Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map

in History, Stanford | May 19th, 2012

Schol­ars of ancient his­to­ry and IT experts at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty have col­lab­o­rat­ed to cre­ate a nov­el way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospa­tial net­work mod­el, allows vis­i­tors to expe­ri­ence the strat­e­gy behind trav­el in antiq­ui­ty. (Find a handy tuto­r­i­al for using the sys­tem on the Web and YouTube). The ORBIS map includes about 750 most­ly urban set­tle­ments of the Roman peri­od. Users of the mod­el can select a point of ori­gin and des­ti­na­tion for a trip and then choose from a num­ber of options to deter­mine either the cheap­est, fastest or short­est route. Select riv­er or  open sea trans­port for the cheap­est route. Pick road trav­el by pack ani­mal or wag­on for the short­est, but most expen­sive, trip. In cre­at­ing ORBIS, his­to­ri­ans used ancient maps and records along with mod­ern-day weath­er infor­ma­tion and results from exper­i­ments sail­ing in ancient-style ships to cal­cu­late the trav­el con­di­tions of 2,000 years ago.

Aside from the site’s inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, there’s enough dis­cus­sion in ORBIS about ancient Roman trans­port to sat­is­fy the biggest his­to­ry buff but the real fun is in explor­ing how peo­ple and goods were moved across the empire. Cities on the edge of the empire, for exam­ple, were more expen­sive to trans­port to, even if they weren’t that far away. All trips vary in time and cost, how­ev­er, depend­ing upon the time of year and mode of trav­el. The fastest route to deliv­er wheat from Cartha­go (mod­ern-day Tunisia) to Lon­dini­um (Lon­don) would take more than 27 days under the best trav­el con­di­tions (dur­ing July). Car­go would move across the Mediter­ranean by open sea, across south­west­ern France by river­boat and along the coast to south­east­ern Eng­land. The cost? A lit­tle less than 8 dinarii per kilo­gram of wheat using a don­key for land trans­port. Com­pare that to oth­er routes that elim­i­nate the open sea dur­ing win­ter months, or road trav­el to save mon­ey, and you’re close to under­stand­ing why it was no pic­nic rul­ing the Roman Empire.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Einstein Explains His Famous Formula, E=mc², in Original Audio

in Physics | May 18th, 2012

Last week we played for you the only known record­ing of Sig­mund Freud’s voice (1938). Now it’s time to revive the voice of anoth­er intel­lec­tu­al giant, Albert Ein­stein. In this record­ing, the physi­cist offers the briefest expla­na­tion of the world’s most famous equa­tion, E=mc2. When was this record­ed? We’re unfor­tu­nate­ly not sure. Let’s just say some­where between 1932 (a date Ein­stein men­tions in the clip) and his death in 1955. Some­where in those 20+ years, give or take a few. Don’t miss the recent­ly-opened Ein­stein archive and many free Physics cours­es in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Miracle of Flight, the Classic Early Animation by Terry Gilliam

in Animation, Comedy, Film | May 18th, 2012

As Michael Palin once put it, “there’s no get­ting away from the wit, won­der and wiz­ardry of the man Cahiers du Ciné­ma once described as Ter­ry Gilliam.”

Those qual­i­ties are clear­ly vis­i­ble in this very fun­ny ear­ly film by Gilliam called The Mir­a­cle of Flight. The film was made in 1971 for the Amer­i­can-British TV show The Mar­ty Feld­man Com­e­dy Machine. Mon­ty Python was on hia­tus that year, so Gilliam went to work for the short-lived Com­e­dy Machine, cre­at­ing the open­ing cred­it sequence and var­i­ous ani­mat­ed fea­tures using his trade­mark air­brush and paper cutout tech­niques. (Watch his primer on doing your own cutout ani­ma­tion here.) The mate­r­i­al for The Mir­a­cle of Flight was appar­ent­ly pack­aged as a stand-alone film in 1974, right after Gilliam’s first film, Sto­ry­time.  It was lat­er used as a bonus fea­ture before the­atri­cal screen­ings of Gilliam movies, and dur­ing live Python per­for­mances. The film ver­sion is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the one aired on the Com­e­dy Machine. Accord­ing to Smarter Than The Aver­age, “for the the­atri­cal ver­sion it lost a griz­zly punch­line where a man who had failed at his attempt to fly by emu­lat­ing the ergonom­ics of a bird takes his revenge by rip­ping the bird to pieces.” The writer then goes on to describe details only a Python fanat­ic could notice:

The Mir­a­cle of Flight in par­tic­u­lar is a cor­nu­copia of odd­i­ties for the Python con­nois­seur, con­tain­ing as it does one line record­ed by Ter­ry Jones, the tarred-and-feath­ered char­ac­ter who appears in Ani­ma­tions of Mor­tal­i­ty, the moun­tain in the finale of the Mean­ing of Life com­put­er game and the ani­mat­ed woman from Python who says “Turn that tele­vi­sion off–you know it’s bad for your eyes”. Most baf­fling of all is the muzak in the air­port ter­mi­nal, which is the same as used in the Den­tal sequence of the Mean­ing of Life CD-Rom near­ly thir­ty years lat­er. For sheer num­bers of Python iconog­ra­phy appear­ing in a non-Python pro­duc­tion, The Mir­a­cle of Flight’s only rival is Eric Idle’s music video for George Har­rison’s Cracker­box Palace. But I digress.

Indeed. But we enjoyed it. And you’ll enjoy The Mir­a­cle of Flight, which might more accu­rate­ly be called The Tri­umph of Grav­i­ty.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Bryan Magee’s In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers (1978–87)

in Philosophy, Television | May 18th, 2012

Bryan Magee comes from a tra­di­tion that pro­duced some of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry’s most impres­sive media per­son­al­i­ties: that of the schol­ar­ship-edu­cat­ed, Oxbridge-refined, intel­lec­tu­al­ly omniv­o­rous, occa­sion­al­ly office-hold­ing, radio- and tele­vi­sion-savvy man of let­ters. Stu­dents and pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy prob­a­bly know him from his large print oeu­vre, which includes vol­umes on Pop­per and Schopen­hauer as well as sev­er­al guides to west­ern phi­los­o­phy and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Con­fes­sions of a Philoso­pher. He also wrote anoth­er mem­oir called The Tele­vi­sion Inter­view­er, and philo­soph­i­cal­ly inclined lay­men may fond­ly remem­ber him as just that. When Magee played to both these strengths at once, he came up with two philo­soph­i­cal tele­vi­sion shows in the span of a decade: Men of Ideas, which began in 1978, and The Great Philoso­phers, which ran in 1987. Both series brought BBC view­ers in-depth, uncut con­ver­sa­tions with many of the day’s most famous philoso­phers.

You can watch select inter­views of Men of Ideas and The Great Philoso­phers on YouTube, includ­ing:

At the top of the post, you’ll find Magee talk­ing with A.J. Ayer, a well-known spe­cial­ist in “log­i­cal pos­i­tivism,” about the devel­op­ment of, and chal­lenges to, that philo­soph­i­cal sub-field. Two philoso­phers, relaxed on a couch, some­times smok­ing, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly engaged in a com­mer­cial-free back-and-forth about the most impor­tant thinkers and thoughts in the field — watch some­thing like that, and you can’t pos­si­bly think of now as a gold­en age of tele­vi­sion.

Note: Oodles of phi­los­o­phy cours­es, many thought by famous philoso­phers, can be found in the Phi­los­o­phy sec­tion of our list of Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

105 Ani­mat­ed Phi­los­o­phy Videos from Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: A Project Spon­sored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Morgan Freeman Teaches Kids to Read in Vintage Electric Company Footage from 1971

in Education, K-12, Television | May 17th, 2012

Every actor has to start some­where, and Mor­gan Free­man (Dri­ving Miss Daisy, The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion, and Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby) could have done worse than join­ing the cast of The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny, the PBS chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The orig­i­nal cast includ­ed Bill Cos­by and Rita Moreno (not bad com­pa­ny), and the ver­sa­tile Free­man played a series of char­ac­ters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vin­cent the Veg­etable Vam­pire,” and then, of course, Easy Read­er. If you’re of my gen­er­a­tion, you might rec­og­nize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Read­er (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rid­er) in action, teach­ing kids to read in his effort­less­ly cool, hip­ster way. H/T Metafil­ter

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

A Brief History of John Baldessari, Narrated by Tom Waits

in Art, Film | May 17th, 2012

Tom Waits nar­rates this whim­si­cal, fast-mov­ing intro­duc­tion to the life and work of West-Coast con­cep­tu­al artist John Baldessari. The film was direct­ed by Hen­ry Joost and Ariel Schul­man, the cre­ative team behind Cat­fish and Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty 3. It was made for the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art’s inau­gur­al Art & Film Gala, held last Novem­ber in hon­or of Baldessari and Clint East­wood. Baldessari mix­es a vari­ety of media in his art, includ­ing sculp­ture, paint­ing, print­mak­ing and video. “His work,” writes Elis­a­beth Roark of Grove Art Online, “is char­ac­ter­ized by a con­scious­ness of lan­guage evi­dent in his use of puns, seman­tics based on the struc­tural­ism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and by the incor­po­ra­tion of mate­r­i­al drawn from pop­u­lar cul­ture.” When Joost and Schul­man ask Baldessari how he will be remem­bered 100 years hence, he says dry­ly, “I’m the guy who puts dots over peo­ple’s faces.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Makes Com­ic Appear­ance on Fer­n­wood Tonight (1977)

Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukows­ki Poems, “The Laugh­ing Heart” and “Nir­vana”

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Brussels Express: The Perils of Cycling in Europe’s Most Congested City

in Film, Life | May 17th, 2012

The Bel­gians take their cycling seri­ous­ly. After all, it’s the birth­place of Eddy Mer­ckx, the five time cham­pi­on of the Tour de France. And it’s a coun­try that plays host to some of the great short races in the sport: La Flèche Wal­lonne, E3 Harel­beke, Gent–Wevelgem, and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. If you’re famil­iar with these races, you know they’re not for the faint of heart, see­ing that they some­times take rid­ers across long sec­tions of dan­ger­ous cob­ble­stones. (Get a feel for that here.) But when you watch this new doc­u­men­tary, Brus­sels Express, you start to won­der whether the real risks are not being tak­en by bike mes­sen­gers in Brus­sels, one of the most con­gest­ed cities in Europe. As David Byrne recent­ly showed us, some mod­ern cities (New York, Copen­hagen, Mod­e­na) try to make cyclists feel at home. Not so in Brus­sels. Direct­ed and shot by Sander Van­den­broucke, Brus­sels Express offers a com­men­tary on some­thing larg­er than cycling itself. It’s real­ly a tale about moder­ni­ty, the auto­mo­bile, the choic­es we make in our con­tem­po­rary, mech­a­nized lives, and their social costs. The film runs 20 min­utes, and it appears in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part of our col­lec­tion of 635 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

The Physics of the Bike

A Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steve Allen Show (1963)

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling: “It’s Lying Twenty-Four Times a Second”

in Film, History | May 17th, 2012

If you’ve nev­er watched a doc­u­men­tary by Ken Burns, maybe you just haven’t had the time. Ten hours for The Civ­il War, eigh­teen and a half for Base­ball, near­ly nine­teen for Jazz; such blocks can be dif­fi­cult to carve out, even when you’re carv­ing them out for the mas­ter audio­vi­su­al sto­ry­teller of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Burns takes on such icon­ic sub­jects, and in so doing attracts so much acclaim — includ­ing the inim­itable form of recog­ni­tion that is a spoof on The Simp­sons — that he seems like some­one whose work you should know well, even if you’ve only glimpsed it or heard it ref­er­enced. Luck­i­ly, film­mak­ers Tom Mason and Sarah Klein have put togeth­er a doc­u­men­tary of their own, one on Ken Burns, that you can watch no mat­ter how packed your sched­ule. In a mere five min­utes, Ken Burns: On Sto­ry con­veys just enough of impor­tance about Burns’ per­son­al­i­ty, work­ing prin­ci­ples, and world­view that it may leave you feel­ing like you have no choice but to dive into his fil­mog­ra­phy imme­di­ate­ly.

Of course, this all depends on how you feel about sto­ry­telling. In explain­ing his own view on film­mak­ing, Burns rolls out that old quote from Jean Luc-Godard, “Cin­e­ma is truth at twen­ty-four frames a sec­ond.” But he has his own response to the famous procla­ma­tion: “Maybe. It’s lying twen­ty-four times a sec­ond, too. All the time. All sto­ry is manip­u­la­tion.” With as much vehe­mence as Godard has aired his griev­ances about how the forces of sto­ry, plot, and nar­ra­tive hope­less­ly and per­verse­ly dis­tort artis­tic truth, Burns declares his accep­tance and even admi­ra­tion of that ele­ment of sto­ry­telling. To him, craft­ing a prop­er sto­ry requires manip­u­la­tion, but he does­n’t con­sid­er all manip­u­la­tive tech­niques equal. “Is there accept­able manip­u­la­tion? You bet,” he declares. “Peo­ple say, ‘Oh boy, I was so moved to tears by your film.’ That’s a good thing? I manip­u­lat­ed that!” And even if you feel you have no stake in mat­ters of sto­ry, truth, and manip­u­la­tion, keep watch­ing; Mason and Klein even­tu­al­ly get Burns talk­ing about some­thing that would fas­ci­nate any­one: his desire to “wake the dead.”

(See also the Atlantic’s inter­view with Mason and Klein about the mak­ing of Ken Burns: On Sto­ry.)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.