Are you blessed with a musical brain? If you care to find out, the BBC is now running an experiment – How Musical Are You? – that assesses your overall relationship with music. It includes questionnaires and tests designed to see whether you can group together different musical styles, memorize tunes and recognize the beat in a piece of music. It all takes about 25 minutes, and, when you’re done, you will receive some (desirable or undesirable) feedback. This experiment was designed by researchers at the Music, Mind and Brain Research Group, University of London, and your participation will contribute to their research into the musical brain. Note: You will need to register with the BBC to participate.
How Musical Are You?
How to See the World Like Malcolm Gladwell
This question ran through my mind just yesterday. No, not how does Malcolm Gladwell see the world? But, rather, what does it feel like to inhabit the mind of people who think and see the world in entirely different ways? The question can be a big existential thought experiment. Or, it turns out, it can be the impulse guiding Malcolm Gladwell’s varied, often unexpected, and usually bestselling inquiries.
Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming in Conversation (1958)
We take you back to 1958 when Ian Fleming, creator of the great spymaster character James Bond, meets up with Raymond Chandler, America’s foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. The two authors, who read and admired each other’s work, sat down for drinks one day and got down to talking about villains (real and imagined) and their iconic literary characters. The BBC captured it all on audio (above). You can also find a transcript of the conversation on page 30 of this PDF. The conversation, which has a free flowing quality to it, runs 25 minutes.
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Raymond Chandler: There’s No Art of the Screenplay in Hollywood
James Bond in Drag For International Women’s Day
NASA: The Frontier Is Everywhere
Reid Gower writes: “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings …” but “none of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd.” Strange given that “NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.” Taking matters into his own hands, Gower has produced a little marketing gift for NASA: The Frontier is Everywhere, a video modeled after Michael Marantz’s beautiful short film, Earth: The Pale Blue Dot, which also features the voice of Carl Sagan – someone who understood the importance of popularizing science…
P.S. NASA isn’t exactly inept on the marketing front. We should remind you of two pretty cool and recent NASA productions:
The Best of NASA Space Shuttle Videos (1981–2010)
NASA Lauches Photo Archive on Flickr
via Zadi.TV
The Impossible Motion Contraption
Every year, The New Scientist sponsors an illusion contest, and, above, we have the winner of the 2010 edition: A contraption created by Koukichi Sugihara (Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences, Japan) that appears to defy gravity, allowing wooden balls to roll up slopes. But, in actual fact “the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion.” You can now make submissions to the 2011 edition.
A Brief History of Product Placement in Movies
Product placement — it became commonplace during the 1980s, but it has a much longer history, one that goes right back to the beginning of film. Oliver Noble’s video lightly (emphasis on lightly) traces the evolution of conspicuous product placement in film. A little tale of the not-so-good, the bad and the ugly…
Oxford English Dictionary Free
Definitely worth a quick mention. The Oxford English Dictionary, otherwise known simply as the OED, can be accessed for free until February 5. This gives you access to 600,000 words, 3 million quotations, over 1000 years of English. In brief, the authority on the English language. To access the dictionary, simply login with trynewoed as both the username and password.
Note: Kaplan Publishing has extended its free ebook offer until January 17. If you know anyone getting ready to take the SAT, GRE, LSAT, etc., then please send them to this page for more information.
via Kottke
World’s Smallest Periodic Table on a Human Hair
Fun with science. The world’s smallest periodic table etched onto a strand of hair belonging to chemistry Professor Martyn Poliakoff (University of Nottingham). This clip comes from the Periodic Videos collection and it comes recommend by the great @OliverSacks.
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Related Content:
A Periodic Table Visualizing the Year & Country in Which Each Element Was Discovered
The Periodic Table of Elements Presented as Interactive Haikus
Arduino Documentary: Open Source Hardware is Here
Open Source, it’s not just for software. It’s for hardware too. The new film, Arduino: The Documentary, revisits a project launched in the Italian town of Ivrea back in 2005. The challenge? To develop cheap, easy-to-use electronics components for design students. (You can get into the technical side of things here.) The message? Geek.com summarizes it well: “we are about to see an explosion of hardware devices that come from bedroom tinkerers and student projects.” Note: A Spanish version of the film is available here, and they’re all released under a Creative Commons license.
Arduino: The Documentary will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
Two Men: A Kafka Inspired Short Film
Two Men, a short film directed by Dominic Allen, takes an old philosophical story by Franz Kafka, one set in Europe of course, and adapts it to a contemporary Aboriginal Australian context, using indigenous “non actors.” In reworking Kafka’s tale (read the original text here), Allen hoped to “affirm an element of humanity’s commonality” … and “reinforce Kafka’s point that it’s impossible to ever truly know another’s motivations.” Made in 2009, the film has since been screened at film festivals in New York, Prague, London, and Sydney, and the film earned Allen the “Emerging Australian Filmmaker Prize” at the Melbourne International Film Festival last year.
Related Content:
Franz Kafka: The Animated Short Film
Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport
17-Year-Old Joan Baez Performs at Famous “Club 47” in Cambridge, MA (1958)
The video above brings you way back (we think) to 1958, when Joan Baez was only 17, to a concert she played at the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass. While the teenage ingénue broke onto the folk scene, Bob Dylan was still a student back in Hibbing, Minnesota. Five years later, Baez introduced Dylan to the music world; the two dated for a while; and then, even while going their separate ways, they put their stamp on the 60s folk scene – a story that gets well documented in the book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. If you click here, you can watch Baez, now in her prime, perform a complete concert in 1965. The show runs 65 minutes and features 18 songs.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
Related Content:
Woody Guthrie’s Fan Letter To John Cage and Alan Hovhaness (1947)
Two Legends Together: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Program, 1963
The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Features 17,000 Recordings
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