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Friday, September 8th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 11:00a | The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”
I’ve never wanted to start a sentence with “I’m old enough to remember…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remember the enormously successful Apple IIe and Commodore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were science fiction. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a programming language. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hindsight as well—to be the very dawn of computing. Before the personal computer, such devices were the size of kitchen appliances and were hidden away in military installations, universities, and NASA labs. But of course we all know that the history of computing goes far beyond the early 80s: at least back to World War II, and perhaps even much farther. Do we begin with the abacus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, the astrolabe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage? The question is maybe one of definitions. In the short, animated video above, physicist, science writer, and YouTube educator Dominic Walliman defines the computer according to its basic binary function of “just flipping zeros and ones,” and he begins his condensed history of computer science with tragic genius Alan Turing of Turing Test and Bletchley Park codebreaking fame. Turing’s most significant contribution to computing came from his 1936 concept of the “Turing Machine,” a theoretical mechanism that could, writes the Cambridge Computer Laboratory “simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is!” All other designs, says Walliman—apart from a quantum computer—are equivalent to the Turing Machine, “which makes it the foundation of computer science.” But since Turing’s time, the simple design has come to seem endlessly capable of adaptation and innovation. Walliman illustrates the computer's exponential growth by pointing out that a smart phone has more computing power than the entire world possessed in 1963, and that the computing capability that first landed astronauts on the moon is equal to “a couple of Nintendos” (first generation classic consoles, judging by the image). But despite the hubris of the computer age, Walliman points out that “there are some problems which, due to their very nature, can never be solved by a computer” either because of the degree of uncertainty involved or the degree of inherent complexity. This fascinating, yet abstract discussion is where Walliman’s “Map of Computer Science” begins, and for most of us this will probably be unfamiliar territory. We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Computer Theory to that of Computer Engineering, but while Walliman covers familiar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to applications, we’re in the realm of big data, natural language processing, the internet of things, and “augmented reality.” From here on out, computer technology will only get faster, and weirder, despite the fact that the “underlying hardware is hitting some hard limits.” Certainly this very quick course in Computer Science only makes for an introductory survey of the discipline, but like Wallman’s other maps—of mathematics, physics, and chemistry—this one provides us with an impressive visual overview of the field that is both broad and specific, and that we likely wouldn’t encounter anywhere else. As with his other maps, Walliman has made this the Map of Computer Science available as a poster, perfect for dorm rooms, living rooms, or wherever else you might need a reminder. Related Content: Free Online Computer Science Courses Watch Breaking the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Turing (1996) The Map of Mathematics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together The Map of Physics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Physics Fit Together The Map of Chemistry: New Animation Summarizes the Entire Field of Chemistry in 12 Minutes Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality” 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.  |
| 2:35p | Watch Werner Herzog’s Very First Film, Herakles, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)
Rebellious dwarfs, crazed conquistadors, delusional tycoons, wood-carving ski jumpers: Werner Herzog scholars who attempt to find a pattern in the filmmaker's choices of subject matter are virtually guaranteed an interesting search, if an ultimately futile one. But they must all start in the same place: Herzog's very first film Herakles, which mashes up the spectacles of body building, auto racing, and destruction. It does all that in nine minutes to a soundtrack of saxophone jazz, and with frequent references to the titular hero of myth, whom you may know better by his Roman name of Hercules. "Would he clean the Augean stables?" ask Herakles' subtitles over footage of one young German man showing off his well-shaped torso. "Would he dispose of the Lernaean Hydra?" they ask of another as he strikes a pose. 
Between clips of these bodybuilders performing their labors and questions about whether they could perform those of Hercules, we see militaristic marches, falling bombs, heaps of rubble, and a 1955 racecar crash at Le Mans that killed 83 people. All this juxtaposition tempts us to ask what message the nineteen-year-old Herzog wanted to deliver, but, as in all his subsequent work, he surely wanted less to make an articulable point than to explore the possibilities of cinema itself. More recently, in Paul Cronin's interview book Herzog on Herzog, the filmmaker looks back on "my first blunder, Herakles" and finds it "rather stupid and pointless, though at the time it was an important test for me. It taught me about editing together very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole," and in a sense prepared him for an entire cinematic career of very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole. "For me it was fascinating to edit material together that had such separate and individual lives. The film was some kind of an apprenticeship for me. I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school” — of the non-rogue variety, anyway. Related Content: Werner Herzog Teaches His First Online Course on Filmmaking Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Guerilla Filmmaking & Lock-Picking Portrait Werner Herzog: The Director’s Autobiographical Short Film from 1986 Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, 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. Watch Werner Herzog’s Very First Film, Herakles, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962) 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. |
| 7:00p | Follow Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s 2017 “Making Comics” Class Online, Presented at UW-Wisconsin
Professor Skeletor—aka cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry—is at it again. Making Comics (& other Graphic Formations), her fall offering at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Discovery is just getting underway. Those of us who can't study in person with an educator whose department chair called her “the best classroom teacher” that he’s ever seen can happily follow along online. As always, her handwritten homework assignments will be posted to her Nearsighted Monkey tumblr account, along with in-class reflections and inspirational bits and bobs pulled off the Internet. The first task, familiar to readers of her Syllabus workbook, is to begin a daily diary practice, filling in a template frame of Barry’s own devising.
Begin by putting your phone on airplane mode. "The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom," she stated last year, on a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "Those have always been where creative ideas come from." Amen.
Any one of the exercises will renew your powers of observation and sense of connection with the world around you. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting up early or skipping some must-see TV in order to fully comply with Professor Skeletor’s feel-good assignments. There are no wrong answers, provided you go at the assignments with energy and a willingness to play. As Barry said in an interview: Because we tend to give up on the arts so early in life, I became really interested in what would happen if we reintroduce the arts without the thought of ‘you’re going to do this to become a great writer or painter,’ but rather that it might help people with the other work in their field. For added value, complete your first daily diary frame to an audio recording of Barry’s timed instruction here. (Ignore the background noise of your teacher’s life—her sneezing cat, her happy pet birds—or better yet, let her household’s zesty energy seep into your work.) Related Content: Join Cartoonist Lynda Barry for a University-Level Course on Doodling and Neuroscience Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Follow Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s 2017 “Making Comics” Class Online, Presented at UW-Wisconsin 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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