as he draws organizational lines to work out the proportions. Giacometti would often leave these intersecting vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines–which would emerge organically as he went along–in his finished works.
In the German narration, the speaker describes Giacometti’s almost mystical sense of the process: A face appears on the canvas which is his own face but also that of another, distant person who will appear out of the depth if only you reach out for him. But as you do reach out the person recedes, remaining just beyond your grasp. “The apparition,” Giacometti once said: “Sometimes I think I can trap it, but then I lose it again and must begin once more.”
Special thanks to Matthias Rascher for his linguistic help.
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Vintage Footage of Picasso and Jackson Pollock Painting … Through Glass
Wassily Kandinsky Caught in the Act of Creation, 1926
Read More...A Poignant, Elegant Tribute to the Mars Rover Curiosity
The Curiosity mission on Mars will soon bring us some big news. We don’t know what it is. We just know, according to one NASA scientist, the discovery “is going to be one for the history books.” As we await more information, we bring you this: a short film by Dan Winters and Shervin Shaeri that weaves together commentary from NASA engineers and some arresting photographs. Together, they remind us of the heart and soul that went into putting a state-of-the-art rover on a red planet some 200 million miles away from our own “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan once called it.
Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927)
While Scottish physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, he seems almost wholly of the nineteenth century: a trained scientist who fervently believed in “spiritualism” and fairies, and an accomplished and prolific writer whose most famous character—that most logical of detectives—had a cocaine addiction and more personal quirks than the average neurotic. Like Joseph Conrad, Doyle sailed–as a ship’s doctor–to European colonies in West Africa and found himself deeply affected by the brutal exploitation he encountered. And like Conrad, he seems to embody a turn-of-the-century Britishness poised between old and new worlds, when Victoria gave way to Edward and modernity limned the Empire. Although the age of film and of television have always embraced Sherlock Holmes, his creator belongs to the age of the novel. Nevertheless, he agreed to the 1927 interview above, possibly his only appearance on film. In the brief monologue, he discusses the two questions that he most received from curious fans and journalists: how he came to write the Sherlock Holmes stories and how he came to believe in “psychic matters.”
Doyle attributes the creation of Holmes to his scientific training, and to a keen irritation when reading detective stories whose protagonists stumbled on solutions by chance or narrative non sequitur. He also describes his admiration for a colleague’s impressive “deductive” abilities. What if, Conan Doyle reasoned, the detectives had the powers of a doctor? Oh, had he lived to see his premise flipped in House (and sue for royalties). Doyle also expresses his amusement at the credulity of his reading public, many of whom believed in the reality of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and who sent them regards and advice. At this point in the interview, Doyle turns to a subject upon which many thought him credulous: psychic and supernatural experience. He goes to some lengths to establish his bona fides, saying that he studied spiritualism for forty-one years and did not arrive at his ideas in haste. But Doyle was easily taken in by several hoaxes and insisted throughout his life that Harry Houdini possessed psychic powers, despite Houdini’s protests to the contrary. It seems this was one area in which Doyle’s reason failed him—in which he resembles the mystical Yeats more than the skeptical Watson and Holmes.
You can download free copies of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. You can also find four adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Read More...Kurt Vonnegut’s Tips for Teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1967)
Few who dip into Kurt Vonnegut’s work come away without the influence of his voice. If we can judge by his letter to Richard Gehman (click here to read it in large format), this will go for his personal correspondence as much as it does for his fiction. In addition to such novels as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut left behind a great many letters, some of the most interesting of which have just come together in a new 464-page collection. We previously featured one of Vonnegut’s dispatches from the army, written to his parents at age 22. 22 years after that, he wrote the above page to Gehman, himself a noted man of letters. It contains the one thing for which nearly ever dedicated reader of Kurt Vonnegut must long: advice from Kurt Vonnegut.
“Mornings are for writing,” Vonnegut tells Gehman, “and so are most of the afternoons.” The recipient was preparing for a teaching stint at the University of Iowa’s famous Writer’s Workshop. Vonnegut’s own tour of duty there from 1965 to 1967 put him in a position to offer wise counsel. “The classes don’t matter much,” he writes, a sentiment that will strike creative writing teachers as at once dispiriting and sensible. “The real business, head-to-head, is done during office hours.” He also has much to say about university life and how to cope with the remoteness of Iowa City. “Forget your lack of credentials.” “You go to Cedar Rapids for seafood.” “Cancel classes whenever you damn please.” “Every so often you will go nuts. All of a sudden the cornfields get you.” “Run with the painters. I did.” “Go to all the football games. They are great.” Beyond these points, the letter only gets juicier — as a true Vonnegut fan would expect. Again you can read it in large format here.
via Slate
Related content:
22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Vonnegut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”
Kurt Vonnegut Reads from Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story
Kurt Vonnegut: “How To Get A Job Like Mine” (2002)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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