Thursday, June 1st, 2017

Time	Event
7:38a	Blitzscaling: A Free Stanford Course on Scaling a Startup, Led by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman A quick postscript to yesterday's mention of Reid Hoffman's new podcast, Masters of Scale. Many of the concepts discussed in Masters of Scale expand on a 2015 course taught at Stanford by Hoffman and his colleagues-- John Lilly from Greylock Partners, LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue, and author Chris Yeh. The course focuses on Blitzscaling--or what Hoffman described in the Harvard Business Review as "the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale." And to help demystify that process, Hoffman invited guest speakers to class to break things down. Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google, Netflix's Reed Hastings on Building a Streaming Empire, Airbnb's Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale--they're among the experts featured in the course. You can stream the 20 lectures from start to finish above, or find the playlist on Greylock Partner's YouTube channel. You can also find class notes for the course on Medium. Blitzscaling will be added to our list of Free Online Business Courses, a subset of our collection, 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Creates a New Podcast Offering Wisdom on Nurturing & Scaling New Businesses Seth Godin’s Startup School: A Free Mini-Course for New Entrepreneurs Peter Thiel’s Stanford Course on Startups: Read the Lecture Notes Free Online Blitzscaling: A Free Stanford Course on Scaling a Startup, Led by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
2:15p	Paul McCartney Admits to Dropping Acid in a Scrappy Interview with a Prying Reporter (June, 1967) When we think of LSD and the Beatles, John Lennon invariably gets the nod as the main mind expander of the group. After all, despite all protestations to the contrary, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” literally spells out Lennon’s indulgence in the psychedelic drug. But it was Paul, as seen in this above newsreel, who announced that he himself had dropped acid before any other band member admitted to such. And in doing so, knowing the whole world was watching, McCartney insisted on telling the truth and facing the music, as it were. The interview was recorded on June 19, 1967, a day after Paul’s 25th birthday. Their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released three weeks prior on June 1, ushering in a particular psychedelic era in London, though the band had been dropping hints (as well as lysergic acid) as early as 1966’s Revolver and 1965’s “Day Tripper.” McCartney had already let it be known he had taken the drug in an interview a few days before in Queen magazine, which Life then reprinted. After I took it (LSD), it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would mean a whole new world. The quote sent ITV crews to McCartney’s backyard garden on Cavendish Ave. for this confrontational interview, where the interviewer wants to know first where he got the LSD from, but then chastises the singer for not keeping such a personal event quiet. McCartney responded: Mmm, but the thing is -- I was asked a question by a newspaper, and the decision was whether to tell a lie or tell him the truth. I decided to tell him the truth... but I really didn't want to say anything, you know, because if I had my way I wouldn't have told anyone. I'm not trying to spread the word about this. But the man from the newspaper is the man from the mass medium. I'll keep it a personal thing if he does too you know... if he keeps it quiet. But he wanted to spread it so it's his responsibility, you know, for spreading it not mine. The reporter, looking for an angle, asks “Do you think that you have now encouraged your fans to take drugs?” McCartney puts the onus back on the reporter for sensationalizing a personal matter. No, it's you who've got the responsibility. You've got the responsibility not to spread this NOW. You know, I'm quite prepared to keep it as a very personal thing if you will too. If you'll shut up about it, I will. Funnily enough, it was Paul who came to LSD long after Lennon and Harrison had taken it for the first time...inadvertantly, that is: John, George and their wives were slipped a dose on a sugar pill in their evening coffee by dentist John Riley, who had the couples over for dinner, and possibly some free love. Instead the four went clubbing and had their minds expanded. You can read the whole story over here at this fascinating history of Beatle drug use. Also hear John tell it in the animation above. McCartney finally dropped acid--the last Beatle to do so--on March 21, 1967 after a recording session for “Getting Better.” Lennon had taken some acid by accident and sat out the session, unable to continue and McCartney took him home to his flat, where he decided to try LSD, to “sort of catch up” with his friend. The BeatlesBible site quotes from McCartney’s bio by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away. There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go. I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while. I'd just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, 'Go to bed? You won't sleep!' 'I know that, I've still got to go to bed.' I thought, now that's enough fun and partying, now ... It's like with drink. That's enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off. But of course you don't just sleep off an acid trip so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right. 'Yeah, I think so.' I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably. Related Content: An Animated John Lennon Describes His First Acid Trip Meet the Iconic Figures on the Cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Sgt. Pepper’s Album Cover Gets Reworked to Remember Icons Lost in 2016 How The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cover Design Forever Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Paul McCartney Admits to Dropping Acid in a Scrappy Interview with a Prying Reporter (June, 1967) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
5:00p	See What Happens When a Camera’s Shutter Speed Gets Perfectly Synced with a Helicopter’s Rotor German cameraman Chris Fay recently posted on YouTube a neat video showing what happens when the frames per second on a camera and the speed of a helicopter rotor are perfectly aligned. The helicopter blades appear not to rotate at all. And the helicopter hovers magically in the air. Even if you know the mechanics of the illusion, it's still fun to watch! Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. via PetaPixel Related Content: An Introduction to Digital Photography: Take a Free Course from Stanford Prof/Google Researcher Marc Levoy Visit a New Digital Archive of 2.2 Million Images from the First Hundred Years of Photography Hollywood by Helicopter, 1958 Watch Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Great Helicopter String Quartet, Starring 4 Musicians, 4 Cameras & 4 Copters See What Happens When a Camera’s Shutter Speed Gets Perfectly Synced with a Helicopter’s Rotor is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
7:00p	Animated GIFs Show How Subway Maps of Berlin, New York, Tokyo & London Compare to the Real Geography of Those Great Cities You can't make a perfectly accurate map, as Jorge Luis Borges so succinctly told us, without making it the exact same size and shape as the land it portrays. But given the utter uselessness of such an enormous piece of paper (which so frustrated the citizens of the imaginary empire in Borges' story that, "not without some pitilessness," they tossed theirs into the desert), no mapmaker would ever want to. A more compact map is a more useful one; unfortunately, a more compact map is also, by its very nature, a less accurate one. New York The same rule applies to maps of all kinds, and especially to transit maps, quite possibly the most useful specialized maps we consult today. They show us how to navigate cities, and yet their clean, bold lines, sometimes turning but never wavering, hardly represent those cities — subject as they are to variations in terrain and density, as well as centuries of unplannably organic growth — with geographical faithfulness. One can't help but wonder just how each urban transit map, some of them beloved works of design, strikes the usefulness-faithfulness balance. London Living in Seoul, I've grown used to the city's standard subway map. I thus get a kick out of scrutinizing the more geographically accurate one, which overlays the train lines onto an existing map of the city, posted on some station platforms. It reveals the truth that some lines are shorter than they look on the standard map, some are much longer, and none cut quite as clean a path through the city as they seem to. At Twisted Sifter you'll find a GIF gallery of 15 standard subway maps that morph into more geographically faithful equivalents, a vivid demonstration of just how much transit map designers need to twist, squeeze, and simplify an urban landscape to produce something legible at a glance. Tokyo All of those animations, just five of which you see in this post, come from the subreddit Data Is Beautiful, a realm populated by enthusiasts of the visual display of quantitative information — enthusiasts so enthusiastic that many of them create innovative data visualizations like these by themselves. According to their creations, subway maps, like that of New York City's venerable system, do relatively little to distort the city; others, like Tokyo's, look nearly unrecognizable when made to conform to geography. Austin Even the maps of new and incomplete transit networks do a number on the real shape and direction of their paths: the map of Austin, Texas' Capital MetroRail, for instance, straightens a somewhat zig-zaggy northeast-southwest track into a single horizontal line. It may take a few generations before Austin's "system" develops into one extensive and complex enough to inspire one of the great transit maps (the ranks, for example, of "The Wonderground Map of London Town"). But I wouldn't count out the possibility: the more fully cities realize their public-transit potential, the more opportunity opens up for the advancement of the subway mapmaker's art. See all 15 of the subway GIFs at Twisted Sifter. Related Content: A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps: Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design Designer Massimo Vignelli Revisits and Defends His Iconic 1972 New York City Subway Map “The Wonderground Map of London Town,” the Iconic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Subway System Bauhaus Artist László Moholy-Nagy Designs an Avant-Garde Map to Help People Get Over the Fear of Flying (1936) Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, 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 Facebook. Animated GIFs Show How Subway Maps of Berlin, New York, Tokyo & London Compare to the Real Geography of Those Great Cities is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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