Monday, September 18th, 2017

Time	Event
8:00a	A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures Image by Carlos Delgado, via Wikimedia Commons For the past 11 years, we've been busy rummaging around the internet and adding courses to an ever-growing list of Free Online Courses, which now features 1,300 courses from top universities. Let's give you the quick overview: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites, and you can listen to the lectures anytime, anywhere, on your computer or smart phone. We haven't done a precise calculation, but there's about 45,000 hours of free audio & video lectures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time. Right now you’ll find 173 free philosophy courses, 92 free history courses, 128 free computer science courses, 81 free physics courses and 55 Free Literature Courses in the collection, and that’s just beginning to scratch the surface. You can peruse sections covering Astronomy, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Math, Political Science, Psychology and Religion. Here are some highlights from the complete list of Free Online Courses. We've added a few unconventional/vintage courses in the mix just to keep things interesting. A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times - Free Online Video - Arthur Holmes, Wheaton College A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners - Various Formats – Marianne Talbot, Oxford University Against All Odds: Inside Statistics – Free Online Video – Pardis Sabeti, Harvard Ancient Greek History - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video - Course Materials - Donald Kagan, Yale Creative Reading and Writing by William S. Burroughs - Free Online Audio - Naropa University Critical Reasoning for Beginners - Free iTunes Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free Online Video & Audio – Marianne Talbot, Oxford Deep Learning - Free Online Video - Vincent Vanhoucke, Google Developing iOS 10 Apps with Swift - Free iTunes Video - Paul Hegarty, Stanford Edible Education 101 – Free Online Video – Michael Pollan, UC Berkeley Financial Markets - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Audio - Free iTunes Video - Course Materials - Robert Shiller, Yale Growing Up in the Universe – Free Online Video – Richard Dawkins, Oxford The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science – Free Online Video - Harvard/Smithsonian Harvard's Introductory Computer Science Course - Free Online Course - David Malan, Harvard Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner – Various Formats – Wai Chee Dimock, Yale Heidegger’s Being & Time – Free Online Audio - Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley How to Listen to Music - Various Formats - Craig Wright, Yale Human Behavioral Biology – Various Formats – Robert Sapolsky, Stanford Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) – Free Online Video - Christine Hayes, Yale. Invitation to World Literature – Free Online Video - David Damrosch, Harvard Lectures on Digital Photography - Free Online Video - Marc Levoy, Stanford/Google Philosophy of Language – Free Online Audio – John Searle, UC Berkeley Physics for Future Presidents – Free Online Video – Richard Muller, UC Berkeley Quantum Electrodynamics – Free Online Video - Richard Feynman, Presented at University of Auckland Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter - Free Online Video - Free iTunes Video - Course Info - Team taught, Harvard Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays – Free Online Video – Marjorie Garber, Harvard Speak Italian with Your Mouth Full - Various Formats - MIT, Dr. Paola Rebusco The American Novel Since 1945 – Various Formats – Amy Hungerford, Yale The Central Philosophy of Tibet - Free Online Audio – Robert Thurman, Columbia University The Character of Physical Law (1964) - Free Online Video - Richard Feynman, Cornell The Hobbit – Free iTunes Video – More – Corey Olsen, Washington College The Tempest - Free Online Audio - Allen Ginsberg, Naropa Walter Kaufmann Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre - Free Online Audio The complete list of courses can be accessed here: 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Learn 48 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More. A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures 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)
2:00p	Wassily Kandinsky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a Historic Bauhaus Theatre Production (1928) European modernity may never had taken the direction it did without the significant influence of two Russian artists, Wassily Kandinsky and Modest Mussorgsky. Kandinsky may not have been the very first abstract painter, but in an important sense he deserves the title, given the impact that his series of early 20th century abstract paintings had on modern art as a whole. Inspired by Goethe’s Theory of Colors, he also published what might have been the first treatise specifically devoted to a theory of abstraction. The composer Mussorgsky’s most famous work, Pictures at an Exhibition (listen here), had a tremendous influence on some of the most famous composers of the day when it debuted, which happened to be after its author's death. Written in 1874 as a solo piano piece, it didn’t see publication until 1886, when it quickly became a virtuoso challenge for pianists and a popular choice for arrangements most notably by Maurice Ravel and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who, along with Igor Stravinsky and others, interpreted and expanded on many of Mussorgsky's ideas into the early 20th century. Mussorgsky’s early death in 1881 prevented any living collaboration between the painter and composer, but it’s only natural that his minimalist musical piece should have inspired Kandinsky’s only successful stage production. In Kandinsky’s theory, musical ideas operate like primary colors. His paintings explicitly illustrate sound. In his stage adaptation of Pictures at an Exhibition, he had the opportunity to paint sound in motion. Kandinsky was first inspired to paint, at the age of 30, after hearing a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. “I saw all my colors in spirit,” he remarked afterward, “Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.” The Denver Art Museum’s Renée Miller writes of Kandinsky’s experience as an example of synesthesia. He drew from the work of Arnold Schoenberg in his abstract expressionist canvases, and “gave many of his paintings musical titles, such as Composition and Improvisation.” For his part, Mussorgsky found inspiration for his nonrepresentational work in the strangely uncanny representational visual art of Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann, his closest friend and member of a nationalist circle of artists attempting a nationalist Russian cultural revival. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition sets music to a collection of Hartmann’s paintings and drawings exhibited after the artist's death, including sketches of opera costumes and a monumental architectural design. The creation of several highly distinctive musical motifs is of a piece with Mussorgsky's opera compositions. Both he and Kandinsky were drawn to opera for its dramatic conjunction of visual art, performance, and music, or what Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art.” And yet, despite their mutual admiration for classical forms and traditional Russian folklore, both artists illustrated the title of Wagner’s essay on the subject, “The Artwork of the Future," more fully than Wagner himself. Mussorgsky’s piece, as composed solo on the piano, is willfully odd, ugly and piercingly beautiful by turns, and always unsettling, like the Hartmann paintings that inspired it. So visually descriptive is its musical language that it might be said to induce a virtual form of synesthesia. In illustrating Pictures at an Exhibition, Kandinsky “took another step towards translating the idea of ‘monumental art’ into life,” notes the site Modern Art Consulting, “with his own sets and light, color and geometrical shapes for characters.” On April 4, 1928, the première at the Friedrich Theater, Dessau, was a tremendous success. The music was played on the piano. The production was rather cumbersome as the sets were supposed to move and the hall lighting was to change constantly in keeping with Kandinsky’s scrupulous instructions. According to one of them, “bottomless depths of black” against a black backdrop were to transform into violet, while dimmers (rheostats) were yet to be invented. Rather than translating Mussorgsky’s piece back into Hartmann’s representational idiom, Kandinsky creates an operatic movement of geometrical figures from the lexicon of the Bauhaus school. (Only “The Great Gate of Kiev,” at the top, resembles the original painting.) Rather than create narrative, “Kandinsky’s task was to turn the music into paintings,” says Harald Wetzel, curator of a recent exhibit in Dessau featuring many of the set designs. Those static elements “give just a limited impression of the stage production,” which was “constantly in motion.” We may not have film of that original production, but we do have a very good sense of what it might have looked like through its many re-stagings over the past few years, including the production further up with pianist Mikhaïl Rudy at the théâtre de Brive in 2011 and the animated video remake above, which brings it even further into the future. See a selection of photos from the Kandinsky exhibit at Deutsche Welle and compare these paintings with the original pictures by Viktor Hartmann that inspired Mussorgsky’s piece. Related Content: Who Painted the First Abstract Painting?: Wassily Kandinsky? Hilma af Klint? Or Another Contender? Time Travel Back to 1926 and Watch Wassily Kandinsky Make Art in Some Rare Vintage Video Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece (1933) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Wassily Kandinsky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a Historic Bauhaus Theatre Production (1928) 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)
5:11p	Watch Author Chuck Palahniuk Read Fight Club 4 Kids The first rule of Horsing Around Club is: You do not talk about Horsing Around Club.  ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club for Kids Retooling a popular show, film, or comic to feature younger versions of the characters, their personalities and relationships virtually unchanged, can be a serious, if cynical source of income for the original creators. The Muppets, Archie, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond have all given birth to spin-off babies. So why not author Chuck Palahniuk? Perhaps because spin-off babies are designed to gently ensnare a new and younger audience, and Palahniuk, whose 2002 novel Lullaby hinged on a nursery rhyme that kills children in their cribs, is unlikely to file down the dark, twisted edges that have won him a cult following. That said, his most recent title is formatted as a coloring book, with another due to drop later this fall. The same spirit of mischief drives Fight Club for Kids, which mercifully will not be hitting the children’s section of your local bookstore in time for the upcoming holiday season (or ever). Much like Tyler Durden, Palahniuk's most infamous creation, this title is but a figment, existing only in the above video, where it is read by its putative author. If you think Samuel L. Jackson’s narration of Go the F**k to Sleep—which can actually be purchased in book form—represents the height of adult readers running off the rails, you ain’t heard nothing yet: The horseplay would go on until it was done And everyone who did it would always have fun Especially the Boy Who Had No Name Who once just, like, beat this dude, who was actually Jared Leto in the movie, which was so fuckin’ cool and intense, and he’s just pummeling this guy and of course, being Jared Leto, he was essentially a model, but when our guy is done with him, he’s just this purple, bloated, chewed up bubblegum-looking motherfucker covered in blood, head to toe! (The second rule of Horsing Around Club is: You DO NOT TALK ABOUT HORSING AROUND CLUB!) Find more printable Chuck Palahniuk coloring pages here. via Mashable Related Content: Jane Austen’s Fight Club What Are the Most Stolen Books? Bookstore Lists Feature Works by Murakami, Bukowski, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Kerouac & Palahniuk David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech “This is Water” Visualized in a Short Film Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Follow her @AyunHalliday. Watch Author Chuck Palahniuk Read <i>Fight Club 4 Kids</i> 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)
6:00p	David Lynch Gives Unconventional Advice to Graduates in an Unusual Commencement Address Just as we wouldn't expect David Lynch to deliver a traditional movie, nor should we expect him to deliver a traditional commencement address. "I did an interview with the Des Moines Register and said that this would be a strange commencement speech," the creator of Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks tells the 2016 graduating class of the Maharishi University of Management by way of opening not a speech but an on-stage question-and-answer session. The questions came from select students who want to know things like how he sees the world looking in ten years, what makes a good leader, and what makes a meaningful life. One also wants to know how to "reconcile a job or career with our dharma or purpose." To that question, the very first, Lynch can respond with only one word: "Wow." But then, he had to have expected that question from a student at MUM, an institution established to provide something called "Consciousness-Based education" under which you don't just gain knowledge but "your awareness expands, improving your ability to absorb knowledge and see the big picture." Integral to all this is Transcendental Meditation, the technique developed by MUM founder (and guru to the likes of the Beatles and the Beach Boys) Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and which Lynch himself has practiced since 1973. Even if you have no interest in Lynch's memories of the Maharishi (a possible subject of a future movie of his, he implies), or in meditation of any kind, Lynch still dispenses a fair few pieces of valuable advice during these twenty minutes. "I always equate ideas sort of like fish — we don’t make the fish, we catch the fish," he says in response to one student who asks about how he falls in love with the ideas out of which his projects develop. "You fall in love with an idea and for me it may just be a fragment of a whole thing like a script, or a whole film, but this little fragment is so thrilling and you fall in love." And "once you get one fragment, it’s like bait on a hook to catch more fragments." More concretely, another student asks Lynch to go back to his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (which draws a "Whoa" from Lynch) and consider whether he'd make all the same decisions again. "I was very lucky," he says of avoiding the drugs in vogue at the time because of the warnings of his friends. "They were all taking them, but for some reason they warned me against it. So I guess I dodged a bullet." But he does admit to, after his daily meditation practice, never failing to imbibe one consciousness-altering substance: coffee. And when an aspiring filmmaker asks for the "one thing that you learned on one of your film sets that then became a life lesson," Lynch reveals something perhaps even more important to him than always getting his coffee: "Always have final cut." Related Content: David Lynch Takes Aspiring Filmmakers Inside the Art & Craft of Making Indie Films An Animated David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas David Lynch Explains How Meditation Boosts Our Creativity (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Meditating) David Lynch Talks Meditation with Paul McCartney Daily Meditation Boosts & Revitalizes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Harvard Study Finds 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. David Lynch Gives Unconventional Advice to Graduates in an Unusual Commencement Address 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)

<< Previous Day

2017/09/18 [Calendar]

Next Day >>