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Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Painting Free Online: 403 Episodes Spanning 31 Seasons
Whether your New Year’s resolution involves taking up painting, managing stress, cultivating a more positive outlook, or building a business empire, the late television artist Bob Ross can help you stick it out. Like Fred Rogers’ Mr Rogers' Neighborhood, Ross’ long-running PBS show, The Joy of Painting, did not disappear from view following its creator’s demise. For over twenty years, new fans have continued to seek out the half-hour long instructional videos, along with its mesmerizingly mellow, easily spoofed host. Now all 403 episodes have been made available for free on Ross’ official Youtube channel. That covers all 31 seasons. It’s said that 90% of the regular viewers tuning in to watch Ross crank out his signature “wet-on-wet” landscapes never took up a brush, despite his belief that, with a bit of encouragement, anyone can paint. Perhaps they preferred sad clowns or big-eyed children to scenic landscapes of the sort that would not have looked out of place in a 1970's motel.... Or perhaps Ross, himself, was the big draw. Like Mister Rogers, Ross spoke softly, using direct address to create an impression of intimacy between himself and the viewer. Twenty years in the military had soured him on barked-out, rigid instructions. Instead, Ross reassured less experienced painters that the 16th-century ”Alla Prima” technique he brought to the masses could never result in mistakes, only “happy accidents.” He was patient and kind and he didn't take his own abilities too seriously, though he seemed like he would certainly have taken pleasure in yours.
Ross' Land of Make Believe was a character-free natural world, in which many of the same elements appear over and over. According to Five Thirty Eight culture editor Walt Hickey’s statistical analysis, trees reigned supreme. The real life landscapes he observed as first sergeant of the U.S. Air Force Clinic at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska became his lifelong subject, and by extension, that of untold numbers of home viewers. His devotees may be content just seeing "happy little trees” and "pretty little mountains” bloom on canvas, but in an interview with NPR, Ross’ business partner, Annette Kowalski, suggests that he would not have been. The gentle, forest-and-cloud-loving host was also an ambitious and highly focused businessman, who used TV as the medium for his success. Every folksy comment was rehearsed before filming and he stuck with the permed hairdo he loathed, rather than scrapping what had become a highly visual brand identifier. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Watch all 31 seasons of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting here, or right here on this page. Official Bob Ross painting kits are widely available online, or source your own using a cobbled together supply list. Season Three
Season Four
Season Five
Season Six
We will continuing adding seasons to this list as they become available. Season Seven
Season Eight
Season Nine
Season Ten
Season 11 Season 12 Season 13 Season 14 Season 15 Season 16 Season 17 Season 18 Season 19 Season 20 Season 21 Season 22 Season 23 Season 24 Season 25 Season 26 Season 27 Season 28 Season 29 Season 30 Season 31 Related Content: Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, Seasons 1-3, Free Online Mr. Rogers Goes to Congress and Saves PBS: Heartwarming Video from 1969 Stream 23 Free Documentaries from PBS’ Award-Winning American Experience Series Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her resolution is to spend less time online, but you can still follow her @AyunHalliday. Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Painting Free Online: 403 Episodes Spanning 31 Seasons 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.  |
| 12:00p | What Actually Is Bitcoin? Princeton’s Free Course “Bitcoin and Currency Technologies” Provides Much-Needed Answers
"Don't Understand Bitcoin?" asked the headline of a recent video from Clickhole, the Onion's viral-media parody site. "This Man Will Mumble an Explanation at You." The inexplicable hilarity of the mumbling man and his 72-second explanation of Bitcoin contains, like all good humor, a solid truth: most of us don't understand Bitcoin, and the simplistic information we seek out, for all we grasp of it, might as well be delivered unintelligibly. A few years ago we featured a much clearer three-minute explanation of that best-known form of cryptocurrency here on Open Culture, but how to gain a deeper understanding of this technology that, in one form or another, so many of us will eventually use? Consider joining "Bitcoin and Currency Technologies," a free course from Coursera taught by several professors from Princeton University, including computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, whose Princeton Bitcoin Textbook we featured last year. The eleven-week online course (classroom versions of whose lectures you can check out here) just began, but you can still easily join and learn the answers to questions like the following: "How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold?" All of those, you'll notice, have been raised more and more often in the media lately, but seldom satisfactorily addressed. "Real understanding of the economic issues underlying the cryptocurrency is almost nonexistent," writes Nobel-winning economist Robert J. Shiller in a recent New York Times piece on Bitcoin. "It is not just that very few people really comprehend the technology behind Bitcoin. It is that no one can attach objective probabilities to the various possible outcomes of the current Bitcoin enthusiasm." Take Princeton's course, then, and you'll pull way ahead of many others interested in Bitcoin, even allowing for all the still-unknowable unknowns that have caused such thrilling and shocking fluctuations in the digital currency's eight years of existence so far. All of it has culminated in the current craze Shiller calls "a marvelous case study in ambiguity and animal spirits," and where ambiguity and animal spirits rule, a little intellectual understanding certainly never hurts. Enroll free in "Bitcoin and Currency Technologies" here. Related Content: Bitcoin, the New Decentralized Digital Currency, Demystified in a Three Minute Video The Princeton Bitcoin Textbook Is Now Free Online Why Economics is for Everyone!, Explained in a New RSA Animated Video 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. What Actually Is Bitcoin? Princeton’s Free Course “Bitcoin and Currency Technologies” Provides Much-Needed Answers 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. |
| 3:00p | How Isaac Newton Lost $3 Million Dollars in the “South Sea Bubble” of 1720: Even Geniuses Can’t Prevail Against the Machinations of the Markets
The Aristotelian notion of “man” as a “rational animal” has seen its share of detractors, from the Cynics to Bertrand Russell to nearly the whole of Poststructuralist thought. Leave it up to Oscar Wilde to compress the debate between intellect and passion into a pithy aphorism: “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” We no longer need clever verbal barbs to refute too-optimistic assessments of human behavior. Economics is catching up: we have the language of neuroscience and psychology, which consistently tells us that humans decidedly do not behave rationally very often, but are driven by bias and biology in inexplicable ways. And for over a hundred years now, we've known that the clockwork Newtonian view of the physical universe turns out be a much messier and indeterminate affair, as does the universe of the human mind. Why, then, has so much economic theory operated with a kind of dogged Aristotelianism, insisting that the units of capitalist society, the workers, managers, investors, consumers, owners, renters, speculators, etc. behave in predictable ways? We have case after case showing that intelligence and critical reasoning often have little to do with success or failure in the market. In such cases, however, one often hears the “madness of crowds” or other cliches invoked as an explanation. To illustrate, market reporters and business writers have seized upon the story of Isaac Newton’s spectacular rise and fall in the so-called “South Sea Bubble” of 1720. We find the story in Benjamin Graham’s 1949 classic The Intelligent Investor, a widely-read book that attributes the irrationality of market systems to an anthropomorphic entity named “Mr. Market.” Graham writes,
The quotation in bold may or may not have been uttered by Newton, but the events Graham describes did indeed happen. As the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zwieg relates, University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko found that “Newton had shifted from a prudent investor with his money spread across several securities to a speculator who had plunged essentially all of his capital into a single stock. The great scientist was chasing hot performance as desperately as a day trader in 1999 or many bitcoin buyers in 2017.” (Odlyzko estimates Newton's losses closer to $4 million.) Perhaps it was not a metaphorical “Mr. Market” who cost Newton up to 77% “on his worst purchases,” nor was it widespread “wild enthusiasm”—the mass movement of passion that Enlightenment philosophers so feared. Perhaps it was Newton himself who, Elena Holodny writes at Business Insider, “let his emotions get the best of him, and got swayed by the irrationality of the crowd.” Maybe it's more accurate to say Newton succumbed to greed when the bubble expanded. “Throughout history,” Barbara Kollmeyer writes at Market Watch in her interview with author Richard Dale, “people—especially those at the top rung of society—have been greedy and gullible participants in financial bubbles. And Sir Isaac Newton was only human, after all.” (How many at the top rung of society fell prey to Bernie Madoff’s schemes? And a century before the South Sea Bubble, hundreds of wealthy investors lost their shirts in the Dutch Tulip Bulb craze.) Some business writers, like investment editor Richard Evans at The Telegraph, recommend a calculable formula to avoid losing a fortune in bubbles, advice that takes rational agency for granted. Perhaps it should not. In addition to citing the contagion of crowds, nearly every discussion of Newton’s folly allows that a failure of emotional discipline played a significant role. Benjamin Graham invokes another Aristotelian notion—the idea that “character” counts as much or more than intelligence when it comes to investing. "The investor's chief problem," he writes, "and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself." Far fewer commenters note that the South Sea venture was itself a failure of character from its inception. The company had secured an exclusive monopoly on trade with South America; much of that trade involved selling slaves. It is also the case that the company artificially inflated its stock prices, and colluded with several MPs in insider trading schemes. The so-called “Bubble Act” of Parliament in 1720, presumably passed to prevent crashes like the one that devastated Newton, turned out to be corporate giveaway. The terms of the act had been dictated by the South Sea Company in order to prevent other companies from poaching their investors. Although these circumstances are well-known to economic historians, they rarely make their way into commentary on Newton’s great loss. Economists instead tend to blame abstractions for economic events like the South Sea Bubble, or they blame the overreaching profit-seeking of investors, and maybe for good reason. The other explanations haunt the margins: the inherently exploitative nature of most forms of corporate capitalism, and the corruption and collusion between the state and private enterprise that inhibits fair competition and makes it impossible for investors to evaluate the situation transparently. For all of his scientific and mathematical genius, Isaac Newton was no exception—he was just as subject to irrational greed as the next investor, and to the predatory machinations of “market forces." Related Content: In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicts the World Will End in 2060 Isaac Newton Creates a List of His 57 Sins (Circa 1662) Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Isaac Newton Lost $3 Million Dollars in the “South Sea Bubble” of 1720: Even Geniuses Can’t Prevail Against the Machinations of the Markets 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. |
| 6:26p | Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer
In the past decade or so, the analog modular synth—of the kind pioneered by Robert Moog and Don Buchla—has made a comeback, creating a booming niche market full of musicians chasing the sounds of the 70s and 80s. These inscrutable racks of patchbays, oscillators, filters, etc. look to the non-initiated more like telephone operator stations of old than musical instruments. But the sounds they produce are sublime and otherworldly, with a saturated warmth unparalleled in the digital world. But while analog technology may have perfected certain tones, one can't beat the convenience of digital recording, with its nearly unlimited multi-tracking capability, ability to save settings, and the ease of editing and arranging in the computer. Digital audio workstations have become increasingly sophisticated, able to emulate with “plug-ins” the capabilities of sought-after analog studio gear of the past. It has taken a bit longer for virtual instruments to meet this same standard, but they may be nearly there.  Only the most finely-tuned ears, for example, can hear the difference between the highest-quality digitally modeled guitar amplifiers and effects and their real-world counterparts in the mix. Even the most high-end modeling packages don't cost as much as their real life counterparts, and many also come free in limited versions. So too the wealth of analog synth software, modeled to sound convincingly like the old and newly reissued analog boxes that can run into the many thousands of dollars to collect and connect.
One such collection of synths, the VCV Rack, offers open-source virtual modular synths almost entirely free, with only a few at very modest prices. The standalone virtual rack works without any additional software. Once you’ve created an account and installed it, you can start adding dozens of plug-ins, including various synthesizers, gates, reverbs, compressors, sequencers, keyboards, etc. “It’s pretty transformative stuff,” writes CDM. “You can run virtual modules to synthesize and process sounds, both those emulating real hardware and many that exist only in software.” The learning curve is plenty steep for those who haven’t handled this perplexing technology outside the box. A series of YouTube tutorials, a few of which you can see here, can get you going in short order. Those already experienced with the real-world stuff will delight in the expanded capabilities of the digital versions, as well as the fidelity with which these plug-ins emulate real equipment—without the need for a roomful of cables, unwieldly racks, and soldiering irons and spare parts for those inevitable bad connections and broken switches and inputs.
You can download the virtual rack here, then follow the instructions to load as many plug-ins as you like. CDM has instructions for the developer version (find the source code here), and a YouTube series called Modular Curiosity demonstrates how to install the rack and use the various plugins (see their first video further up and find the rest here). Modular System Beginner Tutorial is another YouTube guide, with five different videos. See number one above and the rest here. The longer video at the top of the post offers a “first look and noob tutorial.” VCV Rack is only the latest of many virtual modular synths, including Native Instruments’ Reaktor Blocks and Softube’s Modular. “But these come with a hefty price tag,” notes FACT magazine. “VCV Rack can be downloaded for free on Linux, Mac and Windows platform.” And if you’re wondering how it stacks up against the real-life boxes it emulates, check out the video below.
Related Content: How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Shows Off His Synthesizer Collection Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Created by Synthesizers Made with Artificial Intelligence Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer 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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