Watch Werner Herzog’s Very First Film, Herakles, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

in Film | September 8th, 2017

Rebellious dwarfs, crazed conquistadors, delusional tycoons, wood-carving ski jumpers: Werner Herzog scholars who attempt to find a pattern in the filmmaker’s choices of subject matter are virtually guaranteed an interesting search, if an ultimately futile one. But they must all start in the same place: Herzog’s very first film Herakles, which mashes up the spectacles of body building, auto racing, and destruction. It does all that in nine minutes to a soundtrack of saxophone jazz, and with frequent references to the titular hero of myth, whom you may know better by his Roman name of Hercules.

“Would he clean the Augean stables?” ask Herakles’ subtitles over footage of one young German man showing off his well-shaped torso. “Would he dispose of the Lernaean Hydra?” they ask of another as he strikes a pose.

Between clips of these bodybuilders performing their labors and questions about whether they could perform those of Hercules, we see militaristic marches, falling bombs, heaps of rubble, and a 1955 racecar crash at Le Mans that killed 83 people. All this juxtaposition tempts us to ask what message the nineteen-year-old Herzog wanted to deliver, but, as in all his subsequent work, he surely wanted less to make an articulable point than to explore the possibilities of cinema itself.

More recently, in Paul Cronin’s interview book Herzog on Herzog, the filmmaker looks back on “my first blunder, Herakles” and finds it “rather stupid and pointless, though at the time it was an important test for me. It taught me about editing together very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole,” and in a sense prepared him for an entire cinematic career of very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole. “For me it was fascinating to edit material together that had such separate and individual lives. The film was some kind of an apprenticeship for me. I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school” — of the non-rogue variety, anyway.

Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Guerilla Filmmaking & Lock-Picking

Portrait Werner Herzog: The Director’s Autobiographical Short Film from 1986

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

in Computer Science, Science, Technology | September 8th, 2017

I’ve never wanted to start a sentence with “I’m old enough to remember…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remember the enormously successful Apple IIe and Commodore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were science fiction. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a programming language. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hindsight as well—to be the very dawn of computing. Before the personal computer, such devices were the size of kitchen appliances and were hidden away in military installations, universities, and NASA labs.

But of course we all know that the history of computing goes far beyond the early 80s: at least back to World War II, and perhaps even much farther. Do we begin with the abacus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, the astrolabe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage? The question is maybe one of definitions. In the short, animated video above, physicist, science writer, and YouTube educator Dominic Walliman defines the computer according to its basic binary function of “just flipping zeros and ones,” and he begins his condensed history of computer science with tragic genius Alan Turing of Turing Test and Bletchley Park codebreaking fame.

Turing’s most significant contribution to computing came from his 1936 concept of the “Turing Machine,” a theoretical mechanism that could, writes the Cambridge Computer Laboratory “simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is!” All other designs, says Walliman—apart from a quantum computer—are equivalent to the Turing Machine, “which makes it the foundation of computer science.” But since Turing’s time, the simple design has come to seem endlessly capable of adaptation and innovation.

Walliman illustrates the computer’s exponential growth by pointing out that a smart phone has more computing power than the entire world possessed in 1963, and that the computing capability that first landed astronauts on the moon is equal to “a couple of Nintendos” (first generation classic consoles, judging by the image). But despite the hubris of the computer age, Walliman points out that “there are some problems which, due to their very nature, can never be solved by a computer” either because of the degree of uncertainty involved or the degree of inherent complexity. This fascinating, yet abstract discussion is where Walliman’s “Map of Computer Science” begins, and for most of us this will probably be unfamiliar territory.

We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Computer Theory to that of Computer Engineering, but while Walliman covers familiar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to applications, we’re in the realm of big data, natural language processing, the internet of things, and “augmented reality.” From here on out, computer technology will only get faster, and weirder, despite the fact that the “underlying hardware is hitting some hard limits.” Certainly this very quick course in Computer Science only makes for an introductory survey of the discipline, but like Wallman’s other maps—of mathematics, physics, and chemistry—this one provides us with an impressive visual overview of the field that is both broad and specific, and that we likely wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.

As with his other maps, Walliman has made this the Map of Computer Science available as a poster, perfect for dorm rooms, living rooms, or wherever else you might need a reminder.

Related Content:

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Watch Breaking the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Turing (1996)

The Map of Mathematics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together

The Map of Physics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Physics Fit Together

The Map of Chemistry: New Animation Summarizes the Entire Field of Chemistry in 12 Minutes

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics

in Film | September 7th, 2017

Entertainment first, and art second? Hasn’t that always been the American way when it comes to film? And is that how the rest of the world sees it, especially considering France’s love of Jerry Lewis, Germany’s obsession with David Hasselhoff, and China taking Nicholas Cage’s career choices more seriously than he does himself?

In this list of The 100 Greatest American Films, the BBC polled 62 international film critics to see what they thought were the United States’ enduring contributions to cinema culture. The films only needed to be funded by American companies—the directors could be from other countries. (If not, about a third of these choices would be disqualified. Five are by Hitchcock alone.)

As for other favorite directors, Spielberg gets five (although the highest entry, Jaws, comes in at 38) and Billy Wilder gets five, with The Apartment the highest ranked at 24. The most popular decade for film is the 1970s, the top two being Coppola’s first two Godfather films. (It would be interesting to know the median age of these 62 critics, just to see if their formative years align with the decade.)

Of the 100, here’s the Top 10:

10. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
9. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
8. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
7. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
6. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
5. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
2. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Comparing this list to BFI’s 2012 list of the Top 100 films of all time, there isn’t much difference in the top spots. And, in the years to come, I suspect those top four films will switch places occasionally but never really leave.

Instead, the surprises come further down the list. Gone with the Wind used to be considered a classic, no doubt bolstered by its box office success at the time. But its politics have weakened its position, and, along with Birth of a Nation, it might not last another decade on such lists. On the flip side, black filmmakers have four films on the list and women directors only one (Meshes of the Afternoon one of the best experimental films of all time).

Other interesting choices include The Lion King (the only animated film on the list), Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, and Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (one of two musicals by the director on the list). What films would you like to see added or taken away? Is this a fair assessment of America’s worth? Let us know in the comments.

Above, you can watch a somewhat idiosyncratic presentations of the films on the BBC list.

The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers

The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

The Addams Family Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”

in Random | September 7th, 2017

In the spirit of Andrew Sullivan’s Mental Health Break, we give you this: The Addams Family Dancing to The Ramones’ 1976 track, “Blitzkrieg Bop.” For a brief moment, forget the hurricanes, the threat of nuclear war, the fires burning in LA, Montana, Washington, DC and the hearts of white supremacists. Breathe in. Breathe out. And repeat after me. “Hey Ho.…..Let’s go!”

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Talking Heads Perform The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Together)

The Ramones’ First Press Release: We’re Part Musicians, Dentists & Degenerates (1975)

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapted from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968)

in Comedy, Television | September 7th, 2017

“What if there were no punch lines?” asks Steve Martin in his autobiography Born Standing Up. “What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?” These questions motivated him to develop the distinctive style of stand-up comedy — in a sense, an anti-stand-up comedy — that rocketed him to superstardom in the 1970s. But before the world knew him as a banjo-playing funnyman, Martin worked for a couple of his especially notable comedian-musician elders: Tom and Dick Smothers, better known as the Smothers Brothers.

“We happened to be walking through the writer area of the show, and there he was, sitting at one of our writers’ desks,” Tom says of Martin on the 1968 broadcast of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour above. “Later we found out that he actually was one of our writers. Since he hasn’t been paid for his work, we thought we’d let him come out tonight and make a few dollars.”

So introduced, the 22-year-old Martin begins his television debut by re-introducing himself: “As Tom just said, I’m Steve Martin, and I’ll be out here in a minute. While I’m waiting for me, I’d like to jump into kind of a socko-boffo comedy routine.” With his prop table ready, he then launches into “the fabulous glove-into-dove trick.”

Though the studio audience may look pretty square by today’s standards (or even those of the late 1960s), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had already built a reputation for pushing the envelope of mainstream television comedy. Still, it’s safe to say that its audience had never seen any performer – and certainly not any prop comic — quite like Martin before. In this short set, he performs a number of deliberately botched or otherwise askew magic tricks, using his tone to generate the humor. “If I kept denying them the formality of a punch line,” as he writes more than 40 years later in B orn Standing Up, “the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.”

Watching today, Martin’s fans will recognize his trademark sensibility more quickly than his appearance, since the clip predates both the white suit and the white hair. Even then, he wanted to perform in a way that, in the words of The Guardian’s Rafael Behr, “would unnerve and alienate the audience, but also, through self-deprecation, engage them in conspiracy against himself.” Martin seems to take a dim view of his own early television work, having described himself in a 1971 Virginia Graham Show appearance as “mannered, slow and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority,” a quality that he has since developed in abundance, and of which “the art of having an act so bad it was good,” as Behr puts it, demands a surprising amount.

Steve Martin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Einstein & Picasso in a Heady Comedy Routine (2002)

Steve Martin on the Legendary Bluegrass Musician Earl Scruggs

Steve Martin Writes a Hymn for Hymn-Less Atheists

Steve Martin, “Home Crafts Expert,” Explains the Art of Paper Wadding, Endorses Bob Kerrey

Steve Martin Releases Bluegrass Album/Animated Video

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More

in Music | September 7th, 2017

After each heartbreaking loss of a musical icon this past year and a half, we have turned to their greatest moments onstage, not necessarily their last, because their final shows weren’t always all that memorable. Declining health, bad recordings… and not every gig is a good one even in the best of times and with the best of performers. But when it comes to John Lennon’s last public appearance, I like to think he might have left the stage exactly the way he wanted to, as a rocker, a provocateur, and a pisstaker in a candy-apple red jumpsuit, backed by a nine-piece miming band of bald men in black leather with masks painted on the back of their heads.

Credited as “John Lennon, Etc.,” the band’s true name, given to them by Lennon himself, is abbreviated on their bass drum: B.O.M.F., or “Brothers of Mother Fuckers.” It was Lennon’s send off to his own career as much as it was a Salute to Sir Lew, as the program was called. Just a few months later Sean was born, and Lennon declared he would retire to raise his son. At the time of his tragic death five years later, he had begun recording again, releasing Double Fantasy and planning a second double album, Milk and Honey. But we never got to see him perform those songs.

The honoree for Lennon’s last gig was Sir Lew Grade, “a powerful media mogul,” notes Dangerous Minds, “with roots in cabaret and variety shows.” A man known as much for his ruthlessness in business as for his Charleston, which he performed on tabletops whenever the mood struck him. In 1969 Grade bought up the rights to over a hundred Lennon and McCartney songs, after some very tense negotiations. Lennon sued Grade in 1974 and settled out of court, and Grade remained the co-publisher of all of his new songs.

As part of the settlement, Lennon recorded his album of covers of classic rock ‘n’ roll songs, appropriately titled Rock ‘n’ Roll. When he appeared at the tribute concert for Sir Lew at the Hilton Hotel in New York—on the bill with Julie Andrews, Tom Jones, and Peter Sellers—he played Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin,” and Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” for “a “who’s who of the old Hollywood elite,” including Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly, and Orson Welles. The show, recorded for TV broadcast, cut his rendition of “Stand by Me” (hear the audio above), but they did air his final song, “Imagine,” which turned out to be the last song he ever sang live onstage (top).

Lennon is in very good form, and seemingly in good spirits. The year previous, he’d scored a number one hit with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” According at least to Paul McCartney and Lennon’s girlfriend May Pang, he had even considered reuniting the Beatles. In November of 1974, Lennon joined Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden for rollicking versions of “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” on which Elton had played in the studio. You can see a recreation of that performance above. It was technically Lennon’s last live concert appearance.

His final appearance on stage, on the other hand, while it might have been an odd way to say goodbye, whether he meant to do so or not, may not be what we revisit when we revisit Lennon. Why did he agree to do a tribute concert “for a man he had been embroiled in lawsuits with?” With a stage show that many have thought was deliberately designed to antagonize the honoree? We’ll never know. But I’m grateful that his final live song was one that still speaks to us of hope and possibility. Maybe bowing to censors, Lennon changes “Imagine”’s controversial line about religion. Instead, he sings, “Nothing to kill or die for, no immigration, too,” referring both to his troubles with the U.S. immigration authorities and to the borderless world the song projects. “Imagine there’s no countries… Imagine all the people sharing all the world.”

Get a Fly-on-the-Wall View of John Lennon Recording & Arranging His Classic Song, “Imagine” (1971)

John Lennon’s Solo Albums Now Streaming for Free on Spotify

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions

in Astronomy | September 7th, 2017

A quick fyi: Last year, NASA released 14 Free Posters That Depict the Future of Space Travel in a Captivatingly Retro Style. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions (Aug. 20 and Sept. 5, 1977), the space agency has issued three attractive new posters to celebrate our “ambassadors to the rest of the Milky Way.” All are free to download and print here. Writes Space.com: “One of the Voyager posters is an image of a starry night sky [see above], and another advertises the mission using the flamboyant design style of the 1970s, the decade when the probes launched. A third poster honors the probes’ ‘grand tour’ of the planets, on their way to the edge of the solar system.” Happy downloading!

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Leonard Nimoy Narrates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voyage to the Origins of the Solar System

The Best of NASA Space Shuttle Videos (1981–2010)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

in History, Math, Science | September 6th, 2017

One presumption of television shows like Ancient Aliens and books like Chariots of the Gods is that ancient people—particularly non-western people—couldn’t possibly have constructed the elaborate infrastructure and monumental architecture and statuary they did without the help of extra-terrestrials. The idea is intriguing, giving us the hugely ambitious sci-fi fantasies woven into Ridley Scott’s revived Alien franchise. It is also insulting in its level of disbelief about the capabilities of ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, South Americans, South Sea Islanders, etc.

We assume the Greeks perfected geometry, for example, and refer to the Pythagorean theorem, although this principle was probably well-known to ancient Indians. Since at least the 1940s, mathematicians have also known that the “Pythagorean triples”—integer solutions to the theorem—appeared 1000 years before Pythagoras on a Babylonian tablet called Plimpton 322. Dating back to sometime between 1822 and 1762 B.C. and discovered in southern Iraq in the early 1900s, the tablet has recently been re-examined by mathematicians Daniel Mansfield and Norman Wildberger of Australia’s University of New South Wales and found to contain even more ancient mathematical wisdom, “a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time.”

In a paper published in Historia Mathematica the two conclude that Plimpton 322’s Babylonian creators detailed a “novel kind of trigonometry,” 1000 years before Pythagoras and Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who has typically received credit for trigonometry’s discovery. In the video above, Mansfield introduces the unique properties of this “scientific marvel of the ancient world,” an enigma that has “puzzled mathematicians,” he writes in his article, “for more than 70 years.” Mansfield is confident that his research will fundamentally change the way we understand scientific history. He may be overly optimistic about the cultural forces that shape historical narratives, and he is not without his scholarly critics either.

Eleanor Robson, an expert on Mesopotamia at University College London has not published a formal critique, but she did take to Twitter to register her dissent, writing, “for any historical document, you need to be able to read the language & know the historical context to make sense of it. Maths is no exception.” The trigonometry hypothesis, she writes in a follow-up tweet, is “tediously wrong.” Mansfield and Wildberger may not be experts in ancient Mesopotamian language and culture, it’s true, but Robson is also not a mathematician. “The strongest argument” in the Australian researchers’ favor, writes Kenneth Chang at The New York Times, is that “the table works for trigonomic calculations.” As Mansfield says, “you don’t make a trigonomic table by accident.”

Plimpton 322 uses ratios rather than angles and circles. “But when you arrange it such a way so that you can use any known ratio of a triangle to find the other side of a triangle,” says Mansfield, “then it becomes trigonometry. That’s what we can use this fragment for.” As for what the ancient Babylonians used it for, we can only speculate. Robson and others have proposed that the tablet was a teaching guide. Mansfield believes “Plimpton 322 was a powerful tool that could have been used for surveying fields or making architectural calculations to build palaces, temples or step pyramids.”

Whatever its ancient use, Mansfield thinks the tablet “has great relevance for our modern world… practical applications in surveying, computer graphics and education.” Given the possibilities, Plimpton 322 might serve as “a rare example of the ancient world teaching us something new,” should we choose to learn it. That knowledge probably did not originate in outer space.

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Babylon, Rome, and the Islamic World

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch Werner Herzog’s Very First Film, Herakles, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

The Top 100 American Films of All Time, According to 62 International Film Critics

The Addams Family Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968)

Watch John Lennon’s Last Live Performance (1975): “Imagine,” “Stand By Me” & More

NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions

Trigonometry Discovered on a 3700-Year-Old Ancient Babylonian Tablet

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