Welles is reading just a short introduction here. But if you want a complete audio download of Moby Dick, let me tell you how to get one. You can download a free reading of Melville’s classic at Librivox. The full mp3 zip file is right here.
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Just wanted to send out a quick birthday wish to YouTube EDU, which celebrates its first birthday today. The site now features over 65,000 academic videos and 350 full courses, many coming from universities like Stanford, Yale, and MIT. My program at Stanford has happily contributed 12 courses to the collection (find them here), and they’ve been downloaded by thousands of viewers across the world. It’s all very gratifying.
PS If you’re looking for more intelligent content on YouTube, you should peruse our page that highlights the smartest video channels on the Tube. NASA, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Google Talks, TED Talks — they’re all listed here.
What’s good, and what’s evil? Traditionally, religion and philosophy have answered these questions, pushing science to the side, asking it to stick to the world of natural laws and knowable facts. But Sam Harris wants to change things. At TED, he’s arguing that science (particularly neuroscience) can address moral questions precisely because these questions fall into the world of knowable facts. And, even better, science can provide definitive, highly objective answers to such questions. Just as there are scientific answers to all questions in physics, so there are clear answers in the moral realm. This applies, for example, to whether children should be subjected to corporal punishment, or how society deals with very meaningful gender questions. (Things get a little emotional on this topic at about 11 minutes in.) The upshot is that Harris isn’t buying a radically relativist position on morality, and this will disappoint many post-modernists. The Enlightenment project is alive and well, ready to make its comeback.
Both the iPhone and Facebook took off when they opened themselves up to outside developers, letting them innovate and build thousands of unforeseen apps for users. In the video above, tech guru Tim O’Reilly asks how universities can do the same. How can they let developers (in this case, the professors) innovate and distribute content to users (students) in new and efficient ways? There are more questions than answers here, but if you want to imagine the university in the 21st century, these are the questions you can’t avoid.
The Wilhelm Scream, named after Private Wilhelm, a character in the 1953 Western film The Charge at Feather River, has appeared in over 140 Hollywood films, including Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reservoir Dogs, and others. (See full list here.) Now the scream is coming back. According to the LA Times, the scream will again echo through cinemas with the May 7 release of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2. Above, you can watch a montage of The Wilhelm Scream. Naturally, the ur-scream comes first. Thanks Veronica for the tip on this one!
Since 2007, Apple has offered universities around the world a way to distribute educational media via iTunes U. Fast forward to 2010, Harvard has now set up its own iTunes U section, with more than 200 audio and video tracks covering everything from the Harvard Kuumba Singers to a course on Justice with prominent political philosopher Michael Sandel. Other highlights include:
Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.
Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese director, would have turned 100 today. And to mark the occasion, The Guardian has assembled a handy guide to ten key Kurosawa movies. Above, we highlight a clip from Seven Samurai (1954), an enormously influential film both in Japan and abroad. The Guardian guide celebrates this and nine other major Kurosawa films, so it’s definitely worth a visit. Meanwhile, you’ll conveniently find two important Kurosawa works (Rashomon and Throne of Blood) listed in our collection of Free Online Movies.
A little belated something for World Water Day (yesterday): National Geographic has released a special issue that delves into the challenges facing our most essential natural resource. “Water: Our Thirsty World” will be soon available at newsstands everywhere. But, right now, you can now download a free interactive version that includes all of the print magazine content, plus lots of extra online goodies. The free download requires registration and is available only until April 2.
An intriguing bit of news from the Yale Bulletin. It begins:
For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
You can read more about what went down here. And, if you want to brush up your physics, head over to the Physics section of our Free Online Course collection. There you’ll find free physics courses from Yale, Stanford, MIT and other fine institutions of higher learning.
For centuries, artists and architects have used some well-known geometrical and mathematical formulas to guide their work: The Fibonacci Series and Spiral, The Golden and Angle Ratios, The Delauney Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations, etc. These formulas have a reality beyond the minds of mathematicians. They present themselves in nature, and that’s what a Spanish filmmaker, Cristóbal Vila, wanted to capture with this short film, Nature by Numbers. You can learn more about the movie at the filmmaker’s web site, and also find his latest film here: Inspirations: A Short Film Celebrating the Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
A quick fyi: Amazon has released an app that will let you read Kindle texts on your Mac (finally!) and the upcoming iPad. If you’re looking for free Kindle texts, we’ve produced a long list here, including many great classics. You can find Kindle apps (all free) for other devices below.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
