This week, Microsoft rolled out its new tablet, simply called Surface, which gives you another way to enjoy our courses, movies, ebooks, audio books and the rest. In many ways, Surface resembles the iPad in its look and feel. And when it came to unveiling the tablet, Microsoft’s execs couldn’t think outside the box created by Steve Jobs. A video made by ReadWriteWeb makes that rather painfully yet amusingly clear.…
Since Canadian Confederation, it was the policy of the Canadian government to provide education to Aboriginal peoples through a system of church-run Residential Schools. The idea was that by separating the children at an early age from their parents’ influence, they might be more easily assimilated into white Canadian society, including the Christian religion. (A very similar fate befell Australian Aboriginal children after 1931.) The Methodist and Presbyterian churches, and the United Church of Canada, explicitly supported the goals of assimilation and Christianization.
Mount Elgin Industrial School, operating near London, Ontario between 1851 and 1946, was one such institution. Apart from attending school itself, the native children had to work day and night at a nearby barn. Recently, scholars discovered words and drawings all over the barn walls left behind by some of the 1,200 children forced to work there. Described as the “Dead Sea Scrolls” of this dark chapter in Canadian history, the words tell a moving tale of children isolated from friends and families, working very hard under less than ideal circumstances.
On June 20 2012, a monument to the survivors of Canadian residential schools will be unveiled on the site of Mount Elgin Residential School.
Here are some historical photos of Mount Elgin Residential School.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
In the early 1960s, a Swiss publisher commissioned Dalí to create a print edition celebrating five real and imagined figures who loom large in the Spanish cultural imagination. The collection was called The Five Spanish Immortals, and it featured sketches of Cervantes, Europe’s first great novelist and his unforgettable protagonist, Don Quixote. The book also paid homage to the medieval hero El Cid; the master painter El Greco; and Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez — someone The Met calls “the most admired—perhaps the greatest—European painter who ever lived.” Cervantes appears above, and the remaining quartet below.
Is it a tragedy? Is it a farce? In the land once called East Germany, in a town once called Karl-Marx-Stadt, a bank called Sparkasse Chemnitz ran an online poll letting customers vote for images to place on their credit cards. And the hands-down winner was Karl Marx, an ironic pick given that … well, you don’t need me to explain why.
In response to this selection, Planet Money has encouraged readers to post a tagline for the card on Twitter, using the hashtag #marxcard. Here are a few of our favorites so far:
There are Some Things Money Can’t Buy. Especially If You Abolish All Private Property.
From each according to their ability, to each according to his need. For everything else, there’s #Marxcard.
The Marx Card — Because Credit is the Opiate of the Masses.
The Karl Marx MasterCard — When You’re Short of Kapital
Got your own to suggest? cc: us on Twitter: @openculture
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In the last years of his life, Frank Zappa spent much of his remaining time doing what he loved best: composing.
The 1991 documentary Peefeeyatko, by German-born filmmaker and composer Henning Lohner, takes us inside Zappa’s secluded world to watch and listen as he creates symphonic compositions on an early digital synthesizer called a Synclavier. The film was made not long after Zappa learned he had terminal cancer. Like its subject, Lohner’s film is eccentric, with scenes from monster movies spliced in with footage of Zappa working and talking. “Peefeeyatko,” we learn at the end, is Bigfoot-language for “Give me some more Apples.”
Zappa talks about his wide range of musical tastes–how from an early age he would listen to rhythm and blues one minute and the French experimental composer Edgard Verèse the next. The film includes interviews with his fellow avant-garde composers John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. To describe his radical eclecticism, Zappa says: “The easiest way to sum up the aesthetic would be: anything, anytime, anyplace for no reason at all. And I think with an aesthetic like that you can have pretty good latitude for being creative.”
Peefeeyatko runs 59 minutes, and will be added to our expanding collection of Free Movies Online.
This week, Salman Khan returned to his alma mater, MIT, to deliver the commencement speech to the 2012 graduates. As you know, MIT helped spark the open education movement when it launched its OpenCourseWare site in 2002. A decade later, the university has placed materials for 2100 courses online (find many highlighted in our collection of Free Online Courses). So it’s fitting that the new face of open education would deliver the big speech.
The talk is a bit inwardly focused, a celebration of MIT and its Hogwarts qualities. But the latter half gets to Khan’s philosophy of life, his recipe for living well in the world. It boils down to 1) being positive and smiling when in doubt, 2) surrendering your ego during times of conflict, 3) listening to others, 4) downplaying material concerns and focusing on health and relationships, and 5) using a number of thought experiments to gain perspective on life. Those he explains along the way.…
Last August, we featured Peter Adamson’s podcast The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site), a chronologically uninterrupted “look at the ideas and lives of the major philosophers (eventually covering in detail such giants as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant) as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.” Continuing at the rate of one episode a week, Adamson and his guest philosophical experts have since covered names like Lucretius, Seneca, and Plutarch. They’ve most recently reached Alexander of Aphrodisias, an especially astute ancient commentator on Aristotle and opponent of Stoic attitudes toward fate; Quintilian, Lucian, Themistius, and the interplay between rhetoric and philosophy in the Roman Empire; and the emergence of astronomy, ushered in by Ptolemy during a time when observers still had much to say about astrology.
Don’t miss the episodes where Adamson brings in specialists on the particular philosopher, philosophical subfield, or quirk in philosophical history to which his podcasting journey brings him. Since our last post on the show, we’ve heard Richard Sorabji talk about time and eternity in Aristotle, James Warren on Epicureanism, and Raphael Wolf on Cicero, to name but a few. Such is Adamson’s attention to detail — and dedication to the Zeno’s Paradox-reminiscent cause of pure continuity — that, after putting out 85 episodes, he remains in the ancient world. Imagine the bounty of discussion when he reaches, say, the eighteenth century, let alone the twentieth. To prepare yourself for that, you’d better start listening now; a show expressly created without gaps must, it seems only natural, be experienced without them.
Last year, right before publishing his illustrated children’s book The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins appeared at The New Yorker Festival and walked the crowd through a short thought experiment. Imagine pulling out your family genealogy. Now snap a photo of each ancestor going back 185 million generations. What would it show? First off, your very distant grandfather was a fish. Secondly, you can never put your finger on the very first human being, a proverbial Adam and Eve. 185,000,000 snapshots can never capture that one moment.
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