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Thursday, May 2nd, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 4:42a | Meanwhile, Inside the Box, Schrodinger’s Cat Plans Its Revenge…
Meanwhile, Inside the Box, Schrodinger’s Cat Plans Its Revenge… 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 | Behold the Ingenious Musical Marble Machine
Could the return of marble-based madness be a reaction to our digital age? That we must construct real fantastical machines that perform humble amusements in the face of CGI-filled blockbusters? Do we need to know that if society collapses we can look to members of the Swedish folktronic band Wintergatan to help rebuild it? After watching the above video, friends, I say yes to all those (rhetorical) questions. The Marble Conveyer Belt does what its name implies in a loving series of cranks, gears, “fish stairs,” ratchets, pistons, curved tracks, and springs, and no real amount of florid description will do justice to the visual poetry of watching Wintergatan’s Martin Molin operate/play what they have dubbed Marble Machine X. This is not Molin or the band’s first machine. According to Wikipedia, between December 2014 and March 2016, Molin built the first Marble Machine, that played instruments like a vibraphone, bass guitar, cymbals, and a contact-microphone’d mini drum kit following a programmed wheel that triggered marble release armatures. When that was a success, they disassembled the machine and set about working on Machine X. Molin provided some specs over at the finished video’s YouTube page:
Molin has some kind of madness, the good kind. Where he goes after this achievement is anybody’s guess. Related Content: Metropolis II: Discover the Amazing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinetic Sculpture by Chris Burden 200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action Watch a Musician Improvise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instrument, The Carillon 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. Behold the Ingenious Musical Marble Machine 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. |
| 4:37p | When American Financiers and Business Leaders Plotted to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Government in the U.S. (1933)
Economist and columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote about a current nominee for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors who called cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland “armpits of America” to laughs from an audience of business leaders. This same nominee has made headlines for saying “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” and calling the 16th Amendment establishing the income tax the “most evil” law passed in the 20th century. As crude as the comments are, many wealthy people who make decisions of consequence in the U.S. do not seem like “big believers in democracy,” as the nominee put it. It’s messy and inconvenient for those who would prefer not to answer to an elected government. The same attitudes were shared by right-wing bankers, business leaders, and conservative politicians during the worst economic crisis the country has seen. Despite the failure of laissez-faire financial capitalism after the crash of 1929, financiers, economists, and politicians refused to admit their principles might have been very badly flawed. But in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, “the economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system,” writes NPR, in a description of the Great Depression that reads as drily understated. Still, Roosevelt’s election went too far for his opponents (and not far enough for progressives to his left). West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield wrote to a colleague, in a series of evergreen expressions, characterizing FDR’s historic First Hundred Days as “despotism”:
Wall Street agreed, except for all that stuff about the Constitution and the welfare of the ordinary American. In what became known as the “Business Plot” (or the “Wall Street Putsch”)—a group of bankers and business leaders allegedly created a conspiracy to overthrow the president and install a dictator friendly to their interests. The conspirators included investment banker and future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. Bush), bond salesman Gerald MacGuire, and Bill Doyle commander of the Massachusetts American Legion. The plot was famously exposed by Major General Smedley D. Butler, who testified under oath about his knowledge of a plan to form an organization of 500,000 veterans who could take over the functions of government, as you can see Butler himself say in the 1935 newsreel footage above. The members of the Business Plot believed Butler would lead this irregular force in a coup. He had previously been “an influential figure in the so-called Bonus Army,” writes Matt Davis at Big Think, “a group of 43,000 marchers—among them many World War I veterans—who were camped at Washington to demand the early payment of the veteran’s bonus promised to them.” Butler’s willingness to challenge the government did not make him sympathetic to a coup. He heard the conspirators out, then turned them in. But his allegations were immediately dismissed by The New York Times, who wrote that the story was a “gigantic hoax,” “perfect moonshine!,” “a fantasy,” and “a publicity stunt.” A congressional investigation corroborated Smedley’s claims, to an extent. The conspirators may have had weapons, violent intent, and millions of dollars. But no one was ever prosecuted. Many, like New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, waved the coup attempt away as “a cocktail putsch.” The same attitudes that let the conspirators suffer no consequences, and let them go on to serve in high office, also seemed to drive their way of thinking. Roosevelt could be brought to see reason, they believed. Since his class interests aligned with theirs, he would see that fascism best served those interests. Sally Denton, investigative reporter and author of a book about the multiple plots against FDR (The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right), explains in an interview with All Things Considered:
What MacGuire proposed was more corporatist than militarist in appearance, at least, notes Davis. The President could remain as a figurehead, but “the real power of the government would be held in the hands of a Secretary of General Affairs, who would be in effect a dictator," but whose job description, as MacGuire put it, was “a sort of super secretary.” As for Butler, not only did he call the plot treason, but he also came to feel considerable regret for his service as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” as he later wrote in his essay “War is a Racket,” published in the socialist magazine Common Sense. “I was a racketeer,” he confessed, “a gangster for capitalism.” In exposing the plot, he decided to side with the flawed, but functional democracy of our own country over the will of capitalists bent on holding power by any means. via Big Think Related Content: Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness When American Financiers and Business Leaders Plotted to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Government in the U.S. (1933) 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. |
| 6:50p | 53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto
It’s strange what can make an impact. Sometimes a message needs to be loud and over-the-top to come across, like punk rock or the films of Oliver Stone. In other cases, cool and quiet works much better. Take the new time lapse map created by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. It is beautiful in a simple way and eerie as it documents the 2,053 nuclear explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998. It looks like a war room map of the world, black landmasses surrounded by deep blue ocean. It starts out slow, in July of 1945, with a blue blip and an explosion sound in the American southwest—the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos. Just one month later come the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From there the months click by—condensed down to seconds—on a digital clock. Each nation that has exploded a nuclear bomb gets a blip and a flashing dot when they detonate a weapon, with a running tally kept on the screen. Eeriest of all is that each nation gets its own electronic sound pitch: low tones for the United States, higher for the Soviet Union—beeping to the metronome of the months ticking by. What starts out slow picks up by 1960 or so, when all the cold neutral beeps and flashes become overwhelming. If you’re like me, you had no idea just how many detonations the United States is responsible for (1,032—more than the rest of the countries put together). The sequence ends with the Pakistani nuclear tests of May 1998. Hashimoto worked for many years as a foreign exchange dealer but is now an art curator. He says the piece expresses “the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Or sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Related Content: 63 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online Haunting Unedited Footage of the Bombing of Nagasaki (1945) How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954 53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto 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 | The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film
Another man insults your honor, leaving you no choice but to challenge him to a highly formalized fight to the death: in the 21st century, the very idea strikes us as almost incomprehensibly of the past. And dueling is indeed dead, at least in all the lands that historically had the most enthusiasm for it, but it hasn't been dead for as long as we might assume. The last recorded duel performed not with pistols but swords (specifically épées, the largest type of swords used in fencing) took place in France in 1967 — the year of the Saturn V and the Boeing 737, the Detroit riots and the Six-Day War, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love. The duelists were Marseilles mayor Gaston Defferre and another politician names Rene Ribière. "After a clash in the National Assembly, Defferre yelled 'Taisez-vous, abruti!' at Ribiere and refused to apologize," writes professional stage-and-screen fight coordinator Jared Kirby. "Ribière challenged and Defferre accepted. The duel took place with épées in a private residence in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and it was officiated by Jean de Lipkowskiin." Heightening the drama, Ribière was to be married the following day, though he could expect to live to see his own wedding, Defferre having vowed not to kill him but "wound him in such a way as to spoil his wedding night very considerably." You can see the subsequent action of this relatively modern-day duel in the newsreel footage at the top of the post. Defferre did indeed land a couple of touches on Ribière, both in the arm. Ribière, the younger man by twelve years, seems to have taken the event even more seriously than Defferre: he insisted not only on using sharper épées than the ones Defferre originally offered, but on continuing the duel after Defferre first struck him. Lipkowskiin put an end to the combat after the second time, and both Defferre and Ribière went on to live full lives, the former into the 1980s and the latter into the 1990s. Just how considerable an effect Ribière's dueling injuries had on his wedding night, however, history has not recorded. Related Content: Watch a Witty, Gritty, Hardboiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton Duel Drunk History: An Intoxicated Look at the Famous Alexander Hamilton – Aaron Burr Duel A Demonstration of Perfect Samurai Swordsmanship Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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. The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film 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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