Steve Jobs on Life

I like re-post­ing this from time to time.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Com­put­er, deliv­ered this speech at Stan­ford’s com­mence­ment cer­e­mo­ny in June 2005. I some­how doubt that the grad­u­at­ing class could have tru­ly appre­ci­at­ed what Jobs is say­ing here. (At that age, I could­n’t have.) But if you’re a lit­tle fur­ther down the road, you’ll under­stand that Jobs (who iron­i­cal­ly nev­er grad­u­at­ed from col­lege) points to a sim­ple set of guide­lines that can make the dif­fer­ence between liv­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing and so-so life. Sad­ly, these prin­ci­ples get lost all too often in the noise, iner­tia and blur of every­day life.

By the way, the pod­cast ver­sion of this speech con­sis­tent­ly remains the num­ber #1 pod­cast on Stan­ford’s iTunes site. You can down­load it in video here, or audio here.


Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Some Yo-Yo Ma and More: Free Classical Music Podcasts

Mozartipod

With last year being the 250th anniver­sary of Mozart’s birth, there was no short­age of pod­casts ded­i­cat­ed to Mozart’s mas­ter­pieces. First, Radio Swe­den (iTunesFeedWeb Site) reis­sued a dig­i­tal archive of Mozart record­ings by the Roy­al Swedish Opera from the 1940s and 1950s. And, along very sim­i­lar lines, Dan­marks Radio (FeedWeb Site) issued pod­casts of nine Mozart sym­phonies record­ed by the Dan­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny
Orches­tra. (You’ll find here sym­phonies num­bers 15, 17, 23, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, and 41. Since the web site is in Dan­ish, we’d rec­om­mend access­ing these high qual­i­ty MP3’s through the rss feed list­ed above.) Last­ly, we should men­tion here that, as part of last year’s fes­tiv­i­ties, The Inter­na­tion­al Mozart Foun­da­tion pub­lished online for the first time the entire­ty of of Mozart’s musi­cal scores.

Along with Mozart, you can find plen­ty of Beethoven. We have high­light­ed here before, but it’s worth not­ing again, Deutsche Welle’s pod­cast col­lec­tion called Beethoven­fest (iTunesFeedWeb Site). You’ll want to give it a look, and also see the pod­cast col­lec­tion put togeth­er by the Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Con­ser­va­to­ry (iTunesFeedWeb Site). This edu­ca­tion­al series offers an exten­sive overview and record­ings of Beethoven’s work, as well as that of Arnold Schoen­berg. You can also catch more Beethoven (as well as a lit­tle Mozart and Bach) with the pod­cast series called The Con­cert (iTunesFeedWeb Site), which fea­tures record­ings from the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner Muse­um in Boston.

Speak­ing of Bach, you may want to give some time to these two pod­casts: Bach Pod­cast from Magnatune.com (iTunesFeedWeb Site) and Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia (FeedWeb Site).

Let’s now leave you with a few oth­er good finds: Wag­n­er Operas Pod­cast (iTunesFeedWeb Site) lets you lis­ten in on record­ings from the annu­al Bayreuth Fes­ti­val, plus more. An Inti­mate Tour Through the Music of Yo-Yo Ma (iTunesFeedWeb Site) offers essen­tial­ly what the title says. Final­ly, we’d rec­om­mend Clas­si­cal Per­for­mance (iTunes Feed Web Site), which con­sists of clas­si­cal music per­for­mances from WGB­H’s Stu­dio One in Boston; The New York Phi­la­har­mon­ic Pod­cast (iTunesFeedWeb Site) which intro­duces you to the music and per­form­ers fea­tured in the con­certs of the New York Phil­har­mon­ic; and From the Top. Live from Carnegie Hall Video Pod­cast (iTunesFeedWeb Site), a pod­cast that show­cas­es the top-notch skills and com­pelling sto­ries of Amer­i­ca’s best young clas­si­cal musi­cians.

Oth­er Pod­cast Sur­veys:

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The New Stanford Blog Directory: Stem Cells, Philosophy and Beyond

Blogs are abound­ing these days, and what’s unfor­tu­nate­ly miss­ing is an effec­tive way to orga­nize this new world of infor­ma­tion and to make it acces­si­ble to oth­ers. Until a good, large-scale solu­tion comes along (I don’t count Tech­no­rati or Google Blog Search as the real answer), some of this will get done the old fash­ioned way, the way Yahoo did it back in 1996 — that is, index­ing by hand.

Last week, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty launched the Stan­ford Blog Direc­to­ry, which hopes to index the col­lec­tive blog­ging wis­dom com­ing out of the uni­ver­si­ty com­mu­ni­ty (fac­ul­ty, staff, alum­ni, etc.). This small list will inevitably grow over time. But it already includes some blogs (in addi­tion to Open Cul­ture) that you may want to peruse. Let’s high­light a few:

Smart Ener­gy Show: 6.6 bil­lion peo­ple live on the earth today. 9.2 bil­lion will be here by 2050. And, as time goes by, ener­gy demand will inevitably push toward a break­ing point. Smart Ener­gy takes a close look at how we can meet “this ris­ing demand with­out inflict­ing per­ma­nent dam­age” on our frag­ile envi­ron­ment. And it explains what sci­ence, gov­ern­ments and indi­vid­u­als can do to meet this chal­lenge. The blog is writ­ten by Mar­got Ger­rit­se­na, pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Ener­gy Resources Engi­neer­ing, and the blog posts are often accom­pa­nied by infor­ma­tive videos.

The Stem Cell Blog: Writ­ten by Christo­pher Thomas Scott, this blog exam­ines the sci­ence, ethics, busi­ness and pol­i­tics of stem cell research. Scott is par­tic­u­lar­ly well posi­tioned to do this. He is the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Pro­gram on Stem Cells in Soci­ety and the author of Stem Cell Now: An Intro­duc­tion to the Com­ing Med­ical Rev­o­lu­tion. Plus he has taught a course called Straight Talk About Stem Cells that you can access on iTunes for free.

Phi­los­o­phy Talk: Writ­ten by two Stan­ford phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, Ken Tay­lor and John Per­ry, this blog accom­pa­nies a week­ly radio show (also called “Phi­los­o­phy Talk”) that offers a “down-to-earth and no-non­sense approach” to phi­los­o­phy that’s rel­e­vant to every­day life. Along the way, the blog/show explores phi­los­o­phy that touch­es on our beliefs, rela­tion­ships, pas­sions and the world around us.

For more Stan­ford blogs, enter the Blog Direc­to­ry here. For more Stan­ford con­tent on Open Cul­ture, click here.

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Free Burma!

Get more infor­ma­tion here.

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Bob Dylan Video Goodness

dylancard.jpgMark Octo­ber 1 on your cal­en­dar. That’s when Bob Dylan will release a new box set of his “great­est songs.” Now, cut over to the web­site designed to mar­ket the album, and you’ll find a cou­ple notable pieces of video. First up, you can watch the video that accom­pa­nies Mark Ron­son’s remix­ing of “Most Like­ly You Will Go Your Way (& I’ll Go Mine).” (Watch it on the web­site here or on YouTube here.) It’s appar­ent­ly the first time Dylan has allowed a remix of any of his songs, and the song has been get­ting some air­play this week.

And then there is this video con­cept. Back in 1967, D. A. Pen­nebak­er released Don’t Look Back, a well-known doc­u­men­tary that cov­ered Dylan’s first tour of Eng­land in 1965. The open­ing seg­ment of the film has Dylan stand­ing in an alley, flip­ping through cards inscribed with lyrics from Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues. (Also the beat poet Allen Gins­berg looms in the back­ground. We’ve includ­ed the orig­i­nal video below.) Now, I’m men­tion­ing this because the afore­men­tioned web­site lets you re-work this video seg­ment. Click here and you can re-write the cards that Dylan flips through, and then watch your edit­ed ver­sion. It’s anoth­er form of re-mix­ing, I guess.

Last­ly, I want to direct your atten­tion to the trove of videos that Google put togeth­er back when Google Video was a real liv­ing, breath­ing thing. Cre­at­ed to coin­cide with the release of Dylan’s last stu­dio album, Mod­ern Times (2006), this col­lec­tion lets you watch 11 videos in total, rang­ing from unre­leased footage from D. A. Pen­nebak­er’s Don’t Look Back, to Dylan’s appear­ance on The John­ny Cash Show, to his per­for­mance of “Dig­ni­ty” on MTV’s Unplugged. Good stuff, to be sure.

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SmartLinks From Our Readers

Below, we have some links rec­om­mend­ed by our read­ers. Feel free to send oth­er good bits our way. The more we give, the more we get. Just click here to send:

  • Sean Penn reads an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Chron­i­cles, here. (Or check out the full audio­book ver­sion.)
  • Jared Dia­mond, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Col­lapse speaks at The Long Now Foun­da­tion about why civ­i­liza­tions have his­tor­i­cal­ly endured or failed. Two impor­tant fac­tors include how they man­aged their nat­ur­al resources and dealt with cli­mate change. Does this ring any bells? Get the lec­ture here: (iTunesFeedMP3s)
  • Ayn Rand’s Lit­er­a­ture of Cap­i­tal­ism. A piece in The New York Times explores Atlas Shrugged and its impact on Alan Greenspan.
  • Inter­view with Hal Var­i­an, Chief Econ­o­mist at Google (and UC Berke­ley Pro­fes­sor), who talks (iTunes - FeedMP3Web Site) about the inter­net as an “engine for democ­ra­cy.”
  • Appear­ing in The New York Review of Books, this piece, enti­tled Cit­i­zen Gore, takes a look a Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Rea­son, and how Gore, being freed up from pol­i­tics, has been remark­ably able to prod the con­science of the nation. For some, how­ev­er, it’s not enough. Hence the recent “Draft Al Gore” cam­paign that has got­ten under­way.
  • Check out the Voodoo Music Fes­ti­val com­ing up on Octo­ber 26, 27 & 28 in New Orleans. The line­up of artists includes Rage Against The Machine, Com­mon, Tiesto, The Smash­ing Pump­kins, Black Rebel Motor­cy­cle Club, M.I.A., Ben Harp­er, Wilco and more. To win pass­es to the show and some trav­el mon­ey, you can enter a con­test here.

A Blogging Scholarship

An orga­ni­za­tion called Col­lege Schol­ar­ships is offer­ing a $10,000 schol­ar­ship this year for a col­lege stu­dent who blogs about “unique and inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about you and/or things you are pas­sion­ate about.” We’re not shilling for a nom­i­na­tion here, but per­haps you know an aspir­ing blog­ger some­where who could use the extra cash.

This con­test rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion: are there any col­lege stu­dents out there who sup­port their edu­ca­tion through blog­ging? It’s not a far stretch from work­ing part-time (or full-time) to help pay the bills, but blog­ging seems like an unlike­ly way to earn enough mon­ey to buy books, let alone pay tuition.

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