20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating Traditional Handicrafts

in Art, Design | September 3rd, 2024

In Japan­ese “tewaza” means “hand tech­nique” or “hand­craft” and, in this YouTube playlist of 20 short films, var­i­ous arti­sanal tech­niques are explored and demon­strat­ed by Japan­ese mas­ters in the field. For those who are both obsessed with Japan­ese art and watch­ing things get made, these videos are cat­nip. There’s very lit­tle spo­ken, except a few quotes from the mak­ers them­selves, and gen­tle music plays over shots of del­i­cate, intri­cate, and con­fi­dent hand­i­work.

Watch the video up top, a look at how a small group of men forge a Sakai knife. (Yes, we keep expect­ing the music to turn into the Lau­ra Palmer’s Theme too.) No words are nec­es­sary in this exact­ing demon­stra­tion, and just check out the wood-like grain in the met­al.

And the names of these goods denote the towns of origin–Sakai is just out­side Osa­ka, and is one of Japan’s main sea­ports and, yes, known for its knives.

Oth­er videos show the mak­ing of hand­made washi paper from Mino; stun­ning gold leaf pro­duc­tion from Kanaza­wa; paper lantern making from Gifu; dec­o­rat­ed wall­pa­per from Ueno; a Kumano writ­ing brush, and very del­i­cate bam­boo weav­ing from Bep­pu that looks so pre­cise it’s like it’s made by machine, but no, this is all in the eye.

The YouTube chan­nel that has pro­duced these videos, Aoya­ma Square, is a lit­er­al one-stop shop in Tokyo for all the kinds of crafts seen in the videos, and is a mem­ber of the Japan­ese nation­al asso­ci­a­tion that pro­motes and keeps these skills and mini-indus­tries alive. So is this one long ad for a large crafts empo­ri­um? Well, could be. Do we still want to buy some of that beau­ti­ful lac­quer­ware from Echizen? Oh yes, very much so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Beau­ti­ful Art of Mak­ing Japan­ese Cal­lig­ra­phy Ink Out of Soot & Glue

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Arti­san Make a Noh Mask, Cre­at­ing an Aston­ish­ing Char­ac­ter From a Sin­gle Block of Wood

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.

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Behold the First American Board Game, Travellers’ Tour Through the United States (1822)

in Games, History | September 3rd, 2024

Asked to name a clas­sic Amer­i­can board game, most of us would first think of Monop­oly, whose imagery and ver­biage — Park Place, Rich Uncle Pen­ny­bags, “Do not pass go” — has worked its way deep into the cul­ture since Park­er Broth­ers brought it to mar­ket in 1935. Despite that, it isn’t the old­est Amer­i­can board game: that hon­or goes to Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States, which came out more than a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, in 1822. Where­as Monop­oly teach­es its play­ers about real-estate val­ues in Depres­sion-era Atlantic City (as well as a thing or two about cap­i­tal­ism), the old­er game took a larg­er sub­ject for its edu­ca­tion­al ambi­tions: the whole of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.

Of course, that whole was a lot small­er back in 1822, the year after Mis­souri became the 24th state. Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States presents its two-to-four play­ers with the task of tra­vers­ing the young coun­try, begin­ning in Wash­ing­ton and end­ing in New Orleans. This is done by spin­ning some­thing called a “tee­to­tum,” a kind of hybrid between a top and a die, designed to hedge against the sin­ful asso­ci­a­tions of gam­bling. The play­er then moves ahead accord­ing to the dis­tance shown on the tee­to­tum, but must name the unla­beled city on which they’ve land­ed — and, in a more chal­leng­ing vari­a­tion, guess its pop­u­la­tion — in order to remain there.

As they move their pieces across the coun­try, play­ers can also read the includ­ed descrip­tions of each city, town, and region through which they pass. “Pro­mot­ing the val­ue of edu­ca­tion, the game high­lights insti­tu­tions of learn­ing,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Matthew Wynn Sivils. “Philadelphia’s ‘lit­er­ary and benev­o­lent insti­tu­tions are numer­ous and respectable.’ Prov­i­dence boasts ‘Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, a respectable lit­er­ary insti­tu­tion.’ ” Mak­ing their way south, “play­ers learn about Richmond’s ‘fer­tile back­coun­try’ and the ‘pol­ished man­ners and unaf­fect­ed hos­pi­tal­i­ty’ of the cit­i­zens of Charleston. Savan­nah ‘con­tains many splen­did edi­fices’ and Columbia’s ‘South Car­oli­na Col­lege … bids fair to be a valu­able insti­tu­tion.’ ”

As clear-eyed descrip­tions of the Unit­ed States in the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, these fall some­what short of Toc­queville — but then, they were writ­ten almost a decade before Alex­is de Toc­queville set foot in Amer­i­ca. Not only did the coun­try still have much expan­sion across the con­ti­nent left to do, it had amassed but a frac­tion of the pow­er and influ­ence it would go on to do in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. How­ev­er com­pelling a spec­ta­cle the U.S. had become to for­eign observers, it must have inspired among its own peo­ple an even stronger yearn­ing to under­stand its nature, and there­fore its future — a yearn­ing the mak­ers of Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States clear­ly hoped would moti­vate sales. As a prod­uct, it seems not to have been suc­cess­ful, but as an idea, it lives on more than 200 years lat­er in the form of the great Amer­i­can road trip.

via My Mod­ern Met/Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Moth­er of All Maps of the “Father of Waters”: Behold the 11-Foot Traveler’s Map of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er (1866)

he Fiendish­ly Com­pli­cat­ed Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Dis­cov­er The Cam­paign for North Africa

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rol­lick­ing Nov­el

Watch a Playthrough of the Old­est Board Game in the World, the Sumer­ian Roy­al Game of Ur, Cir­ca 2500 BC

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Night Frank Zappa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Captain Beefheart Too (Belgium, 1969)

in Music | September 3rd, 2024

Recent­ly an old­er musi­cian acquain­tance told me he nev­er “got into ‘Inter­stel­lar Over­drive’ and all that,” refer­ring to the “first major space jam” of Pink Floy­d’s career and the sub­se­quent explo­sion of space rock bands. I found myself a lit­tle tak­en aback. Though I was born too late to be there, I’ve come to see “’Inter­stel­lar Over­drive’ and all that” as one of the most inter­est­ing things about the end of the sixties—the com­ing of Cap­tain Beef­heart and the Mag­ic Band, of The Soft Machine, of Hawk­wind and oth­er psy­che­del­ic war­riors.

Too oft over­looked in the pop­u­lar Wood­stock/Alta­mont bina­ry short­hand for fin-de-six­ties rock and roll, these bands’ brand of prog/­jaz­z/blues/psych-rock exper­i­men­tal­ism got its due in Amou­gies, Bel­gium, in a 1969 fes­ti­val meant as Europe’s answer to the three-day “Aquar­i­an expo­si­tion” staged in upstate New York that same year.

Spon­sored by Paris mag­a­zine Actuel, “The Actuel Rock Fes­ti­val” fea­tured all of the bands men­tioned above (except Hawk­wind), along with Yes, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cher­ry, and many more. MC’ing the event, and serv­ing as Beefheart’s man­ag­er, was none oth­er than impre­sario of weird him­self, Frank Zap­pa, who sat in with Floyd on “Inter­stel­lar Over­drive,” bring­ing his con­sid­er­able lead gui­tar prowess to their dark, descend­ing instru­men­tal.

Just above, hear that Zappa/Floyd per­for­mance of the song. The live audio record­ing is fuzzy and a bit hol­low, but the play­ing comes through per­fect­ly clear. Zap­pa, in fact, jammed with near­ly all the artists on the ros­ter, though only a few record­ings have sur­faced, like this one from an audi­ence mem­ber. Of their col­lab­o­ra­tion, Pink Floyd drum­mer Nick Mason said in 1973, “Frank Zap­pa is real­ly one of those rare musi­cians that can play with us. The lit­tle he did in Amou­gies was ter­ri­bly cor­rect.” I think you’ll agree.

Dan­ger­ous Minds records many of Zappa’s rec­ol­lec­tions of the event, includ­ing a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly sar­don­ic account he gave in an inter­view with The Simp­sons’ Matt Groen­ing in which he com­plains of feel­ing “like Lin­da McCart­ney” and about the scourge of “slum­ber­ing euro-hip­pies.” Zap­pa appar­ent­ly did not remem­ber jam­ming with Floyd but “the pho­tos don’t lie and nei­ther does the record­ing.” He does recall play­ing with Cap­tain Beef­heart, who says he him­self “enjoyed it.” You can hear Beef­heart’s set with Zap­pa above.

Accord­ing to a biog­ra­phy of found­ing Pink Floyd singer and gui­tarist Syd Bar­rett—gone by the time of the festival—footage of the Zappa/Floyd jam exists, part of an unre­leased doc­u­men­tary of the event by Gerome Laper­rousaz. That film has yet to sur­face, it seems, but we do have the film above—slipping between black-and-white and color—of Pink Floyd play­ing “Green is the Colour,” “Care­ful With That Axe, Eugene,” and “Set the Con­trols For the Heart of the Sun.” It’s a must-watch if only for Roger Waters’ bone-chill­ing screams in the sec­ond song.

The fes­ti­val is notable not only for these ear­ly per­for­mances of the new­ly Gilmour-front­ed Pink Floyd, but also for the appear­ance of Ayns­ley Dun­bar, future Zap­pa drum­mer and jour­ney­man musi­cian extra­or­di­naire. Alleged­ly Zap­pa met Dun­bar at the fes­ti­val and was quite impressed with the latter’s jazz chops (though Dun­bar first joined Zappa’s band on gui­tar before mov­ing to drums). You can hear Zap­pa jam with his even­tu­al star drummer’s band, Ayns­ley Dunbar’s Retal­i­a­tion, above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix, Pink Floyd, Traf­fic & Oth­er Bands Play Huge Lon­don Fes­ti­val “Christ­mas on Earth Con­tin­ued” (1967)

Andy Warhol Hosts Frank Zap­pa on His Cable TV Show, and Lat­er Recalls, “I Hat­ed Him More Than Ever” After the Show

Ani­mat­ed: Frank Zap­pa on Why the Cul­tur­al­ly-Bereft Unit­ed States Is So Sus­cep­ti­ble to Fads (1971)

Watch Frank Zap­pa Play Michael Nesmith (RIP) on The Monkees–and Vice Ver­sa (1967)

Psy­che­del­ic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Ear­ly Days with Syd Bar­rett, 1967

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

 

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Download 1,000+ Digitized Tapes of Sounds from Classic Hollywood Films & TV, Courtesy of the Internet Archive

in Archives, Film, Television | September 2nd, 2024

Watch enough clas­sic movies — espe­cial­ly clas­sic movies from slight­ly down­mar­ket stu­dios — and you’ll swear you’ve been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again. That’s because you have been hear­ing the very same sound effects over and over again: once record­ed or acquired for one film, they could, of course, be re-used in anoth­er, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. No such fre­quent­ly employed record­ing has a more illus­tri­ous and well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry than the so-called “Wil­helm scream,” which, accord­ing to Oliv­er Macaulay at the Sci­ence + Media Muse­um, “has been used in over 400 films and TV pro­grams.”

“First record­ed in 1951, the ‘Wil­helm scream’ was ini­tial­ly fea­tured as stock sound effect in Raoul Walsh’s west­ern Dis­tant Drums,” writes Macaulay, but it got its name from a scene in The Charge at Feath­er Riv­er, from 1953: “When Pri­vate Wil­helm takes an arrow to the leg, he lets out the fabled blood-cur­dling cry which came to per­me­ate Hollywood’s sound­scape.”

It may well have been most wide­ly heard in the orig­i­nal Star Wars, “when Luke Sky­walk­er shoots a stormtroop­er off a ledge,” but for decades it was pulled from the vault when­ev­er “char­ac­ters meet a grim and gris­ly end, from being shot to falling off a build­ing to being caught up in an explo­sion.”

Orig­i­nal­ly labeled “Man eat­en by an alli­ga­tor; screams” (for such was the fate of the char­ac­ter in Dis­tant Drums), the orig­i­nal record­ing ses­sion of this much-dis­cussed sound effect is now down­load­able from the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library at the Inter­net Archive. It con­tains three col­lec­tions: the Gold and Red Libraries, which “con­sist of high-qual­i­ty, first gen­er­a­tion copies of orig­i­nal nitrate opti­cal sound effects from the 1930s & 40s cre­at­ed for Hol­ly­wood stu­dios,” and the Sun­set Edi­to­r­i­al (SSE) Library, which “includes clas­sic effects from the 1930s into the ’80s” by the epony­mous out­fit. At a Freesound Blog post about the archiv­ing and preser­va­tion of the SSE Library, audio engi­neer Craig Smith notes that the com­pa­ny “main­ly did episod­ic tele­vi­sion shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jean­nie, The Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, and The Wal­tons.”

Lis­ten­ing through the USC Opti­cal Sound Effects Library will thus prove a res­o­nant expe­ri­ence, as it were, with fans of mid-cen­tu­ry Hol­ly­wood movies and tele­vi­sion alike. It may also inspire an appre­ci­a­tion for the sheer amount of record­ing, index­ing, edit­ing, and mix­ing work that must have gone into even out­ward­ly sim­ple pro­duc­tions, which nev­er­the­less required the sounds of doors, birds, sirens, guns, and falling bod­ies — as well as the voic­es of men, women, chil­dren — to fill out a plau­si­ble audio­vi­su­al atmos­phere. They also reveal, as Smith puts it, “the shared cul­ture of Hol­ly­wood’s take on what things ‘sound­ed like.’ ” Heard in iso­la­tion, some of these may seem no more real­is­tic than the Wil­helm scream, but that was­n’t quite the point; they just had to sound like things do in movies and on TV.

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

How Sounds Are Faked For Nature Doc­u­men­taries: Meet the Artists Who Cre­ate the Sounds of Fish, Spi­ders, Orang­utans, Mush­rooms & More

Down­load an Archive of 16,000 Sound Effects from the BBC: A Fas­ci­nat­ing His­to­ry of the 20th Cen­tu­ry in Sound

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

The Wil­helm Scream is Back

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vintage Film

in Technology | September 1st, 2024

A num­ber of years ago, British Pathé uncov­ered some strik­ing footage from 1922 show­ing two women exper­i­ment­ing with the first mobile phone. A spokesman for the archive said: ”It’s amaz­ing that 90 years ago mobile phone tech­nol­o­gy and music … was not only being thought of but being tri­alled.” “The phone even has a lid which makes it the first flip-phone [that] we are aware of, although it is prob­a­bly not going to win any design awards.” He added, ”We would be delight­ed to hear from any­one who can tell us any­thing about the film, from where it is shot to who the women might be or even about the phone itself.” In the Relat­eds below, you can find more ear­ly visions of 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy. Enjoy.

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

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

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Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

in Archives, History, Technology | August 30th, 2024

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Maurice Sendak’s First Published Illustrations: Discover His Drawings for a 1947 Popular Science Book

in Art, Science | August 30th, 2024

McGraw-Hill/pub­lic domain; copy from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives

Once upon a time, long before Mau­rice Sendak illus­trat­ed Where The Wild Things Are (1963), he pub­lished, notes Ars Tech­ni­ca, “his first pro­fes­sion­al illus­tra­tions in a 1947 pop­u­lar sci­ence book about nuclear physics, Atom­ics for the Mil­lions.” Only 18 years old, Sendak pro­vid­ed the illus­tra­tions; his physics teacher, Hyman Ruch­lis authored the text, along with pro­fes­sor Maxwell Leigh Eidi­noff.

Accord­ing to sci­ence his­to­ri­an Ryan Dahn, “Sendak agreed to do the work for 1% of the roy­al­ties, of which he received an advance of $100, about $1600 today.” Not bad for a teenag­er cre­at­ing his first cred­it­ed work.

At Physics Today, you can read Dah­n’s new arti­cle on Sendak’s ear­ly physics illus­tra­tions. You can also read/view all of Atom­ics for the Mil­lions on the HathiTrust web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

An Ani­mat­ed Christ­mas Fable by Mau­rice Sendak (1977)

Mau­rice Sendak Sent Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Let­ters to Fans — So Beau­ti­ful a Kid Ate One

 

 

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Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

in History, Language | August 29th, 2024

If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by the ancient gram­mar­i­an, logi­cian, and “father of lin­guis­tics” Pāṇi­ni and found it new­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. The rules of its com­po­si­tion had stumped schol­ars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an arti­cle by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cam­bridge’s web­site, “With­in min­utes, as I turned the pages, these pat­terns start­ed emerg­ing, and it all start­ed to make sense.”

Pāṇi­ni com­posed his texts using a kind of algo­rithm: “Feed in the base and suf­fix of a word and it should turn them into gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect words and sen­tences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly applic­a­ble at the same step, leav­ing schol­ars to ago­nize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s dis­cov­ery that the dif­fi­cult-to-inter­pret “metarule” meant to apply to such cas­es dic­tates that “between rules applic­a­ble to the left and right sides of a word respec­tive­ly, Pāṇi­ni want­ed us to choose the rule applic­a­ble to the right side.”

That may not be imme­di­ate­ly under­stand­able to those unfa­mil­iar with the struc­ture of San­skrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clar­i­fies with an exam­ple using  mantra, one word from the lan­guage that every­body knows. “In the sen­tence ‘devāḥ prasan­nāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasan­nāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule con­flict’ when deriv­ing mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The deriva­tion starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applic­a­ble to the left part ‘mantra’ and the oth­er to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applic­a­ble to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the cor­rect form ‘mantraih.’ ”

Apply­ing this rule ren­ders inter­pre­ta­tions of Pāṇini’s work almost com­plete­ly unam­bigu­ous and gram­mat­i­cal. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has not­ed, to teach San­skrit gram­mar to com­put­ers being pro­grammed for nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. It no doubt took him a great deal of inten­sive study to reach the point where he was able to dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of Pāṇini’s clar­i­fy­ing metarule, but it did­n’t tru­ly present itself until he let his uncon­scious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Cul­ture before, there are good rea­sons we do our best think­ing while doing things like walk­ing or tak­ing a show­er, a phe­nom­e­non that philoso­phers have broad­ly rec­og­nized through the ages — and, like as not, was under­stood by the great Pāṇi­ni him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Can Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Deci­pher Lost Lan­guages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Lan­guages

Why Algo­rithms Are Called Algo­rithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Per­sian Math­e­mati­cian Muham­mad al-Khwariz­mi

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

in Architecture, History, Museums | August 28th, 2024

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occu­py sev­er­al time peri­ods at once, look­ing both mod­ern and some­how ancient. The lat­ter qual­i­ty sure­ly has to do with its bright white col­or, which we asso­ciate (espe­cial­ly in such an insti­tu­tion­al con­text) with Greek and Roman stat­ues. But just like those stat­ues, the Guggen­heim was­n’t actu­al­ly white to begin with. “Few­er and few­er New York­ers may recall that the muse­um, in a then-grim­i­er city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kim­mel­man. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaun­diced skin.’ ” Hence, pre­sum­ably, the deci­sion dur­ing a 1992 expan­sion to paint over the earth­en hue of Wright’s choice.

Not that beige was the only con­tender in the design phase. Look at the archival draw­ings, Kim­mel­man writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had con­tem­plat­ed some pret­ty far-out col­ors — Chero­kee red, orange, pink.”

The very thought of that last “leads down a rab­bit hole of alter­na­tive New York his­to­ry,” and if you’re curi­ous to see what a pink Guggen­heim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has cre­at­ed a few dig­i­tal­ly mod­i­fied pho­tos. The result hard­ly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Mem­phis-embrac­ing nine­teen-eight­ies, and even the post­mod­ern nineties. The image above, show­ing the Guggen­heim imag­ined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives.

But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s anti­sep­tic, spank­ing-white facade, today is in keep­ing with the neigh­bor­hood.” That itself is in keep­ing with Wright’s ideas for trans­form­ing the Amer­i­can city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempt­ing to solve “the prob­lem of the inner city,” he con­ceived “fan­tas­ti­cal megas­truc­tures for places like down­town Pitts­burgh, Bagh­dad, and Madi­son, Wis­con­sin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even work­ing in the Unit­ed States’ dens­est metrop­o­lis, Wright expressed a long­ing for the splen­did iso­la­tion of the Amer­i­can coun­try­side, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any col­or he pleas­es.

via Messy Nessy/Hooked on the Past

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futur­is­tic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959)

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Is Andrew Huberman Ruining Your Morning Coffee Routine?

in Food & Drink, Science | August 28th, 2024

Andrew Huberman–the host of the influ­en­tial Huber­man Lab pod­cast–has got­ten a lot of mileage out of his rec­om­mend­ed morn­ing rou­tine. His rou­tine empha­sizes the impor­tance of get­ting sun­light with­in 30–60 min­utes of wak­ing; also engag­ing in light phys­i­cal activ­i­ty; hydrat­ing well; and avoid­ing cof­fee for the first 90–120 min­utes. In his words:

I high­ly rec­om­mend that every­body delay their caf­feine intake for 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing. How­ev­er painful it may be to even­tu­al­ly arrive at that 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing, you want, and I encour­age you, to clear out what­ev­er resid­ual adeno­sine is cir­cu­lat­ing in your sys­tem in that first 90 to 120 min­utes of the day. Get that sun­light expo­sure, get some move­ment to wake up, and then, and only then, start to ingest caf­feine because what you’ll do if you delay caf­feine intake until 90 to 120 min­utes after wak­ing is you will avoid the so-called after­noon crash.

And if you drink caf­feine at any point through­out the day, real­ly try and avoid any caf­feine, cer­tain­ly avoid drink­ing more than a hun­dred mil­ligrams of caf­feine after 4:00 p.m and prob­a­bly even bet­ter to lim­it your last caf­feine intake to 3:00 p.m. or even 2:00 p.m.

For many, this isn’t exact­ly a wel­come piece of advice. And you nat­u­ral­ly won­der how the advice sits with James Hoff­mann, author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, who has devel­oped a robust YouTube chan­nel where he explores the ins and outs of mak­ing cof­fee. In the video above, Hoff­mann explores the research sup­port­ing Huber­man’s advice, all with the goal of deter­min­ing whether Huber­man is ruin­ing (or improv­ing) our ear­ly wak­ing hours.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

The Birth of Espres­so: The Sto­ry Behind the Cof­fee Shots That Fuel Mod­ern Life

How Caf­feine Fueled the Enlight­en­ment, Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion & the Mod­ern World: An Intro­duc­tion by Michael Pol­lan

The Curi­ous Sto­ry of London’s First Cof­fee­hous­es (1650–1675)

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The 11 Censored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons That Haven’t Been Aired Since 1968

in Animation, Film, History | August 27th, 2024

For decades and decades, Warn­er Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have served as a kind of default chil­dren’s enter­tain­ment. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived for the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion in the nine­teen-thir­ties, they were ani­mat­ed to a stan­dard that held its own against the sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions along­side which they would lat­er be broad­cast. Even their clas­si­cal music-laden sound­tracks seemed to sig­nal high­er aspi­ra­tions. But when scru­ti­nized close­ly enough, they turned out not to be as time­less and inof­fen­sive as every­one had assumed. In fact, eleven Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have been with­held from syn­di­ca­tion since the nine­teen-six­ties due to their con­tent.

The LSu­per­Son­icQ video above takes a look at the “Cen­sored Eleven,” all of which have been sup­pressed for qual­i­ties like “exag­ger­at­ed fea­tures, racist tones, and out­dat­ed ref­er­ences.” Pro­duced between 1931 and 1944, these car­toons have been described as reflect­ing per­cep­tions wide­ly held by view­ers at the time that have since become unac­cept­able. Take, for exam­ple, the black pro­to-Elmer Fudd in “All This and Rab­bit Stew,” from 1941, a col­lec­tion of “eth­nic stereo­types includ­ing over­sized cloth­ing, a shuf­fle to his move­ment, and mum­bling sen­tences.” In oth­er pro­duc­tions, like “Jun­gle Jit­ters” and “The Isle of Pin­go Pon­go,” the offense is against native islanders, depict­ed there­in as hard-par­ty­ing can­ni­bals.

At first glance, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” from 1943, may resem­ble a grotesque car­ni­val of stereo­types. But as direc­tor Bob Clam­pett lat­er explained, it orig­i­nat­ed when he “was approached in Hol­ly­wood by the cast of an all-black musi­cal off-broad­way pro­duc­tion called Jump For Joy while they were doing some spe­cial per­for­mances in Los Ange­les. They asked me why there weren’t any Warn­er’s car­toons with black char­ac­ters and I did­n’t have any good answer for that ques­tion. So we sat down togeth­er and came up with a par­o­dy of Dis­ney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result.” These per­form­ers pro­vid­ed the voic­es (cred­it­ed, out of con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion, to Mel Blanc), and Clam­pett paid trib­ute in the char­ac­ter designs to real jazz musi­cians he knew from Cen­tral Avenue.

How­ev­er admirable the inten­tions of “Coal Black” — and how­ev­er mas­ter­ful its ani­ma­tion, which has come in for great praise from his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um — it remains rel­e­gat­ed to the banned-car­toons nether­world. Of course, this does­n’t mean you can’t see it today: like most of the “Cen­sored Eleven,” it’s long been boot­legged, and it even under­went restora­tion for the first annu­al Turn­er Clas­sic Movies Film Fes­ti­val in 2010. Some of these con­tro­ver­sial shorts appear on the Looney Tunes Gold Col­lec­tion Vol­ume: 3 DVDs, intro­duced by Whoopi Gold­berg, who makes the sen­si­ble point that “remov­ing these inex­cus­able images and jokes from this col­lec­tion would be the same as say­ing they nev­er exist­ed.” Grown-ups may be okay with that, but kids — always the most dis­cern­ing audi­ence for Warn­er Bros. car­toons — know when they’re being lied to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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