Google has created a free Python class designed for “people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python.” A fortunate thing since Python is a computer language that’s now strongly in demand. (By the way, did you know that Python takes its name from Monty Python? A true story.)
The class includes “written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding. These materials are used within Google to introduce Python to people who have just a little programming experience. The first exercises work on basic Python concepts like strings and lists, building up to the later exercises which are full programs dealing with text files, processes, and http connections. The class is geared for people who have a little bit of programming experience in some language, enough to know what a “variable” or “if statement” is. Beyond that, you do not need to be an expert programmer to use this material.
If you’re looking for a generally well-reviewed textbook, consider Learning Python, 5th edition (from O’Reilly Media.
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The life of Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé has provided fodder for both salacious speculation and intellectual drama in film and on the page for the amount of romantic attention she attracted from European intellectuals like philosopher Paul Rée, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Emotionally intense Nietzsche became infatuated with Salomé, proposed marriage, and, when she declined, broke off their relationship in abrupt Nietzschean fashion.
For her part, Salomé so valued these friendships she made a proposal of her own: that she, Nietzsche and Rée, writes D.A. Barry at 3:AM Magazine, “live together in a celibate household where they might discuss philosophy, literature and art.” The idea scandalized Nietzsche’s sister and his social circle and may have contributed to the “passionate criticism” Salomé’s 1894 biographical study, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reappraisal, Barry argues, as “a psychological portrait.”
In Nietzsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sorrowful ailing and triumphal recovery, incandescent intoxication and cool consciousness. One senses here the close entwining of mutual contradictions; one senses the overflowing and voluntary plunge of over-stimulated and tensed energies into chaos, darkness and terror, and then an ascending urge toward the light and most tender moments.” We might see this passage as charged by the remembrance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the concept of the Eternal Recurrence ‘in a quiet voice with all the signs of deepest horror.’”
We should also, perhaps primarily, see Salomé’s impressions as an effect of Nietzsche’s turbulent prose, reaching its apotheosis in his experimentally philosophical novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra. As a theorist of the embodiment of ideas, of their inextricable relation to the physical and the social, Nietzsche had some very specific ideas about literary style, which he communicated to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teaching of Style.” Well before writers began issuing “similar sets of commandments,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Nietzsche “set down ten stylistic rules of writing,” which you can find, in their original list form, below.
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.
As with all such prescriptions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s perspectivism has been (mis)interpreted as wanton subjectivity, his veneration for antiquity places a high value on formal constraints. His prose, we might say, resides in that tension between Dionysian abandon and Apollonian cool, and his rules address what liberal arts professors once called the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic: the three supports of moving, expressive, persuasive writing.
Salomé was so impressed with these aphoristic rules that she included them in her biography, remarking, “to examine Nietzsche’s style for causes and conditions means far more than examining the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can listen to his inner soundings.” Isn’t this what great writing should feel like?
Salomé wrote in her study that “Nietzsche not only mastered language but also transcended its inadequacies.” (As Nietzsche himself commented in 1886, notes Hugo Drochon, he needed to invent “a language of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-disciplined writing found a complement in Salomé’s boldly keen analysis. From her we can also perhaps glean another principle: “No matter how calumnious the public attacks on her,” writes Barry, “particularly from [his sister] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche during the Nazi period in Germany, Salomé did not respond to them.”
Unlikely as it might seem, the Japanese jazz scene has for decades and decades produced some of the finest players in the world, from traditionalists to experimentalists and everything in-between. One might say the same about other jazz-inclined countries (those of northern Europe, for instance, having developed particularly robust scenes), but those countries have to do without enlivenment by “only in Japan” moments like the one we have above: jazz pianist Yōsuke Yamashita, acclaimed on both sides of the Pacific, playing piano on the beach — a piano on fire on the beach, to be precise.
This wasn’t even the first time he’d done it. In 1973, famed graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu asked Yamashita to appear in his short film burning piano, playing the titular instrument. Watching it again 35 years later, Yamashita wrote, “Seeing myself engaged in that extraordinary performance, I felt this wave of emotion that was like, ‘What was that?’
In one sense, I had performed as an ‘object’ in a Kiyoshi Awazu artwork. In another, however, I had perhaps experienced a form of artistic expression that no one before me had ever experienced before, as the result of a situation that could only have happened at that time. ‘What was that?’ There was only one way I could reconfirm this for myself—by doing it one more time.”
The opportunity arose at the behest of Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, who staged Burning Piano 2008. You can read the event’s program as a PDF, which contains Yamashita’s reflections leading up to the event. It also contains remarks from an Awazu Design Room representative who witnessed the original burning piano shoot, a local piano dealer (who assures us that long after the piano “began to appear in Japanese homes in the era of high-level economic growth,” some “must be destroyed amid reluctant feelings”), and the mayor of Shika Town, on whose Masuhogaura Beach Yamashita donned his silver protective suit and played a funeral requiem on the flaming instrument until it could produce not a sound more.
“I did not think I was risking my life,” Yamashita later said, “but I was almost suffocating from the smoke that was continuously getting into my eyes and nose. I had decided to keep on playing until the piano stopped making sounds, so though I did not mean it, but it ended up having a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself.” Dedicated jazz players know what it means to suffer for their art, as do all the participants in the age-old intensive Japanese conception of mastery, but who would have guessed that those cultures would intersect so… combustibly?
But it would have been difficult for anyone to overlook seven animatronic dinosaurs, traveling by barge on October 15, 1963, bound for the Sinclair Oil Corporation’s “Dinoland” exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair.
In a stunt worthy of Barnum, the synthetic beasts trekked 150 miles from the exhibit’s designer, Jonas Studios, to the World’s Fair site in Flushing, Queens, hailed by fireboats and an enthusiastic throng. The sponsoring corporation, whose highly recognizable logo was a brontosaurus, had furnished the public with a timetable of estimated arrivals along the route.
For good measure, every family to visit the exhibit within the first year was offered a coupon for a free gallon of gasoline.
Installed in what the marvelously evocative Jam Handy short below termed a “prime location surrounded by titans of American industry,” the dinosaurs attracted over 10 million “car-owning, traveling” fans. (That’s a lot of fossil fuel.)
On the way out, visitors were encouraged to avail themselves of the Mold-A-Rama machine, which pumped out miniature plastic dinosaur souvenirs at 25¢ a pop.
After the fair closed, the dinosaurs went on tour, put in an appearance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and eventually settled into zoos and natural history museums around the country.
Sinclair uses the Dinosaur “Brontosaurus” as a symbol to dramatize the age and quality of the crude oils from which Sinclair Petroleum Products are made — crudes which were mellowing in the earth millions of years ago when Dinosaurs lived.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Taught by Yale professor Paul Bloom, this course presents an Introduction to Psychology and tries to explain what makes us tick:
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
You can watch the 20 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.
The main texts used in this course include:
Gray, Peter. Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers, 2007.
Which living writer stands as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe? A silly question, admittedly: now, more than 160 years after his death, Poe’s influence has spread so far and wide throughout literature that no one writer’s work could possibly count as his definitive continuation. The most popular and powerful modern storytellers owe more than a thing or two to Poe — or rather, have built upon Poe’s achievements — without even knowing it, especially if they hail from a different part of the world and work a different part of the cultural map than did 19th-century America’s pioneer of new and psychologically intense genre literature.
Take, for instance, Neil Gaiman. “Every year, Worldbuilders holds a giant auction-charity-donation thing, giving people cool things and raising an awful lot of money for a fantastic cause,” he says in the video above, which came out just this holiday season. “And every year, I seem to be reading a poem or book chosen by the people who pay money to Worldbuilders.
This year, for reasons known only to themselves, they have decided I need to read Edgar Allan Poe’s ghastly, gruesome, dark, and famous poem ‘The Raven.’ So I’ve lit a number of candles, fired up the fire, found a copy of the Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, and I’m going to read it to you in a comfortable chair by the fire, as befits a poem told in the days of yore.”
Though many of his fans come to know him through his novels like American Godsand Stardust, Gaiman’s writing career has also included work in poetry, comic books, radio drama, and movies, all of it using his signature mix of fantastical invention, resonant emotion, and polished, witty wordcraft. When potential collaborators on projects in these fields and others want to work with him, they want to tap not just his uncommon storytelling skill, regardless of the medium in which he tells his stories, but his ability to satisfy both wide audiences and critics with those stories.
Poe, too, knew how to do this, and indeed described “The Raven” in a magazine essay as a work deliberately composed to “suit at once the popular and the critical taste,” and since its first publication in 1845, the poem has only grown better-known and more beloved. Here, in Neil Gaiman’s ten-minute reading, we can see and hear one master of high-impact storytelling acknowledging another over all those 171 years.
Local parent tells other local parent how to raise their children: this scenario has provoked many a neighborhood listserv flamewar, and maybe a street brawl or three. Unkempt and inflammatory philosopher Slavoj Žižek telling parents how to raise their children? Well… maybe a few hundred eyerolls.
I exaggerate. Žižek only addresses one small aspect of parenting—a benign, culturally specific one at that, which ranks far beneath, say, health and education and falls in line with whether one should pretend to be a nocturnal creature who lives on children’s teeth, or to see a giant rabbit in the spring.
We’re talking about Santa Claus, and to lie or not to lie to your kids is the question posed to Žižek by students at SUNY Brockport in the low-quality video above. If you can adjust to the audio/video, you’ll hear the cultural theorist give an interesting answer. I can’t vouch for its consonance with child psychology, but as a parent, I can say my tiny demographic confirms the insight.
Though he’s nearly inaudible at first, we eventually hear Žižek saying, “No… they will absolutely take it as this cynical [reason?] of ‘let’s pretend that it’s real,’ no matter how much you insist that you mean it literally.” For those who might agonize over the question, it may be most kids aren’t nearly as gullible as we imagine, just good sports who don’t want to let us down.
This would not be a Žižek answer if it did not veer into claims far more ambitious, or grandiose, than the question seems to warrant. Sensing perhaps he’s on shaky ground with the whole parenting advice thing, he quickly moves on to the subject of “what does it mean, really, to believe?” Belief, says Žižek—in the sense of individual, inward assent to metaphysical propositions—is a modern invention.
In attempting to make Saint Nicholas believable to children, we’ve paradoxically turned him into a cartoon character (and in the U.S. and elsewhere banished his lovable demon sidekick, Krampus). Kids see right through it, says Žižek in another interview above. And so, “You have a belief which is nobody’s belief! Nobody believes in the first person.”
Why, then, not just admit we’re all pretending, and say “we’re enjoying a story together”? We do it every night with children, this one just involves food, lights, family, gifts, sweaters, uncomfortable travel and maybe religious ceremonies of your tradition. You can often hear Žižek opine on those kinds of beliefs as well. My only comment on the matter is to say, sincerely, Happy Holidays.
Given the reverence this old-fashioned artistry has inspired, it was particularly audacious of Korean filmmaker Kojer to separate some of Miyazaki’s best known characters from their hand-painted habitats, via a painstaking Rotoscoping procedure.
Their liberation was short lived, given that Kojer’s interest lay in transposing them onto live action approximations of the Studio Ghibli originals.
Shot primarily in South Korea, the new settings, above, are uncanny doppelgängers, following some vigorous Photoshopping. One wonders if Kojer experienced any regret, several hundred hours into this masochistic assignment. So many challenges—from shadows to lighting to cloudy skies in need of altering, frame by painstaking frame. The obstacles posed by semi-transparent characters such as Spirited Away’s No Face sound positively unearthly.
The result—some of it some shot out a car window and corrected in Adobe’s Warp Stabilizer—is set to the tune of “One Summer’s Day” from Spirited Away.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Bill Gates has apparently been a big reader all along, even during his Microsoft days. On his site, Gates Notes, he writes, “I’ve been reading about a book a week on average since I was a kid. Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading.” And periodically he publishes a list of his favorite reads.
He continues: “If you’re looking for a book to enjoy over the holidays, here are some of my favorites from this year. They cover an eclectic mix of topics—from tennis to tennis shoes, genomics to great leadership. They’re all very well written, and they all dropped me down a rabbit hole of unexpected insights and pleasures.”
Head to Gates Notes to find out what particularly made each book near and dear to his heart.
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The legacy of Jimi Hendrix’s estate has been in conflict in recent years. Since his father’s death in 2002, his siblings have squabbled over his money and battled unlicensed and bootleg venders. But Hendrix’s musical legacy continues to amaze and inspire, as Janie Hendrix—his stepsister and CEO of the company that manages his music—has released album after album of rarities over the last couple decades. Not all of these releases have pleased Hendrix fans, who have called some of them mercenary and thoughtless. But it is always a joy to discover an unheard recording, whether a live performance, wobbly studio outtake, or semi-polished demo, so many of which reveal the territory Hendrix intended to chart before he died.
In 1982, some of that unreleased material made it into a four-hour Pacifica Radio documentary, which you can hear in four parts here. Produced by what the station calls “some of Pacifica’s finest” at its Berkeley “flagship station 94.1 FM,” the documentary does an excellent job of placing these recordings in context.
With help from Hendrix biographer David Henderson, the producers compiled “previously unheard and rare recordings” and interviews from Hendrix, his family, Noel Redding, Ornette Coleman, Stevie Wonder, John Lee Hooker, John McLaughlin, Chas Chandler, and more. After a newly-recorded introduction and a collage of Hendrix interview soundbites, Part 1 gets right down to it with a live version of “Are You Experienced?” that pulses from the speakers in hypnotic waves (listen to it on a solid pair of headphones if you can).
“I want to have stereo where the sound goes up,” says Hendrix in a soundbite, “and behind and underneath, you know? But all you can get now is across and across.” Somehow, even in ordinary stereo, Hendrix had a way of making sound surround his listeners, enveloping them in warm fuzzy waves of feedback and reverb. But he also had an equally captivating way with language, and not only in his song lyrics. Though the received portrait of Hendrix is of a shy, retiring person who expressed himself better with music, in many of these interviews he weaves together detailed memories and whimsical dreams and fantasies, composing imaginative narratives on the spot. Several extemporaneous lines could have easily flowered into new songs.
Hendrix briefly tells the story of his rise through the R&B and soul circuit as an almost effortless glide from the ranks of struggling sidemen, to playing behind Sam Cooke, Little Richard, and Ike and Tina Turner to starting his solo career. We move through the most famous stages of Hendrix’s life, with its iconic moments and cautionary tales, and by the time we get to Part 4, we start hearing a Hendrix most people never do, a preview of where his music might have gone into the seventies—with jazzy progressions and long, winding instrumental passages powered by the shuffling beats of Buddy Miles.
As has become abundantly clear in the almost four decades since Hendrix’s death, he had a tremendous amount of new music left in him, stretching in directions he never got to pursue. But the bit of it he left behind offers proof of just how influential he was not only on rock guitarists but also on blues and jazz fusion players of the following decade. His pioneering recording style (best heard on Electric Ladyland) also drove forward, and in some cases invented, many of the studio techniques in use today. Processes that can now be automated in minutes might took hours to orchestrate in the late sixties. Watching Hendrix mix in the studio “was like watching a ballet,” says producer Elliot Mazer.
This documentary keeps its focus squarely on Hendrix’s work, phenomenal talent, and uniquely innovative creative thought, and as such it provides the perfect setting for the rare and then-unreleased recordings you may not have heard before. Pacifica re-released the documentary last year as part of its annual fundraising campaign. The station is again soliciting funds to help maintain its impressive archives and digitize many more hours of tape like the Hendrix program, so stop by and make a donation if you can.
From Wendover Productions–a Youtube channel dedicated to explaining how our world works, from travel, to economics, to geography–comes a two part series called “Every Country in the World.”
In 30 minutes, the videos traverse the world, telling you curious facts about 190+ countries, starting with this: China, despite being so vast, doesn’t have time zones. It’s the same time across the entire country. Meanwhile it’s neighbor, Afghanistan is “offset from Greenwich Mean Time by a 30 minute interval.” When it’s 9 am in San Francisco and 5:00 pm in London, it’s actually 9:30 pm in Kabul.
How about another factoid: Canada is so geographically large that it’s eastern border is closer to Croatia than Vancouver. Get the gist?
You can watch “Every Country in the World” above and below.
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