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Friday, June 2nd, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:38a | The Set List for the Band Playing at Trump’s Climate Retreat Speech: From “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” to “Burning Down the House”  Today the United States joined two other countries in refusing to take part in the Paris climate accord. Syria and Nicaragua. What great company to be in. Before Trump made his announcement in the Rose Garden, the White House had a band warm up the crowd. Later, McSweeney's sarcastically published their setlist. Burning Down the House. It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine). I Melt With You. Coal Miner's Daughter. Find all 14 tracks below. 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. The Set List for the Band Playing at Trump’s Climate Retreat Speech: From “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” to “Burning Down the House” 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.  |
| 7:59a | 240 Hours of Relaxing, Sleep-Inducing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Runner to Star Wars Need to put a little geek in your sleep? We've got just what you need... Back in 2009, the musician dubbed Cheesy Nirvosa" began experimenting with ambient music, before launching a YouTube channel where he "composes longform space and scifi ambience," much of it designed to help you relax, or ideally fall asleep. He calls the videos "ambient geek sleep aids." You can sample his work with the playlist above. Called "Video Game Relaxation Sounds," the playlist features "long relaxing soundscapes from video games." Sci-fi video games, to be precise. The playlist gives you access to 21 soundscapes, running more than 240 hours in total. Lull yourself to sleep, for example, with ambient sounds from the 1997 Blade Runner video game, a "sidequel" to the Ridley Scott film. Or de-stress with this ambient noise produced by the A/SF-01 B-Wing Starfighter. It's taken from this 2001 Star Wars game created by LucasArts. Stream the playlist above. And hope you enjoy dreaming of electric sheep. Related Content: 10 Hours of Ambient Arctic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Meditate, Study & Sleep The Power of Power Naps: Salvador Dali Teaches You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Creative Inspiration 240 Hours of Relaxing, Sleep-Inducing Sounds from Sci-Fi Video Games: From Blade Runner to Star Wars 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. |
| 11:00a | Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study  Image Photo courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA. Sometimes—as in the case of neuroscience—scientists and researchers seem to be saying several contradictory things at once. Yes, opposing claims can both be true, given different context and levels of description. But which is it, Neuroscientists? Do we have “neuroplasticity”—the ability to change our brains, and therefore our behavior? Or are we “hard-wired” to be a certain way by innate structures. The debate long predates the field of neuroscience. It figured prominently in the work, for example, of John Locke and other early modern theorists of cognition—which is why Locke is best known as the theorist of tabula rasa. In “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” Locke mostly denies that we are able to change much at all in adulthood. Personality, he reasoned, is determined not by biology, but in the “cradle” by “little, almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies.” Such imprints “have very important and lasting consequences.” Sorry, parents. Not only did your kid get wait-listed for that elite preschool, but their future will also be determined by millions of sights and sounds that happened around them before they could walk. It’s an extreme, and unscientific, contention, fascinating as it may be from a cultural standpoint. Now we have psychedelic-looking brain scans popping up in our news feeds all the time, promising to reveal the true origins of consciousness and personality. But the conclusions drawn from such research are tentative and often highly contested. So what does science say about the eternally mysterious act of artistic creation? The abilities of artists have long seemed to us godlike, drawn from supernatural sources, or channeled from other dimensions. Many neuroscientists, you may not be surprised to hear, believe that such abilities reside in the brain. Moreover, some think that artists’ brains are superior to those of mediocre ability. Or at least that artists’ brains have more gray and white matter than “right-brained” thinkers in the areas of “visual perception, spatial navigation and fine motor skills.” So writes Katherine Brooks in a Huffington Post summary of “Drawing on the right side of the brain: A voxel-based morphometry analysis of observational drawing.” The 2014 study, published at NeuroImage, involved a very small sampling of graduate students, 21 of whom were artists, 23 of whom were not. All 44 students were asked to complete drawing tasks, which were then scored and compared to images of their brain taken by a method called “voxel-based morphometry.” “The people who are better at drawing really seem to have more developed structures in regions of the brain that control for fine motor performance and what we call procedural memory,” the study’s lead author, Rebecca Chamberlain of Belgium’s KU Leuven University, told the BBC. (Hear her segment on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science here.) Does this mean, as Artnet News claims in their quick take, that “artists’ brains are more fully developed?” It’s a juicy headline, but the findings of this limited study, while “intriguing,” are “far from conclusive.” Nonetheless, it marks an important first step. “No studies” thus far, Chamberlain says, “have assessed the structural differences associated with representational skills in visual arts.” Would a dozen such studies resolve questions about causality--nature or nurture? As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in-between. At Smithsonian, Randy Rieland quotes several critics of the neuroscience of art, which has previously focused on what happens in the brain when we look at a Van Gogh or read Jane Austen. The problem with such studies, writes Philip Ball at Nature, is that they can lead to “creating criteria of right or wrong, either in the art itself or in individual reactions to it.” But such criteria may already be predetermined by culturally-conditioned responses to art. The science is fascinating and may lead to numerous discoveries. It does not, as the Creators Project writes hyperbolically, suggest that "artists actually are different creatures from everyone else on the planet." As University of California philosopher professor Alva Noe states succinctly, one problem with making sweeping generalizations about brains that view or create art is that “there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is.” Emerging fields of “neuroaesthetics” and “neurohumanities” may muddy the waters between quantitative and qualitative distinctions, and may not really answer questions about where art comes from and what it does to us. But then again, given enough time, they just might. Related Content: This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study 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. |
| 2:20p | Cab Calloway Stars in “Minnie the Moocher,” a Trippy Betty Boop Cartoon That’s Ranked as the 20th Greatest Cartoon of All Time (1932)
The cast of Dave Fleischer’s 1932 cartoon, Minnie the Moocher, above, are a far cry from the candy-colored ponies and simpering dragons populating today’s cartoon universe. There’s not much of a narrative, and the closest thing to a moral is an unspoken “don’t be cokey.” Who cares? The lyrics to bandleader Cab Calloway’s crossover hit were ample excuse to send a rebellious Betty Boop and her anthropomorphized pal, Bimbo, on a trippy jaunt through the underworld. While there's no evidence of Betty or Bimbo hitting the pipe, one wonders what the animators were smoking to come up with such an imaginative palette of ghouls. The ghosts are prisoners sporting chain gang stripes. A witch with an outsized head prefigures Miyazaki's commanding old ladies. A blank-socketed mama cat, leached dry by her equally eyeless kittens, conjures the sort of nightmare vision that appealed to Hieronymus Bosch. The most benign presence is a phantasmagoric walrus, modeled on a rotoscoped Calloway. The Hi De Ho Man cut a far svelter presence in the flesh, as evidenced by the live action sequence that introduces the cartoon. Betty’s home sweet home offers nearly as weird a landscape as the one she and Bimbo flee at film’s end. Its many inorganic inhabitants would have felt right at home in PeeWee’s Playhouse, as would a self-sacrificing flowering plant, who succumbs to a sample of the hasenpfeffer Betty’s immigrant mother unsuccessfully urges on her. As for Betty's father, Fleischer struck a blow for teenagers everywhere by having his head morph into a gramophone on which a broken record (or rather, cylinder) plays. Minnie the Moocher was voted the 20th greatest cartoon of all time, in a 1994 survey of 1,ooo animation professionals. We hope you enjoy it now, as the animators did then, and audiences did way back in 1932. Related Content: The Harlem Jazz Singer Who Inspired Betty Boop: Meet the Original Boop-Oop-a-Doop, “Baby Esther” Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Cab Calloway Stars in “Minnie the Moocher,” a Trippy Betty Boop Cartoon That’s Ranked as the 20th Greatest Cartoon of All Time (1932) 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. |
| 4:00p | 20,000 Endangered Archaeological Sites Now Catalogued in a New Online Database  We all know that civilizations, through the millennia, have had a way of rising and falling. But many of us don't yet appreciate the fact that even after the fall, a civilization still has value — and can still come to harm. Archaeologists have used the traces left by bygone early cities, nations, and empires to gain an in-depth understanding of human history, but they can only continue doing so if the sites they study have the proper protection. The newest tool to advance that cause takes the form of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East & North Africa (EAMENA) Database, a rich source of information, including satellite imagery and published reports, about the threatened archaeological sites and landscapes in that part of the world. Based at the Universities of Oxford, Leicester, and Durham and built with the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund's open-source platform Arches, the English- and Arabic-Language Database uses, "an interactive map that traces the distribution of sites under threat," writes Smithsonian's Brigit Katz. "You can click on select locales for information about how the sites were once used, and the types of disturbances that have occurred over the years. A pre-populated search function lets users browse through general categories — like 'Pendants,' a type of circular burial enclosure that is associated with some 700 sites in the database—and through specific locations." "Petra, Jericho, and the ancient port of Byblos are just three of the thousands of at-risk archaeological sites scattered across the Middle East and North Africa," writes Hyperallergic's Claire Voon. "Aside from the destruction wrought by wartime conflict, they also face damage from looting; agricultural practices; the construction of pipelines, refugee camps, and mining; and natural erosion." In a press release announcing the project's launch late last month, EAMENA’s director, Dr. Robert Bewley said that "not all damage and threats to the archaeology can be prevented, but they can be mitigated through the sharing of information and specialist skills." And apart from the importance of preserving irreplaceable pieces of global cultural heritage, we might step back and consider that, the better we understand the trajectory of past civilizations, the more we can ensure a positive one for our own. Click here to visit the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East & North Africa (EAMENA) Database. Related Content: Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E. How the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built: A New Theory in 3D Animation Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View Beer Archaeology: Yes, It’s a Thing 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. 20,000 Endangered Archaeological Sites Now Catalogued in a New Online Database 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. |
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