Courtesy of NASA comes a visualization showing how global temperatures have changed since 1880. According to NASA’s web site, this “color-coded map shows a progression of changing global surface temperatures from 1884 to 2012. Dark blue indicates areas cooler than average. Dark red indicates areas warmer than average.” And the difference between dark blue and dark red is about 7.2 degrees fahrenheit. NASA scientists note that “2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1998, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on record.” Copies of the video above and still shots can be freely downloaded from the NASA web site. To deepen your understanding of climate change, spend some time with Global Warming, a freeonline course from the University of Chicago.
It often seems, at least to me, that our culture is slowly sliding backward when it comes to science education. As a humanities person, my observations may not count for much, but I do find myself getting nostalgic for popular science communicators like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman; people who could appear in America’s living room and enthrall even the most hardened and recalcitrant of minds. Sagan’s influence peaked at the dawn of the culture wars, and it doesn’t seem like anyone could fill his shoes.
But several influential science communicators have made significant strides in bringing science to a popular audience in the past few decades. Among them is the very affable astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who takes Sagan’s mantle in the Cosmos reboot on Fox next year. There are media figures like NPR’s Ira Flatow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, and Emmy-award-winning Tracy Day, co-founder of the World Science Festival. Physicist and popular science writer Brian Greene has done excellent work for NOVA, and scientific heavyweights Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins reach millions with popular books and media appearances.
Now imagine all these people on the same stage together, trading stories, jamming, riffing like great jazz musicians, like some Justice League of 21st century science lovers. Well, you don’t have to, because this happened, not on primetime television (alas), but at Arizona State University under the aegis of their “Origins Project,” whose mission is to foster interdisciplinary research, build scientific partnerships, and “raise the profile of origins-related issues and broaden scientific literacy.” Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss MC’ed the March 30th event, and the panel filled a 3,000-seat auditorium for a two-hour session that focuses on “the storytelling of science” (part one at top, part two above).
The event harnesses the slick, entertaining format of TED Talks to demonstrate how cutting-edge research can reach a wide audience eager for a fuller understanding of the physical universe. The first video up top opens with a quote from Michael Shermer: “Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.” The stories that the members of this exciting panel discussion tell are connected to physical reality through scientific evidence that—without artful and compelling narrative—can seem bewilderingly complex.
Today, digitally empowered to take, view, and share a photograph in the span of seconds, we think nothing of the phrase “ïnstant camera.” But to celebrated Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 after living almost his entire life in the Soviet Union, the technology came as a revelation. He had, of course, to use a primitive Polaroid camera, but, Tarkovsky being Tarkovsky, his aesthetic sense still came through its little square, self-developing frames loud and clear — or rather, it came through, rich, pensive, solemn, and autumnal.
In 2006, Thames & Hudson published Instant Light, a book collecting “a selection of color Polaroids the filmmaker took from 1979 to 1984 of his home, family, and friends in Russia and of places he visited in Italy,” and you can see some of these images on the blog Poemas del río Wang, or on this Facebook page.
The post quotes Tarkovsky’s friend Tonino Guerra, remembering the auteur’s Polaroid period: “In 1977, on my wedding ceremony in Moscow, Tarkovsky appeared with a Polaroid camera. He had just shortly discovered this instrument and used it with great pleasure among us. [ … ] Tarkovsky thought a lot about the ‘flight’ of time and wanted to do only one thing: to stop it — even if only for a moment, on the pictures of the Polaroid camera.”
Now that we find ourselves in a new wave of Polaroidism — you can even buy the cameras and their film at Urban Outfitters — we’d do well to study these pictures taken by a man who mastered their form just as thoroughly as he mastered cinema. And if you want evidence of the latter, look no further than our collection of Tarkovsky films free online.
Since 2009, the organization VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts has sought to bring balance to the representation of female authors in the literary world. As revealed by the 2010 controversy begun by author Jodi Picoult over the gushing treatment Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom received in the New York Times, the disparity, and the bias, are real. Author Jennifer Weiner chimed in as well, writing: “when a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it’s romance, or a beach book.” This fracas—involving a number of mostly New York literati and the death of the term “chick lit”—didn’t split evenly down gender lines. Both male and female writers lined up to defend Picoult and Franzen, but it did open up legitimate questions about the old (mostly white) boys club that claims the upper echelons of literary fiction and the brass ring that is the New York Times book review.
What received no notice in the popular media during all this chatter was the place of women writers in genre fiction, which mostly lives outside the gates and rarely gets much notice from the critics (with the exception of a handful of “serious” writers and the Young Adult market). Well, there is a discussion about gender parity in the science fiction world taking place now on the blog of sci-fi critic and writer Ian Sales. Sales curates SF Mistressworks—a blog for women sci-fi writers—and after reviewing a 1975 anthology called Women of Wonder, he asked readers over at his blog to submit their favorite short fiction by women writers. His goal? To collect 100 stories and novellas as a counter to the classic, and almost wholly male-dominated collection, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov. You can read the full list of 100 over at Sales’ blog. Below, we’ve excerpted those stories that are freely available online. If you’re a science fiction fan and find yourself unable to name more than one or two female authors in the genre (everyone knows, for example, the fabulous Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, pictured above), you might want to take a look at some of the great work you’ve missed out on.
Sales’ list spans several decades and, as he writes, demonstrates “a good spread of styles and themes and approaches across the genre.”
1 ‘The Fate of the Poseidonia’, Clare Winger Harris (1927, short story) online here
12 ‘The New You’, Kit Reed (1962, short story) online here
13 ‘The Putnam Tradition’, Sonya Dorman (1963, short story) online here
16 ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’, Pamela Zoline (1967, short story) online here
28 ‘The View from Endless Scarp’, Marta Randall (1978, short story) online here
51 ‘The Road to Jerusalem’, Mary Gentle (1991, short story) online here
71 ‘Captive Girl’, Jennifer Pelland (2006, short story) online here
79 ‘Spider the Artist’, Nnedi Okrafor (2008, short story) online here
81 ‘Eros, Philia, Agape’, Rachel Swirsky (2009, novelette) online here
82 ‘Non-Zero Probabilities’, NK Jemisin (2009, short story) online here
85 ‘Blood, Blood’, Abbey Mei Otis (2010, short story) online here and here
88 ‘Amaryllis’, Carrie Vaughn (2010, short story) online here
89 ‘I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno’, Vylar Kaftan (2010, short story) online here
91 ‘Six Months, Three Days’, Charlie Jane Anders (2011, short story) online here
93 ‘The Cartographer Bees and the Anarchist Wasps’, E Lily Yu (2011, short story) online here
94 ‘Silently and Very Fast’, Catherynne M Valente (2011, novella) online here, here and here
96 ‘A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel’, Yoon Ha Lee (2011, short story) online here
97 ‘Immersion’, Aliette de Bodard (2012, short story) online here
98 ‘The Lady Astronaut of Mars’, Mary Robinette Kowal (2012, novelette) online here
* Please note: an earlier version of this post was titled “The 100 Best Sci-Fi Stories by Women Writers (Read 20 for Free Online).” As this list’s curator, Ian Sales, points out unequivocally below, this is not meant to be a definitive “best of” in any sense. Our apologies for misreading his intentions.
If you’re a New Yorker, you know this stretch of subway inside and out. You’ve schlepped from Union Square to Grand Central Station on the 4, 5, or 6 trains how many times? Probably more than you care to count. But don’t worry, you’re in good company. New Yorkers have been making this journey since 1904, and here we have some vintage video to prove it. Shot on May 21, 1905, seven months after the IRT subway line opened, the video shows a train moving uptown. And then, during the last minute, you can see the New Yorkers exiting the train, svelte and dressed to the nines.
If you’re wondering how this clip was shot, let me add this: A camera was mounted on a subway train following another train on the same track. Lighting was provided by a specially constructed work car on a parallel track.
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Cinema as we’ve almost always known it — “Edison, the Lumière brothers, Méliès, Porter, all the way through Griffith and on to Kubrick” — has “really almost gone.” So writes Martin Scorsese in his recent essay for the New York Review of Books,“The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.” He argues that traditional film forms have “been overwhelmed by moving images coming at us all the time and absolutely everywhere, even faster than the visions coming at the astronaut” in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “We have no choice but to treat all these moving images coming at us as a language. We need to be able to understand what we’re seeing and find the tools to sort it all out.” Only natural that Scorsese, as one of the best-known, highest-profile auteurs alive, would reference Kubrick, his generational predecessor in the untiring furtherance of cinematic vision and craft.
We just yesterday featured a post about Kubrick’s 1963 list of ten favorite films. Scorsese, for his part, has impressed many as one of the most enthusiastically cinephilic directors working in America today: his essays about and appearances on the DVDs of his favorite movies stand as evidence for the surprising breadth of his appreciation. Today, why not have a look at Scorsese’s list, which he put together for Sight and Sound magazine, and which begins with the Kubrick selection you might expect:
In “The Persisting Vision,” he champions comprehensive film preservation, citing the case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the final entry on his list, now named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound’s critics poll. “When the film came out some people liked it, some didn’t, and then it just went away.” When, after decades of obscurity, Vertigo came back into circulation, the color was completely wrong,” and “the elements — the original picture and sound negatives — needed serious attention.” A restoration of the “decaying and severely damaged” film eventually happened, and “more and more people saw Vertigo and came to appreciate its hypnotic beauty and very strange, obsessive focus.” I, personally, couldn’t imagine the world of cinema without it — nor without any of the other pictures Scorsese calls his favorites.
For centuries, seafaring explorers and merchants reckoned with the longitude problem. It was relatively easy to figure out a ship’s location on a north-south axis, but nearly impossible to determine how far east or west it was. And the stakes were high. Sail too far astray and your ship (and men) could end up so far afield that getting home before the food and water ran out might be impossible. The sailing world needed better tools to determine location at sea.
In 1714 the British government established the Board of Longitude, offering a cash prize to anyone who could figure out how to detect how far east or west a ship was at sea. The Board was abolished in 1828, but only after fostering innovative techniques that would forever change the nature of marine navigation.
Cambridge University and the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich recently released an archive making all of the letters, objects, and documents related to the Board’s work available, along with a spiffy set of videos that brings the Board’s history and achievements to life.
During the Board’s tenure, clockmaker John Harrison figured out that sailors could find out their location if they knew local time at sea and compared that to the time at a common reference point. The moon was seen as a giant clock, and its position relative to stars was recorded in the Nautical Almanac, giving sailors the data to compare against the time at sea. One of the innovations vetted by the Board of Longitude is John Harrison’s Sea Clock. Also during that time, Greenwich became the prime meridian.
All of this work led to more accurate maps. The Board sponsored journeys, including some aboard Captain Cook’s ships with portable observatories for mapmakers to sketch and use triangulation to determine accurate location on voyages, including one to the Northwestern United States.
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be present when Oscar Wilde was delivering those dazzling epigrams of his? In this classic sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, we’re presented with one hilarious possibility.
The sketch is from Episode 39 of the Flying Circus, the last episode of season three, which was recorded on May 18, 1972 but not aired until January 18, 1973. The scene takes place in 1895, in the drawing room of Wilde’s London home. Holding court amid a roomful of sycophants, Wilde (played by Graham Chapman) competes with the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (Michael Palin) and the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler (John Cleese) to impress Queen Victoria’s son Albert Edward (Terry Jones), the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII.
As for the historical basis of the sketch, “There seems to be no evidence for the convivial triumvirate of Whistler, Wilde, and Shaw,” writes Darl Larsen in Monty Python’s Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide, “especially as late as 1895, when Whistler was caring for his terminally ill wife and Wilde was in the early stages of his fall from grace.” Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in February of that year, and shortly afterward he became embroiled in a legal battle with the Marquess of Queensberry that led eventually to his imprisonment for homosexuality. Wilde was once a protégé of Whistler, but their friendship had deteriorated by 1895. Whistler was apparently jealous of Wilde’s success, and believed he had stolen many of his famous lines. When Wilde reportedly said “I wish I had said that” in response to a witty remark by Whistler in about 1888, the painter famously retorted, “You will, Oscar, you will.” Shaw worked as a London theatre critic in the 1890s, and the Prince of Wales was a patron of the arts.
In the Python sketch, Wilde kicks off a round of witticisms with his famous line, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” But things go rapidly downhill as the conversation turns into an exercise in heaping abuse on the Prince of Wales and pinning the blame on a rival:
WILDE: Your Majesty is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
PRINCE: I beg your pardon?
WILDE: Um…It was one of Whistler’s.
WHISTLER: I never said that.
WILDE: You did, James, you did.
WHISTLER: Well, Your Highness, what I meant was that, like a doughnut, um, your arrival gives us pleasure…and your departure only makes us hungry for more. [The prince laughs and nods his head.] Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat’s piss.
PRINCE: What?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde’s. One of Wilde’s.
WILDE: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
SHAW: I…I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
PRINCE: Oh.
WILDE: Right. Your Majesty is like a dose of clap–
WHISTLER: –Before you arrive is pleasure, and after is a pain in the dong.
Since his improbable but riveting rise from put-upon, cancer-stricken chemistry teacher Walter White to sociopathic meth kingpin Heisenberg, Bryan Cranston’s character in Breaking Bad has come to embody all of the characteristics of an ancient despot: cunning, paranoia, the nursing of old wounds and pretensions to undeserved greatness. It seems perfectly in character, then, that the show’s producers would tease the final season with the ominous and dusty clip above, with Cranston reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias,” a poem about the hubris of another desert tyrant—well-known for his megalomaniacal folly—Ramesses II (also known by a transliteration of his throne name, Ozymandias).
The speaker of Shelley’s poem meets a traveller from an “antique land,” who describes an immense statue, broken to pieces and lying strewn in the desert where “Nothing beside remains.” On the statue’s pedestal, a sculptor has inscribed the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” As Slate describes the teaser’s match-up:
The poem echoes all the show’s big themes: the mythology of evil, the nuances of morality, the arc of coronation and decay. The images, on the other hand are fleeting—mostly New Mexico desert and suburbia, though we end with a lingering shot of Heisenberg’s dusty, worn hat resting, like the poem’s once-colossal statue.
Fans of the show familiar with the poem’s most pronounced theme, the fleeting nature of empires, no matter how great, will know to anticipate the fall of Heisenberg in some spectacular fashion, though all we have so far are the vague hints of Walter’s escalating violence and paranoia from the last few episodes. Cranston seethes the poem’s most famous line—that one about despair (and the source of the poem’s central irony)—with particular menace.
The poem’s imagery, so common to the early nineteenth century Egyptology of Shelley’s time and after, was allegedly inspired by a passage in Roman-era historian Diodorus Siculus describing just such a statue. Also fueling Shelley’s imagination were the Napoleonic archaeological finds in Egypt, including news of the 1816 discovery of a massive Ramesses II statue by Italian explorer Giovani Belzoni (who sold it to the British Museum in 1821). Shelley wrote “Ozymandias” in competition with a friend, financier and novelist Henry Smith. Smith’s submission, “In Egypt’s Sandy Silence,” came first.
Critic and writer Leigh Hunt published both poems in 1818 editions of his monthly magazine The Examiner. While Smith’s poem barely rises to the occasion, more clumsy parody than serious literary endeavor, Shelley’s—like the sculptor’s inscription in his poem—has outlasted the empire of his day and lives on in the microcosmic TV representations of our own imperial works. Above, see an 1817 draft copy of Shelley’s iambic pentameter sonnet, worked over with corrections and revisions. Below see the fair copy he sent to Hunt for publication. Both copies reside at the Bodleian Library.
Last week Anant Agarwal, President of edX (the MOOC consortium launched by Harvard and MIT), paid a visit to The Colbert Report. And it didn’t take long for the host, the one and only Stephen Colbert, to ask funny but unmistakably probing questions about the advent of Massive Open Online Courses. “I don’t understand. You’re in the knowledge business in a university. Let’s say I had a shoe store, ok, and then I hired you to work at my shoe store. And you said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s give the shoes away for free.’ I would fire you and then probably throw shoes at your head.” In other words, why would universities disrupt themselves and give education away at no cost? Where’s the sanity in that? If you have five minutes, you can watch Agarwal’s response and get a few laughs along the way. And if you’re ready to take a MOOC, then dive into our collection of 550 Free MOOCs from Great Universities. 120 new courses will be starting in August and September alone.
When, over the past weekend, I noticed the words “Stanley Kubrick” had risen into Twitter’s trending-topics list, I got excited. I figured someone had discovered, in the back of a long-neglected studio vault, the last extant print of a Kubrick masterpiece we’d somehow all forgotten. No suck luck, of course; Kubrick scholars, given how much they still talk about even the auteur’s never-realized projects like Napoleon, surely wouldn’t let an entire movie slip into obscurity. The burst of tweets actually came in honor of Kubrick’s 85th birthday, and hey, any chance to celebrate a director whose filmography includes the likes of Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’ll seize. The British Film Institute marked the occasion by posting a little-seen list of Kubrick’s top ten films.
“The first and only (as far as we know) Top 10 list Kubrick submitted to anyone was in 1963 to a fledgling American magazine named Cinema (which had been founded the previous year and ceased publication in 1976),” writes the BFI’s Nick Wrigley. It runs as follows:
1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944)
7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940—above)
9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930)
But seeing as Kubrick still had 36 years to live and watch movies after making the list, it naturally provides something less than the final word on his preferences. Wrigley quotes Kubrick confidant Jan Harlan as saying that “Stanley would have seriously revised this 1963 list in later years, though Wild Strawberries, Citizen Kane and City Lights would remain, but he liked Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V much better than the old and old-fashioned Olivier version.” He also quotes Kubrick himself as calling Max Ophuls the “highest of all” and “possessed of every possible quality,” calling Elia Kazan “without question the best director we have in America,” and praising heartily David Lean, Vittorio de Sica, and François Truffaut. This all comes in handy for true cinephiles, who can never find satisfaction watching only the filmmakers they admire; they must also watch the filmmakers the filmmakers they admireadmire.
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