A quick fyi, you can catch live streams of the Olympic Games via the web.
If you live in the US, you can watch at NBCOlympics.com,
If you live in the UK and Europe, you can get the stream at BBC TV Olympics
If you live on China’s Mainland, you can see the games at CCTVOlympics.com
And for Australian fans, watch here: http://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/
or http://www.abc.net.au/olympics/
via Actionooz
The BBC reports: “An archaeological dig has recovered what is thought to be the remains of the theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.” Get the rest of the big story here.
Related Content:
Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History
Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology, has become something of an internet phenomenon, having produced two wonderful videos that help demystify the world of Web 2.0. (Definitely check them out here and here). Now he has a new video getting some play. Below you can watch a talk he recently gave at The Library of Congress, where he uses video to dissect the new mediascape that we’re living in, and how it’s changing our relationships … for better or for worse.
via John Battelle Searchblog
Today we present Frank Capra’s Academy Award-winning comedy from 1934, starring Clark Gable — It Happened One Night. Grab some popcorn. Dim the lights (even if you’re at work). And enjoy:
Here we have John Gielgud’s first recording of a scene from Hamlet, “recorded shortly after he became the youngest actor to take the lead in the play, in the 1929/30 Old Vic season.” It’s the audio that you will want to focus on here, not the video, even though there’s something a little amusing about the whole idea of watching an old record turn on YouTube. How quaint.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who chronicled the abuses of the Soviet regime and gained worldwide fame with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, has died at 89. (Get the New York Times obit here.) Once asked what Solzhenitsyn means to literature and the history of Russia, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, had this to stay: “It’s impossible to imagine a writer whose affect on a society has been greater than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s affect on the fate of Russia …” In the video posted below, Remnick elaborates on Solzhenitsyn’s contributions, and it’s worth remembering that Remnick won a Pulitzer during the 90s for his bestseller, Lenin’s Tomb.
(Note: you can read the lecture Solzhenitsyn gave upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970 here, and listen to his 1978 Harvard graduation speech here.)
In anticipation of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, The Teaching Company has made available two free lectures that survey the ancient Greek origins of the Olympics. Presented by Jeremy McInerney, a professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, these talks, each running about 30 minutes, bring you back to 776 BC, to the ancient Greeks, who competed in order to demonstrate their allegiance to the Homeric ideals of heroism, honor and manhood. You can listen to Lecture 1 here (MP3 — MP4) and Lecture 2 here (MP3 — MP4) LINKS HAVE BEEN REMOVED AT THE REQUEST OF THE TEACHING COMPANY. And, as a quick fyi, you can download a complete MP3 course on Ancient Greece by the same professor. (It’s on sale for $35.) I’ve actually listened to it, and found it to be quite good.
For more good edifying lectures, see our big collection of Free University Courses here.
A little summer randomness. It’s actually quite beautiful …
(And, no, I’m not sure if this is technically a tsunami.)
YouTube’s Trendspotting Tuesday focused this past week on the growing number of videos that can teach you a foreign language (for free, of course). Among the 12 video collections featured here, you’ll find ones that offer lessons in French, Spanish, Modern Greek, Latin, Japanese and Swahili, among others. They also highlight clips that demonstrate how to write Arabic. (Find the first clip below.) Straightaway, you’ll notice that these videos have a home brewed feel to them, and they’re not necessarily as substantive as what you can get for free via podcast. (See our large Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection). But, at least when it comes to demonstrating something visual (such as how to write Arabic) they have their purpose.
(P.S. With the video below, I have no idea how much the “instructor” actually knows about Arabic. The point isn’t to pass this off as a definitive source of knowledge, but more to show how the video platform is being used.)
By now, most everyone knows that Randy Pausch sadly died of pancreatic cancer last week. And, if you have an internet pulse, you’re already acquainted with his lecture that caught the public imagination last year: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. What you may not have seen is the short, six-minute speech Pausch made at Carnegie Mellon’s graduation in late May — a short two months ago. The philosophy here remains the same. The pitch is just shorter and to the point. It’s added to our YouTube playlist. Here it goes:
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, some former Google engineers launched a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”), which claims to be the “world’s biggest search engine,” indexing 120 billion web pages, or roughly about three times what Google supposedly does. (Get more info on the new site’s schtick here.) A quick round of testing indicates that Cuil has some room for improvement — the relevancy of search results could be much better. But Cuil does have some momentum. On the very first day, it was the fifth largest web site referring traffic to oculture.com, and the traffic was widely distributed. (In other words, one search term didn’t send traffic to the same page.) Not bad for the first day out of the gate.
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
©2006-2025 Open Culture, LLC.
All rights reserved.
