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.
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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.
Wikipedia is now opening the online encyclopedia to video, giving contributors a new way to convey information in a richer way. And they’re making a point of using video in an open format (Ogg Theora).
Among the confluence of factors coming together in 2010 are: 1) the growing awareness that video is the dominant medium of the web and that video can help make Wikipedia articles even richer; 2) the development of open source players and codecs (alternatives to Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media, and H.264, 3); the introduction of public browser tools—Firefox’s Firefogg extension, for example—for uploading and playing nonproprietary video formats; 4) the willingness of nonprofits like the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Open Video Alliance and for-profits like Kaltura and Intelligent Television to dedicate themselves to open video; and the provision of strategic funding from the Mozilla Foundation and Ford Foundation, among others, to support developers, programmers, and activists. As Wikipedia board member S. J. Klein explains in a recent Open Video Alliance video short, the day is fast coming where video will be as easy for users to write, edit, annotate, and remix as text is today. (You can find more details on the campaign here and here.)
What are the recommendations for video contributed to Wikipedia? They should be related to current articles, short and under 100 MB, free, and available to share and reuse (offered under a Creative Commons BY-SA or equivalent license). In coming weeks new videos are expected to proliferate and new strategies will be unfurled for working with educational repositories of legacy video.
The lineup, including many prize winners, features movies by Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Wong Kar-wai (Happy Together), Michelangelo Antonioni (L’avventura), Jacques Tati (Mon oncle), and others. There are nine movies in total, filmed between 1958 and 2008. And they’re free until June. These films should be available worldwide, but registration is required. Kick back and start watching here.
Here’s a little nugget for you. The great inventor Thomas Edison visited the home of Mark Twain in 1909, and captured footage of “the father of American literature” (says Faulkner) walking around his estate and playing cards with his daughters, Clara and Jean. The film is silent and deteriorated. But it’s apparently the only known footage of the author who gave us Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain would die the next year.
Lots of new archives have been coming online lately. So, why not give them a quick mention.
CSPAN: This week, the American cable network finally completed the digitization of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C‑SPAN program aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in total, covering 23 years of American political history. The Times has more on this story.
Popular Science: Thanks to Google, you can now freely access a 137-year archive of Popular Science. As PopSci, founded in 1872, writes, “Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives.” If you spend some time with Brain Picking’s recent post, you’ll see why the PopSci archive holds so much interest. As a side note, you can also find a vast archive of Popular Mechanics via Google Books. Just click here and, as Wired put it, “let the nerdgasmic loss of productivity commence.”
Spin Magazine: Google Books has also added to its virtual magazine shelf every issue of Spin, the music magazine Bob Guccione Jr. founded in 1985. As BoingBoing mentions today, it’s interesting to see “how awfully dated the design of the magazine is.”
Salman Rushdie: Now this isn’t a publicly available archive, but it’s worth knowing about. Archivists at Emory have been working with the digital assets of Salman Rushdie and developing a new field — “digital archaeology” — that will help scholars preserve and methodically study the digital remains (text documents, emails, browser logs and files) of writers and artists. You can watch Rushdie talk about the project, its challenges and benefits. (There’s another clip of him speaking here.) Then you have the archivists themselves talking about how they’re preserving Rushdie’s literary remains, down to the yellow sticky notes he attached to his computer. (Note: The Times has a piece on this project this week.)
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