Google Digitizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Commandments and Genesis

If dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy pos­es any threat to the mar­ket for words print­ed on real paper—and the jury is still out on that one—then it must also be cred­it­ed for expos­ing us to texts from the ancient world.

Last fall we post­ed about how the Israel Muse­um dig­i­tized the Dead Sea Scrolls, near­ly 1,000 texts found on the north­west shore of the Dead Sea in 1946. They are the ear­li­est known sur­viv­ing man­u­scripts from what is called the Hebrew Bible. Dig­i­tiz­ing the texts—most were on parch­ment but some were writ­ten on bronze or papyrus—allows view­ers to zoom in to exam­ine the writ­ing and even the paper fibers of hun­dreds of frag­ments.

Now the Israel Antiq­ui­ties Author­i­ty has expand­ed upon the col­lec­tion. Housed in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Dig­i­tal Library are the ear­li­est known copies of the Book of Deuteron­o­my (which includes the Ten Com­mand­ments) and Chap­ter One of the Book of Gen­e­sis.

Each scroll frag­ment was scanned using spec­tral imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy that allows for the recov­ery of writ­ing that had fad­ed to near invis­i­bil­i­ty over the years. The boon for schol­ars is clear, but for reg­u­lar folks this archive is bet­ter than a muse­um vis­it. The Leon Levy site is search­able by dis­cov­ery site, con­tent and ancient lan­guage.

Google is mak­ing its mark as a major facil­i­ta­tor of cul­tur­al preser­va­tion. Anoth­er recent project with ties to ancient texts and his­to­ry is Caminos de Sefarad, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Red de Jud­erĂ­as de España to cre­ate a dig­i­tal map of Spain’s Jew­ish her­itage.

More than 500 land­marks from the Sefarad—the Sephardic Jews before they were expelled from Spain and Por­tu­gal in 1492—are ful­ly anno­tat­ed with cur­rent pho­tos, text and spe­cial details. Vis­it Rib­a­davia, a once-pros­per­ous city in Spain’s north­west moun­tains, and learn about Jew­ish wed­ding tra­di­tions from the Mid­dle Ages. The Jew­ish Quar­ter of LĂ©on is called the Bar­rio HĂşme­do (Wet Dis­trict) and is known today for its fine wine and food. Use the time­line to keep your­self ori­ent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal his­to­ry and click Street View to see this vibrant dis­trict as it is today.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

Gift Giving Traditions Around the World in a Handy Infographic

Gift Giving Traditions Around The World

This inter­ac­tive map from Cloud 9 Liv­ing offers some poten­tial­ly help­ful tid­bits on gift giv­ing tra­di­tions around the world. For exam­ple, if you’re think­ing of giv­ing a clock as a gift in Chi­na, think again. It’s con­sid­ered bad luck. Or, if you head to Rus­sia, remem­ber to give bou­quets with an uneven num­ber of flow­ers. Even-flow­ered bou­quets are for funer­als. And, when in Swe­den, you can’t go wrong with a bot­tle of liquor. Click through to see the info­graph­ic in larg­er for­mat.

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NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App

In 1960, NASA put its first “Earth-observ­ing envi­ron­men­tal satel­lite” into orbit, and, ever since, these satel­lites have let us observe the dynam­ics of our plan­et in a new way.  They can tell us all about chang­ing weath­er pat­terns, the impact of cli­mate change, what’s hap­pen­ing in the oceans, the coast­lines, rivers and more.

The satel­lites have also demon­strat­ed again and again the Earth’s aes­thet­ic beau­ty, revealed in the pat­terns, shapes, col­ors, and tex­tures seen from space. That beau­ty is what gets cel­e­brat­ed in NASA Earth As Art, a new visu­al pub­li­ca­tion made avail­able as a Free 160-Page eBook (PDF) and a Free iPad App. Fea­tur­ing 75 images in total, the app gives you a very aer­i­al look at places like the Himalayas, Arizona’s Paint­ed Desert, the Lena Riv­er Delta in Rus­sia (shown above), the Byrd Glac­i­er in Antarc­ti­ca, and much more. Enjoy the images, from the sur­re­al to the sub­lime.

You’ll find NASA Earth As Art list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. Also see these relat­ed NASA mate­ri­als:

NASA Archive Col­lects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Plan­et

Ray Brad­bury Reads Mov­ing Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mis­sion

Great Cities at Night: Views from the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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The Fascinating Science of Snow

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Christ­mas songs and hol­i­day cards abound in pic­tures of pris­tine land­scapes cov­ered in fresh pow­der. But what exact­ly is that white stuff, any­way? In a lit­tle over two min­utes, The Chem­istry of Snowflakes gives us the answer. The film is the lat­est install­ment in the Byte­size Sci­ence series from the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety. It’s an inter­est­ing look at a beau­ti­ful subject–and much more fun to think about than, say, the physics of shov­el­ing.

Fol­low us on Face­book and Twit­ter, and share the cul­tur­al good­ness with your friends!

via Boing­Bo­ing

A Christmas Carol, A Vintage Radio Broadcast by Orson Welles (1939)

Orson_Welles_1937

Image by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I wager that we could all recount the plot points of A Christ­mas Car­ol by heart. Fur­ther­more, I wager that most of us inad­ver­tent­ly com­mit­ted these to mem­o­ry not by read­ing and re-read­ing Charles Dick­ens’ 1843 novel­la (avail­able in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions), but by hav­ing seen or heard a dif­fer­ent adap­ta­tion of it each Christ­mas. The work has pro­duced an almost con­fus­ing abun­dance of pro­duc­tions on film, tele­vi­sion, and the stage, from Thomas Edis­on’s 1910 silent short to a Doc­tor Who Christ­mas spe­cial two years ago. Beyond that, we have count­less reimag­in­ings, like the ani­mat­ed Mick­ey’s Christ­mas Car­ol fea­tur­ing Scrooge McDuck as Ebenez­er Scrooge, and loose­ly Christ­mas Car­ol-inspired projects, like Scrooged with Bill Mur­ray. The sto­ry has also made its way to the radio many times, most notably in the 1930s, when Camp­bel­l’s Soup would spon­sor its year­ly appear­ance. In 1939, the “Camp­bell Play­house” brought in two espe­cial­ly for­mi­da­ble thes­pi­ans, Orson Welles and Lionel Bar­ry­more, and you can lis­ten to the result at archive.org, or right below.

Welles, of course, came in as no stranger to adapt­ing lit­er­a­ture for radio; he’d pulled off his infa­mous­ly real­is­tic Hal­loween drama­ti­za­tion of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds just the year before. My per­son­al favorite of his adap­ta­tions remains the haunt­ing­ly askew Orson Welles Show ver­sion of Carl Ewald’s My Lit­tle Boy, but I can’t deny that he brings an entire­ly suit­able tone of mild grandeur, ini­tial­ly stern but ulti­mate­ly pleased, to A Christ­mas Car­ol. Bar­ry­more, an actor of both the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies who man­aged to suc­ceed on stage, in silent films, and then in sound films, plays the now-arche­typ­al miser­ly cur­mud­geon Ebenez­er Scrooge with a style that, for my mon­ey, falls sec­ond only to Scrooge McDuck­’s. But then, we can’t go com­par­ing car­toon char­ac­ters to flesh-and-blood per­form­ers, and Dis­ney’s Scrooge sure­ly drew his own sig­na­ture miser­li­ness and cur­mud­geon­hood (not to men­tion his name) from Dick­ens’, a fig­ure already firm­ly lodged in our col­lec­tive hol­i­day con­scious­ness, thanks espe­cial­ly to per­for­mances like Bar­ry­more’s.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Christ­mas Car­ol by Charles Dick­ens

Orson Welles Vin­tage Radio: The War of the Worlds That Pet­ri­fied a Nation

Cel­e­brate the 200th Birth­day of Charles Dick­ens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

David Bowie’s First American Fan Letter And His Evolving Views of the U.S. (1967–1997)

David Bowie’s rela­tion­ship with Amer­i­ca has typ­i­fied the outsider’s view: an ambiva­lence rang­ing from fas­ci­na­tion to fear that he expressed in a reply to his first let­ter from a U.S. fan in 1967 (click to read in large for­mat). The fan, intre­pid 14-year-old San­dra Dodd, had got­ten her hands on an advance copy of Bowie’s first album and writ­ten him to praise his work and offer to start a fan club for him state­side. Bowie’s response is very inter­est­ing. We’ve writ­ten before about his rise from obscure R&B and folk singer to Zig­gy Star­dust, which required him to shake off a nat­ur­al shy­ness to inhab­it his break­out per­sona. In the let­ter, the 20-year-old Bowie ini­tial­ly comes off as a naïve, slight­ly self-involved young pop singer. Then, after answer­ing the usu­al fan queries—what’s his real name, birth­day, height—he turns to the sub­ject of the U.S., a coun­try he had yet to vis­it. Bowie writes:

I hope one day to get to Amer­i­ca. My man­ag­er tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with oth­er acts he man­ages. I was watch­ing an old film on TV the oth­er night called “No Down Pay­ment” a great film, but rather depress­ing if it is a true reflec­tion of The Amer­i­can Way Of Life. How­ev­er, short­ly after that they showed a doc­u­men­tary about Robert Frost the Amer­i­can poet, filmed main­ly at his home in Ver­mont, and that evened the score. I am sure that that is near­er the real Amer­i­ca.

Draw­ing his impres­sions from movies, Bowie ref­er­ences two views. The first, Mar­tin Ritt’s 1957 No Down Pay­ment, is full of the banal­i­ty and melo­dra­ma we’ve come to expect from Mad Men, mak­ing inci­sive cri­tiques of mid-50s cul­tur­al prob­lems sim­mer­ing under the sur­face of the sub­urbs like alco­holism, racism, and infi­deli­ty. As one fan writes, the film depict­ed what “no one want­ed to see… a soiled Amer­i­can Dream,” or what Bowie cap­i­tal­izes as “The Amer­i­can Way Of Life.”

The oth­er view Bowie takes of the States comes from a film on Robert Frost—most like­ly 1963’s Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quar­rel With the World. Lit­tle won­der this film “evened the score” for the lyri­cal young song­writer, who choos­es in his let­ter to believe it rep­re­sents the “real Amer­i­ca,” a sen­ti­ment he would not hold for long.

Flash for­ward to 1984, and Bowie is an inter­na­tion­al pop star. Most fans would argue his best work was far behind him, but the 80s saw him break out into more main­stream film roles in The Ele­phant Man and Labyrinth that kept him at the fore­front of Amer­i­can pop cul­ture. His sound­track work was mem­o­rable as well, although the track below “This is Not Amer­i­ca,” writ­ten with Pat Methe­ny for The Fal­con and the Snow­man doesn’t get much atten­tion these days. Bowie’s impres­sion­is­tic lyrics–which Methe­ny called “pro­found and meaningful”–show him in mourn­ing for the coun­try that puz­zled his younger self:

A lit­tle piece of you
The lit­tle peace in me
Will die
For this is not Amer­i­ca

Blos­som fails to bloom
This sea­son
Promise not to stare
Too long
For this is not a mir­a­cle

And again, move for­ward to 1997, thir­ty years after Bowie’s let­ter above, and we find him in a jaun­diced mood in “I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans” from his album Earth­ling (the song orig­i­nal­ly appeared on what may be one of the most cyn­i­cal films ever made, Show­girls). Bowie explained the gen­e­sis of the song in a press release:

I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans’ was writ­ten by myself and Eno. It’s not as tru­ly hos­tile about Amer­i­cans as say “Born in the USA”: it’s mere­ly sar­don­ic. I was trav­el­ing in Java when the first McDon­alds went up: it was like, “for fuck­’s sake.” The inva­sion by any homog­e­nized cul­ture is so depress­ing, the erec­tion of anoth­er Dis­ney World in, say, Umbria, Italy, more so. It stran­gles the indige­nous cul­ture and nar­rows expres­sion of life.

The cul­tur­al homog­e­niza­tion that so depressed the young Bowie in No Down Pay­ment is now a glob­al phe­nom­e­non, and the well-trav­eled, world­ly Bowie seems to har­bor few illu­sions when he sings:

John­ny’s in Amer­i­ca
No tricks at the wheel
No one needs any­one
They don’t even just pre­tend

In the award-win­ning video, Trent Reznor plays a Travis Bick­le-like fig­ure, a men­ac­ing crea­ture of alien­ation and unpro­voked, ran­dom vio­lence and Bowie a para­noid out­sider run­ning from what he per­ceives as cit­i­zens attack­ing each oth­er on every street­corner. Stripped of the 50s veneer, it’s a coun­try where peo­ple “don’t even pre­tend”; the vio­lence and mis­an­thropy are now on full dis­play. It’s a view of Amer­i­ca that hasn’t dimmed since the mid-nineties. It’s sim­ply moved out of the city and spilled out into the once self-con­tained sub­urbs. These three arti­facts show Bowie’s evo­lu­tion in rela­tion to a coun­try that he hoped to find the best in, that near­ly always embraced him, and that came to freak him out and piss him off in lat­er years.

via Let­ters of Note

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land­scape, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

Introducing KA Lite: An Offline Version of the Khan Academy That Runs on Almost Anything

Salman Khan’s mod­el for free online edu­ca­tion hinges on the micro lecture—brief tuto­ri­als on near­ly every sub­ject under the sun—delivered through YouTube. Launched in 2006, the Khan Acad­e­my now has a library of 3000 videos. That’s not bad, espe­cial­ly for a site with the ele­vat­ed goal of pro­vid­ing a “free world-class edu­ca­tion for any­one any­where.” With the help of hun­dreds of vol­un­teers, the site’s con­tent is acces­si­ble in 18 lan­guages. But even with all of that effort, Khan does­n’t achieve the glob­al reach that it promis­es. The fact is that only 35 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion has access to the inter­net, which puts the idea of online learn­ing behind a vir­tu­al fire­wall for many peo­ple.

Enter Khan Acad­e­my Lite, oth­er­wise called KA Lite. This new ser­vice tries to work around that fire­wall. Soft­ware devel­op­er Jamie Alexan­dre and a team from UCSD devel­oped an offline ver­sion of Khan’s learn­ing mod­el that can run on just about any­thing. Once you down­load the KA Lite soft­ware and install it on a Lin­ux or Win­dows serv­er, stu­dents can start watch­ing Khan videos and exer­cis­es on computers/devices as tiny and cheap as the $35 Rasp­ber­ry Pi. Actu­al­ly, the whole serv­er can be run on the Rasp­ber­ry Pi!

You can down­load the soft­ware here and find instal­la­tion instruc­tions here. Jamie Alexan­dre offers his own intro­duc­tion to KA Lite here.

Khan Acad­e­my Lite sits nice­ly along­side the free apps released for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch ear­li­er this year. Be sure to check them out.

Find more K‑12 Resources in our col­lec­tion of 200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Offers Advice on How to Be Yourself and Achieve Your Own Greatness

What­ev­er else it is—mordant self-mock­ery, sum­ma­tion of a life’s work in thought—Friedrich Nietzsche’s last pub­lished book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, is a pro­found­ly Roman­tic text, oper­at­ing on the premise that an indi­vid­ual who suf­fers for phi­los­o­phy, for art, for truth, is hero­ic, even (or espe­cial­ly) when anti-hero­ic, brood­ing, Byron­ic. Niet­zsche states one of the pur­pos­es of his strange lit­tle book as an impre­ca­tion: Hear me! For I am such and such. Above all, do not mis­take me for some­one else!

Over a cen­tu­ry after this work’s pub­li­ca­tion, a cry of pop cul­ture with its love of sim­u­lacra might be: Please mis­take me for some­one else, espe­cial­ly some­one wealthy and famous and pret­ti­er than I am! Maybe this ethos reached its zenith with Facebook’s celebri­ty look-alike day, which inspired a site called myheritage.com to use face recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy for users who didn’t look enough like any­one famous to fig­ure out for them­selves who they want­ed to be. Sil­ly harm­less trend, yes, but a lit­tle sad too, since it shows how many peo­ple suf­fer from a sense that their iden­ti­ties are dwarfed into insignif­i­cance by a famous stranger who slight­ly resem­bles them. (Anoth­er, more humor­ous meme, goes some­thing like “Always be your­self, unless you can be Bat­man. Always be Bat­man”).

I offer these pop-soci­o­log­i­cal rumi­na­tions as con­text for the great Neil deGrasse Tyson’s response above to a ques­tion he receives quite a bit: “What can I do to be you?” On the one hand, it must be very flat­ter­ing to be asked this ques­tion, even though Tyson seems a pret­ty mod­est per­son. On the oth­er hand, the ques­tion is pathet­ic, I believe, for the rea­sons I sketched out above. Why be Neil deGrasse Tyson when you can be your­self? Unless you don’t believe you’re worth becom­ing. Tyson’s answer is also Roman­tic; he says, “I think the great­est of peo­ple in soci­ety carve nich­es that rep­re­sent a unique expres­sion of their com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents.” For Tyson that has meant tak­ing a set of aca­d­e­m­ic and career accom­plish­ments and using them as a plat­form for express­ing a com­bi­na­tion of tal­ents that only he has, which is to say that no one can be Neil deGrasse Tyson but Neil deGrasse Tyson. He uses the exam­ple of Michael Jor­dan, who honed his supe­ri­or tal­ent from nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, for sure, but who also cre­at­ed his own cat­e­go­ry through a tal­ent for being him­self, a com­bi­na­tion of per­son­al style, win­ning per­son­al­i­ty, lead­er­ship qual­i­ties, etc.

So what are we to con­clude from this?  Always be your­self, unless you can be Michael Jor­dan? Well, I think the gist of Tyson’s short talk is that there is no default or tem­plate for what you can become, or as he puts it, “what I do day-to-day is not the ful­fill­ment of some pre-exist­ing job descrip­tion.” And while “just be your­self” may sound like trite advice to peo­ple strug­gling to find an iden­ti­ty, Tyson sets it out as a task, not a fait accom­pli. “The task,” he says, “is to find the unique com­bi­na­tion of facts that apply to you. Then peo­ple will beat a path to your door.” It’s not a task to take on light­ly, or in Niet­zsche’s hyper­bol­ic words, it is “the heav­i­est demand ever put on mankind.”

The video above is an excerpt from a longer inter­view Neil deGrasse Tyson did for Big Think. The full inter­view is avail­able here.

Josh Jones is a writer and schol­ar cur­rent­ly com­plet­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion on land, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

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