When you learned about The Periodic Table of Elements in high school, it probably didn’t look like this. Above, we have a different way of visualizing the elements. Created by Professor William F. Sheehan at Santa Clara University in 1970, this chart takes the elements (usually shown like this) and scales them relative to their abundance on the Earth’s surface. In the small print beneath the chart, Sheehan notes “The chart emphasizes that in real life a chemist will probably meet O, Si, Al [Oxygen, Silicon and Aluminum] and that he better do something about it.” Click here to see the chart — and the less abundant elements — in a larger format. Below we have a few more creative takes on the Periodic Table.
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Like many American stories, the story of the National Parks begins with pillage, death, deep cultural misunderstanding, and venture capitalism. According to Ken Burns’ film series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, we can date the idea back to 1851, with the “discovery” of Yosemite by a marauding armed battalion who entered the land “searching for Indians, intent on driving the natives from their homelands and onto reservations.” The Mariposa Battalion, led by Captain James D. Savage, set fire to the Indians’ homes and storehouses after they had retreated to the mountains, “in order to starve them into submission.”
One member of the battalion, a doctor named Lafayette Bunnell, found himself entranced by the scenery amidst this destruction. “As I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being,” he wrote in his later accounts, “and I found myself in tears with emotion.” He named the place “Yosemite,” thinking it was the name of the Indian tribe the soldiers sought to force out or eradicate. The word, it turned out “meant something entirely different,” referring to people who should be feared: “It means, ‘they are killers.’”
In 1855, a failed English gold prospector turned the place into a tourist attraction, and people flooded West to see it, prompting New York worthies like Horace Greeley and Frederick Law Olmsted to lobby for its federal protection. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln deeded Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove, with its giant sequoias, to the state of California. Ever since then, National Parks have been threatened—if not by the occasional political candidate and his billionaire backers hoping to privatize the land, then by oil and gas drilling, and by fire, rising seas, or other effects of climate change. Though the U.S. emptied many of the parks of their inhabitants, it is ironically only the actions of the federal government that prevents the process begun by the Mariposa Battalion from reaching its conclusion in the total despoliation of these landscapes. It is these landscapes that have most come to symbolize the national character, whether as background in Frederic Remington’s paintings of the Indian Wars or in the photographs of Ansel Adams, who began and sustained his career in Yosemite Valley. “Yosemite National Park,” writes the National Park Service’s website,” was Adams’ chief inspiration.”
Adams first became interested in visiting the National Park when he read In the Heart of the Sierras by James Hutchings—that failed English gold prospector. Thereafter, Adams photographed National Parks almost ritually, and in 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in DC. The theme, the National Archives tells us, was to be “nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The project was halted because of World War II and never resumed.” It must have felt like an especially sacred duty for Adams, who traveled the country photographing the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments,” and other locations like the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam and desert vistas in New Mexico.
The photographs you see here are among the 226 taken by Adams for the project. They are now housed at the National Archives, and you can freely view them online or order prints at their site. At the top, we see a snow-covered tree from an apple orchard in Half Dome, Yosemite, where Adams had his first photographic “visualization” in 1927. Below it, the “Court of the Patriarchs” in Zion National Park, Utah. Further down, we have a breathtaking vision of the serpentine Grand Canyon, and just above, one of the few manmade structures, “Cliff Palace” at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. And here can you see a photograph of the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park.
The mural project may have been abandoned, but Adams never stopped photographing the parks, nor advocating for their protection and, in fact, the protection of “the entire environment,” as he told a Playboy interviewer in 1983. “Only two and a half percent of the land in this country is protected,” said Adams then: “Not only are we being fought in trying to extend that two and a half percent to include other important or fragile areas but we are having to fight to protect that small two and a half percent. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save our environment.”
If you want to prepare for a career practicing law, you could do much worse than joining Harvard University’s debate team. But if, far on the other end of the spectrum of the American experience, you end up deep on the wrong side of the law, going to prison rather than college, you need not relinquish your dreams of excelling at this traditional intellectual sport. We now have the precedent to prove it: “Months after winning a national title,” reports the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino, “Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.”
“The showdown,” which revolved around the question of whether public schools should be allowed to turn away undocumented students, “took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club.” They call this program the Bard Prison Initiative, under which inmates have the chance to earn a Bard College degree (through a non-vocational “liberal arts curriculum, including literature, foreign language, philosophy, history and the social sciences, mathematics, science, and the arts”) at satellite campuses established in six New York state prisons. You can see this selective, rigorous and highly unusual educational institution in action in the Washington Post video above. And also in a 2011 PBS News Hour profile below.
The Bard Prison Initiative’s debate victory over Harvard made for a notable event in the program’s history indeed. “But it’s also worth pointing out,” writes Peter Holley, author of the Post article, “the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.” The Bard Prison Initiative has operated on that premise since 2001, and its debate team’s previous high-profile win saw it beating that of West Point — all, you may hardly believe, through old-fashioned research, without any kind of access to the internet. If you’d like to leave your condolences for the Harvard College Debating Union, you may do so at their Facebook page. You can also make a worthwhile financial contribution to the Bard Prison Initiative here.
UK film monthly magazine Sight & Sound’s most recent issue is dedicated to “The Female Gaze: 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women.” The list of 100 films runs some 20 pages, and the edition also collects mini essays from actors like Greta Gerwig, Isabelle Huppert, and Tilda Swinton; directors like Jane Campion and Claire Denis, and critics like Amy Taubin and Camille Paglia, all focusing on female-directed films that deserve a second look.
Many of the filmmakers are fairly obscure, but even better known directors are represented here with lesser-known selections, like Ida Lupino’s Outrage (and not her noir classic The Hitchhiker) and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless, her first feature co-directed with Monty Montgomery and featuring a young Willem Dafoe. (Fact: Until Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker in 2010, no woman had earned a Best Director Oscar).
Presented in chronological order, the list of 100 Overlooked Films Directed by Women features many landmarks in film history, like Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first feature-length animated film, which we recently highlighted here. Open Culture has also previously discussed Germaine Dulac’s 1928 surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman.
Lois Weber’s 1913 Suspense, her short film co-directed with Philippe Smalley (view it at the top of the post), is one of the first examples of cross-cutting to create tension, and it even features a three-way split frame. Cross-cutting is a technique all thrillers have used since. (And Weber stars in the film as well.)
Sight & Sound also profiles Stephanie Rothman, the first female director to work for Roger Corman, and her 1971 film The Velvet Vampire, a West Coast take on a gothic genre. Jessie Maple, who made Will in 1981, was the first African-American woman to become a part of New York’s camera operator’s union.
Then there’s the careers of filmmakers whose lives were cut short: Soviet director Larisa Shepitko died in a car crash at 40, leaving behind two masterpieces, while Elia Kazan’s wife Barbara Loden made her debut with Wanda in 1970 and passed away soon after, too young.
Many of these films are difficult or impossible to find, and Sight & Sound includes an online article of eight more films that might be lost for good, like the aforementioned Lois Weber’s only color film White Heat, or the only film actor Lillian Gish directed, Remodeling Her Husband.
Readers interested in the contributions of women filmmakers will want to explore the Women Film Pioneers website hosted by Columbia University.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Back in June we highlighted Neil Halloran’s 15 minute film, The Fallen of World War II, which used “innovative data visualization techniques to put the human cost of WW II into perspective, showing how some 70 million lives were lost within civilian and military populations across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945.” It’s a pretty staggering illustration of the deadliest war. As the film went viral, Halloran raised money that would enable him to develop new films exploring “other trends of war and peace — from drones and terrorism to democracy and peacekeeping.” He has also translated the film into six different languages. They all went online in the last few weeks. Here they are: Russian, Japanese, Polish, French, German, and Serbian.
Above, you can watch the original in English (certainly worth doing if you were vacationing in June), and you might also explore the accompanying interactive web site here.
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As you know if you saw our previous posts featuring Leonard Nimoy’s readings of stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, the late Star Trek icon could — unsurprisingly, perhaps — tell a science-fiction tale with the best of them. It turns out that he could also give masterful readings of science fiction from other eras too, as far back as the earliest works to define the genre, which we’ve discovered after hearing his performance of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, an out-of-print edition recently digitized from cassette tape and posted to Youtube in twoparts.
With this story of Earth invaded from “across the gulf of space” by aliens with “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” Wells did much to help give science fiction the form we recognize today. The War of the Worlds came out in book form in 1898, preceded by such similarly speculative and innovative works as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, and then followed by the likes of The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. (Find most of these works neatly packaged in the HG Wells Classic Collection.) This Leonard Nimoy recording originally came out in 1976, published by the record label Caedmon, known for doing plenty of innovation of their own in the then-yet-unnamed field of audiobooks.
Caedmon put out not just this album and the one with Nimoy reading Bradbury, but others featuring Kurt Vonnegut, Vincent Price, Tennessee Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. As much as science-fiction die-hards will enjoy hearing this pairing of Nimoy and Wells here, some will certainly want to track down the actual LP — not just for the collectors’ value, but because it features liner notes by none other than that other vastly influential creator of sci-fi as we know it, Isaac Asimov. It looks like there’s one used copy on Amazon. The reading, we should note, is an abridged version of the original text.
The lag time between our imagining of social equality and its arrival can be significantly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, given the limitations of human mortality. 113 years may not be an especially long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Galapagos tortoise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d never know that in 2015 the president of Europe’s most powerful nation is a woman, as are two major presidential candidates in the United States. Given the amount of inequality we still see worldwide, this may not always feel like a triumph. In 1902, it might have seemed like “nothing but fantasy.”
And yet even then, it was certainly possible to foresee women occupying all the roles that men did, through the lenses, writes Laura Hudson at Boing Boing, of “fantasy and science fiction,” which “can often help us open our minds behind the limitations of the world we live in and imagine a better one instead.” In 1902, artist Albert Bergeret was commissioned to create the trading cards you see here—just a small selection of twenty total photographs called “Les Femmes de l’Avenir”—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of different sets of cards, this “retrofuturistic attempt to expand the role of women in society” showed us a “small and fashionable world” where “women were given a more equal role in society, not to mention spectacular hats.”
That may be so, but just as we can never accurately see the future, we can also never reach consensus on the meaning of the past. The Daily Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hudson about the “pin-up quality to many of the images,” which show “an awful lot of arm.” And yet Rawi disparages the entire set as “meant to capture men’s fantasies rather than be part of any feminist movement.” I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the categories are mutually exclusive. Pin-up girls have also represented social power, albeit mainly sexual power. Scantily-clad female superheroes like Wonder Woman, though crafted to appeal to the fantasies of teenage boys, are also powerful because… well, they have superpowers.
Perhaps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mocking his subjects, nor hyper-sexualizing them, but presenting, as each card indicates, advanced futuristic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Daily Mail captions several of the photos with factoids about women’s advances in French history. In some cases, Bergeret did not have to extrapolate far. Women could practice law in 1900; women served in the army during the French Revolution, but did not fight. Colleges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doctors and journalists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had discovered polonium, coined the term “radioactivity,” and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Victoria had ruled over half the world.
But French women would have to wait several more decades to enter most of the professions represented. No matter how sexy—and in some cases ridiculous—some of the costumes in these photos, Bergeret shot the models with poise, style, and dignity. Perhaps he and many in his audience could easily imagine female generals, mayors, firewomen, soldiers, etc. Yet one particular card stands out. It portrays a self-satisfied, Bohemian model labeled “rapin”—which a reader below informs us is “an argot word for (bad) painter.”
Founded and directed by physicist Lawrence Krauss, Arizona State’s Origins Project has for several years brought together some of the biggest minds in the sciences and humanities for friendly debates and conversations about “the 21st Century’s greatest challenges.” Previous all-star panels have included Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins. Stephen Hawking has graced the ASU Origins Project stage, as has actor and science communicator Alan Alda. And this past March, in a sold-out, highly-anticipated Origins Project event, Krauss welcomed Noam Chomsky to the stage for a lengthy interview, which you can watch above.
Although Krauss says he’s wary of hero worship in his laudatory introduction, he nonetheless finds himself asking “What Would Noam Chomsky Do” when faced with a dilemma. He also points out that Chomsky has been “marginalized in U.S. media” for his anti-war, anarchist political views. Those views, of course, come widely into play during the conversation, which ranges from the theory and purpose of education—a subject Chomsky has expounded on a great deal in books and interviews—to the fate of political dissidents throughout history.
Chomsky also gives us his views on science and technology, particularly in the Q&A portion of the talk above, in which he answers questions about artificial intelligence—another subject he’s touched on in the past—and animal experimentation, among a great many other topics. Krauss mostly hangs back during the initial discussion but takes a more active role in the session above, offering views on medical and scientific ethics that will be familiar to those who follow his atheist activism and championing of rationality over religious dogma.
As Chomsky puts it, “the environment, the commons… they’re a common possession, but space is even more so. For individuals to allow institutions like corporations to have any control over it is devastating in its consequences. It will also almost certainly undermine serious research.” He refers to the example of most modern computing—developed under publicly-funded government programs, then marketed and sold back to us by corporations. Krauss makes a case for unmanned space exploration as the cost-effective option, and both thinkers discuss the problem of militarizing space, the ultimate goal of Cold War space programs before the fall of the Soviet Union. The conversation is rich and revealing and makes an excellent supplement to the already rich discussion Krauss and Chomsky have in the videos above.
To my knowledge, Bob Dylan has only appeared in a handful of TV commercials over the decades, including most notably a bizarre ad for Victoria’s Secret back in 2004. Now you can add another to the small list. Last night, IBM debuted a new ad with the iconic singer-songwriter. And this time around, Dylan isn’t peddling bras. Rather, it’s IBM’s cognitive system called “Watson,” which promises to analyze data for corporations in all kinds of interesting ways. Says IBM:
Humans create a staggering amount of information. Poetry, equations, films, selfies, diagnoses, discoveries. Data pours from our mobile devices, social networks, from every digitized and connected system we use. 80% of this data is virtually invisible to computers—including nearly all the information captured in language, sight and sound. Until now.
IBM Watson applies its cognitive technologies to help change how we approach and understand all of this information. Everything that is digital has the potential to become cognitive, and, in a sense, be able to “think.”
Watson can bring cognition to everything and everyone. To evolve in this data-driven culture, every business will need to become a cognitive business.
To demonstrate its analytical powers, IBM asked Watson to analyze Dylan’s lyrics, and it concluded that the major themes of Dylan’s songs are “time passes and love fades”. It’s a conclusion, I’m sure, that never dawned on casual or ardent fans of Dylan’s music.
“One of the many remarkable things about Charlie Chaplin,” wrote Roger Ebert, “is that his films continue to hold up, to attract and delight audiences.” Richard Brody described Chaplin as not just “alone among his peers of silent-comedy genius,” but also as a maker of “great talking pictures.” Jonathan Rosenbaum asked, “Has there ever been another artist — not just in the history of cinema, but maybe in the history of art — who has had more to say, and in such vivid detail, about what it means to be poor?” Andrew Sarris called Chaplin “arguably the single most important artist produced by the cinema, certainly its most extraordinary performer and probably still its most universal icon.” “For me,” wrote Leonard Maltin, “comedy begins with Charlie Chaplin.”
And so we see that Chaplin, nearly forty decades after his death, maintains his high critical reputation — while also having enjoyed the absolute height of movie-stardom back in the silent era.
Vanishingly few artists of any kind manage to combine such blockbusting commercial success with such flying-colors critical success. That alone might give you good enough reason to plunge into Chaplin’s filmography, but know that you can begin that cinematic adventure for free right here on Open Culture in our archive of more than 60 Charlie Chaplin films on the web.
There you’ll find short comedies like 1914’s Kids Auto Race at Venice, which introduced his famous penniless protagonist “The Tramp”; the following year’s The Tramp, which made it into a phenomenon; 1919’s Sunnyside, in which we find out what happens when Chaplin’s gracefully hapless comedic persona winds up on the farm; and 1925’s The Gold Rush, the film Chaplin most wanted to be remembered for.
But though Chaplin’s oeuvre couldn’t be easier to start watching and laughing at, coming to appreciate the full scope of his craft — in the way that the critics quoted above have spent careers doing — may take time. After all, the man made 80 movies over his 75-year entertainment career, a kind of productivity that, even leaving the considerable artistry aside, cinema may never see again. You can dive into our collection of Chaplin films here.
We got a nice tip from one of our readers, and wanted to pass it along. Paramount Pictures has launched an official, verified YouTube channel — called The Paramount Vault — where you can watch full length films for free [update: if you’re based in the US]. You won’t find Paramount’s best-known films in The Vault, but nonetheless there are some quality, if not entertaining, picks among the 150 films.
Update: it looks like you need to be based in the US to view these films — something that wasn’t apparent to me beforehand since I’m based here. My apologies to anyone who’s geoblocked.
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