Free Tech How-To Books
Thanks to BoingBoing, you can get free access (for 30 days) to three popular tech manuals:
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
• Learning Perl
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
Electing a US President in Plain English
We’re less than two weeks away (finally, at long last) from the next US presidential election, and that means that it’s a good time to decipher America’s convoluted electoral system. So here’s a piece from The Common Craft Show, which does it in a fairly creative way:
Your Digital Magazine Rack
A quick fyi: Alltop is a new web service (created by Guy Kawasaki) that aggregates RSS feeds about popular topics. Name a topic and they bring you stories from “the best websites and blogs” on the issue. If you want to see a sample of what I’m talking about, you can take a look at the area where Alltop was kind enough to list Open Culture. We’re in their college section. But you can also find hundreds of other topic areas here — art, books, health, writing, coffee, human rights, you get the picture.
More Free Classical
Until November 24, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, based in the Netherlands, is offering 10 symphonies as free downloads. You have to register, but once you do, you can download high quality performances of Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms, and more. Hat tip to Metafilter for pointing this one out.
The Sun and Its Magnetic Beauty
In case you missed them, I wanted to flag some photos that made their way around the blogosphere yesterday, thanks in part to BoingBoing. The Swedish 1‑m Solar Telescope, operated by the Institute for Solar Physics, has captured images that let you see the sun in an entirely new way. Below, you’ll find a detailed view of the magnetic structure of the Sun’s surface. Rather beautiful. For more photos, definitely have a look here.
via BoingBoing
Tina Fey Does Sarah Palin — Round #4
This one features a guest appearance by Palin herself. Video starts after the brief, but unavoidable commercial. Let ‘er roll:
The Old Man and the Sea Animated
In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film (among other awards) for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As noted here, Petrov’s technique involves painting pastels on glass, and he and his son painted a total of 29,000 images in total. Rather incredible. Below, we present the 20 minute short. You’ll find this film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
As promised
Here’s the YouTube video of the first lecture from The Geography of US Presidential Elections. The next installment comes next week.
Yale Open Courses: The New Lineup
I wanted to give everyone a heads up that Yale has just released its second round of “open courses.” And I have to say that the lineup looks great. Let me quickly list them for you:
- The American Novel Since 1945 (Amy Hungerford)
- Introduction to Greek History (Donald Kagan)
- Game Theory (Ben Polak)
- Financial Markets (Robert Shiller)
- Milton (John Rogers)
- France Since 1871 (John Merriman)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845–1877 (David Blight)
- Fundamentals of Physics (Ramamurti Shankar)
- Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering (W. Mark Saltzman)
As always, each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and quite polished lectures. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be platform agnostic, meaning that you should be able to download the lectures to any computer or mp3 player. For more on Yale’s Open Course initiative, please visit its official website here. And please note that you can also find these courses in our larger collection of Free Online Courses.
The Geography of US Presidential Elections: Week 1
As mentioned last week, Stanford is hosting a five week course, The Geography of US Presidential Elections, that you can follow (for free) in real time. The first video lecture is now available on iTunes (download here), and you can find it embedded below.
The first lecture is fast paced, and features intriguing graphics that start to dismantle the widely held belief that the US can be neatly divided into red and blue states. I will keep posting the lectures as the course unfolds. In the meantime, I’d recommend visiting the course web site, and asking the professor, Martin Lewis, any questions you might have.
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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.
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