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Thursday, October 26th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:04a | Albert Einstein’s Elegant Theory of Happiness: It Just Sold for $1.6 Million at Auction, But You Can Use It for Free
Albert Einstein had a theory of general relativity. Turns out, he had a theory of happiness, too. While traveling in Japan in 1922, Einstein learned that he had won the Nobel Prize. Suddenly the object of unwanted publicity, he secluded himself inside the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. And while there, explains NPR, "a courier came to the door to make a delivery." In lieu of giving the courier a small tip, Einstein handed the courier two handwritten notes, one of which read: "A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."' Einstein also gave the bellhop another useful piece of advice: Don't lose those handwritten notes. They might be worth something someday. Sure enough, Einstein's scrawled theory of happiness sold for $1.6 million at an auction on Tuesday. 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. Related Content: The Musical Mind of Albert Einstein: Great Physicist, Amateur Violinist and Devotee of Mozart Listen as Albert Einstein Calls for Peace and Social Justice in 1945 Albert Einstein Reads ‘The Common Language of Science’ (1941) Free Online Psychology Courses Albert Einstein’s Elegant Theory of Happiness: It Just Sold for $1.6 Million at Auction, But You Can Use It for Free 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 | Every Academy Award Winner for Best Cinematography in One Supercut: From 1927’s Sunrise to 2016’s Moonlight
A list of chronological Oscar winners often tells you more about the state of the culture than the state of the art. That is very true when it comes to Best Picture, with musicals and epics taking home the Academy Award during one decade, but being largely forgotten the next. So too is the award for Best Cinematography, as seen in the seven-minute supercut above. Showing every Academy Award winning cinematographer and their films, the supercut's choices for the one or two shots that sum up a brilliantly lit picture do make the Academy’s decision at least justified. But it is surprising how quickly so many of these films have slipped from the public’s consciousness. (Like 2003’s Master and Commander--when’s the last time you thought about that film?) When the Academy first started giving awards for cinematography, it went to the person first, not the picture and the person involved. So when Karl Struss and Charles Rosher were nominated for--ostensibly--their work on F.W. Murnau’s classic Sunrise--they also got credited for the five other films they had shot that year. The current system was worked out in 1931, although up to 1967 awards went--and I think rightly so!--to color and black and white separately. (And, to further complicate things, the color award was considered a “special achievement” award for a while until Gone with the Wind pretty much necessitated a change in priorities.) After 1967, the only black and white film to win was Schindler’s List. Somebody with way more viewing experience should weigh in on what makes a lot of these films Oscar-worthy in their cinematography, but it does seem that at least through the 1960s, the Academy loved bold use of saturated colors for one category, and an almost abstract use of high contrast shadow and light for the other. Other notables: Only one Alfred Hitchcock film won for Best Cinematography--To Catch a Thief, one of his minor works. Stanley Kubrick has done slightly better, with Russell Metty for Spartacus and John Alcott for Barry Lyndon. (But not Gilbert Taylor for Dr. Strangelove!) Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and The Aviator both earned statues for Robert Richardson (who also won for Oliver Stone’s JFK). Roger Deakins has never won, though he’s been nominated 13 times, twice in 2007 for both No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And the most awarded cinematographer? That’s a tie at four Oscars each for Leon Shamroy (The Black Swan, Wilson, Leave Her to Heaven, and the studio-destroying bomb Cleopatra); and Joseph Ruttenberg (The Great Waltz, Mrs. Miniver, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Gigi). Make of this list what you will. (And feel free to do so in the comments!) Related Content: Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective The History of the Movie Camera in Four Minutes: From the Lumiere Brothers to Google Glass 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. Every Academy Award Winner for Best Cinematography in One Supercut: From 1927’s <i>Sunrise</i> to 2016’s <i>Moonlight</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. |
| 2:00p | The Social Lives of Trees: Science Reveals How Trees Mysteriously Talk to Each Other, Work Together & Form Nurturing Families
In addition to its ham-handed execution, maybe one of the reasons M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening failed with critics is that its premise seemed inherently preposterous. Who could suspend disbelief? Trees don’t talk to each other, act in groups, make calculations, how foolish! But they do, forester Suzanne Simard aims to convince us in the TED video above. Trees aren’t just trees. They are the visible manifestations of “this other world” underground, “a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate, and allow the forest to behave as if it’s a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.” One shared not only by trees but by all of the beings that live in and among them. Forests are alive, though perhaps they are not plotting their revenge on us, even if we’ve earned it. Simard tells the story of growing up in British Columbia among the inland rainforests. Old wet temperate forests crawling with ancient ferns like giant green hands; cities of mushrooms growing around centuries-old fallen trees; whole planes of bird and insect existence in the canopies, American megafauna, the elk, the bear…. On a recent hike deep into the Olympia National Forest in Washington, I found myself thinking some similar thoughts. It’s not that unusual to imagine, in the throes of “forest bathing,” that “trees are nature’s internet,” as Simard says in a Seattle TED talk.
The difference is that Simard has had these thoughts all her life, devoted 30 years of research to testing her hypotheses, and used radioactive carbon isotopes to find two-way communication between different species of tree while being chased by angry grizzly bears. Likewise, most of us have noted the glaring scientific absurdities in the book of Genesis, but few may see the problem with Noah’s Ark that Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso does in his talk above. No one thought to bring any plants? God somehow neglected to mention that all those animals would need ecosystems, and fast? We laugh about an old man literally loading reproducing pairs of every animal on a boat… imagine him trying to fit entire forests…. Mancuso’s charming accent and self-deprecating humor make his observations seem lighthearted, but no less devastating to our idea of ourselves as self-sufficient alpha creatures and of plants as barely alive, inanimate stuff scattered around us like nature’s furniture, one step above the foundational rocks and stones. The idea is not limited to the Bible; it has “accompanied humanity” he says. Yet, just as professors do not belong at the top of a hierarchy of life—as medieval scholars liked to imagine—plants do not belong at the bottom. Let Mancuso convince you that plants exhibit “wonderful and complex behavior that can be considered intelligence.”
Isn’t this all a little presumptuous? Does anyone, after all, speak for the trees? Might their language be forever alien to us? Can we talk about “what plants talk about,” as ecologist J.C. Cahill asserts? Can we make soap opera speculations about “the hidden life of trees,” as the title of German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book promises? Perhaps human language is necessarily anthropomorphic—we insist on seeing ourselves at the center of everything. Maybe we need to think of trees as people to connect to them—as nearly every ancient human civilization has talked to nature through the intermediaries of spirits, gods, devas, sprites, nymphs, ancestors, etc. As a forester with a lumber company, Wohlleben says, he “knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals.” They were already dead to him. Until he began to wake up to the silent communication all around him. Trees can count, can learn, can remember, he found. Trees have families. They nurse their children. As he says in the interview above, “I don’t claim this, that is actual research. But the scientists normally use language than cannot be understood. So I translated this, and surprise, surprise! Trees are living beings, trees are social, trees have feelings.” For most people, says Wohhleben, this comes as a surprise. Related Content: Graphic Shows the House Plants That Naturally Clean the Air in Your Home, According to a NASA Study Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree: The Animated Film Narrated by Shel Himself (1973) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Social Lives of Trees: Science Reveals How Trees Mysteriously Talk to Each Other, Work Together & Form Nurturing Families 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. |
| 4:32p | 6,000 Letters by Marcel Proust to Be Digitized & Put Online
Quick fyi: Next year, an archive of 6,000 letters by Marcel Proust will be digitized and made freely available online. The letters come from the collection of Philip Kolb, a Proust scholar from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. According to The New York Times, "the first tranche of the letters, several hundred related to the First World War, are expected to be published online by Nov. 11, 2018, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the end of the war." We'll update you when the letters actually appear online. Related Content: The First Known Footage of Marcel Proust Discovered: Watch It Online When James Joyce & Marcel Proust Met in 1922, and Totally Bored Each Other 16-Year-Old Marcel Proust Tells His Grandfather About His Misguided Adventures at the Local Brothel Marcel Proust Fills Out a Questionnaire in 1890: The Manuscript of the ‘Proust Questionnaire’ 6,000 Letters by Marcel Proust to Be Digitized & Put Online 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 | Where Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction
If you've ever deliberately studied the English language — or, even worse, taught it — you know that bottomless aggravation awaits anyone foolish enough to try to explain its "rules." What makes English so apparently strange and different from other languages, and how could such a language go on to get so much traction all over the world? Whether you speak English natively (and thus haven't had much occasion to give the matter thought) or learned it as a second language, the five-minute TED-Ed lesson above, written by Yale linguistics professor Claire Bowern and animated by Patrick Smith, will give you a solid start on understanding the answer to those questions and others. "When we talk about ‘English,’ we often think of it as a single language," says the lesson's narrator, "but what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? And how are any of them related to the strange words in Beowulf?" The answer involves English's distinctive evolutionary path through generations and generations of speakers, expanding and changing all the while. Along the way, it's picked up words from Latin-derived Romance languages like French and Spanish, a process that began with the Norman invasion of England in 1066. So also emerged Old English, a member of — you guessed it — the Germanic language family, one brought to the British isles in the fifth and sixth centuries. Then, of course, you've got the Viking invaders bringing in their Old Norse from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. English thus came to its characteristically rich (and often confusing) mixture of words drawn from all over the place quite some time ago, leaving modern linguists to perform the quasi-archaeological task of tracing each word back to its origins through its sound and usage. Go far enough and you get to the tongues we call "Proto-Germanic," spoken circa 500 BC, and "Proto-Indo-European," which had its heyday six millennia ago in modern-day Ukraine and Russia. English now often gets labeled, rightly or wrongly, a "global language," but a look into its complicated history — and thus the history of all European languages — reveals something more impressive: "Nearly three billion people around the world, many of whom cannot understand each other, are nevertheless speaking the same words, shaped by 6,000 years of history." Related Content: The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Where Did the English Language Come From?: An Animated Introduction 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. |
| 11:55p | 2,800 JFK Assassination Documents Just Released by the National Archives
Moments ago, the National Archives released a trove of 2,800 documents that will shed more light on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to the Archives, the release includes "FBI, CIA, and other agency documents (both formerly withheld in part and formerly withheld in full) identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records." You can find the documents here. This data dump was meant to include even more documents. But, according to The New York Times, Donald Trump "bowed to protests by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. by withholding thousands of additional papers pending six more months of review." If those ever see the light of day, we'll let you know. 2,800 JFK Assassination Documents Just Released by the National Archives 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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