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Monday, February 22nd, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | De-Stress with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Director Hayao Miyazaki
What does it mean to describe something as relaxing? Most of us would agree that a relaxing thing is one that quiets both mind and body. There’s scientific evidence to support the stress-relieving, restorative effects of spending time in nature. Even go-go-go city slickers with a hankering for excitement and adventure tend to understand the concept of “relaxing” as something slow-paced and surprise-free. HBO Max is touting its collection of animation master Hayao Miyazaki‘s films with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Studio Ghibli, above. Will all of us experience those 30 minutes as “relaxing”? Maybe not. Studio Ghibli fans may find themselves gripped by a sort of trivia contest competitiveness, shouting the names of the films that supply these pastoral visions—Ponyo! Grave of the Fireflies!! Howl’s Moving Castle!!! Fledgling animators may feel as if they’ve swallowed a stone—no matter how hard I try, nothing I make will approach the beauty on display here. Sticklers—and there are plenty leaving comments on YouTube—may be irritated to realize that it’s actually not 30 but 6 minutes of visuals, looped 5 times. Insomniacs (such as this reporter) may wish there was more looping and less content. The selected scenery is tranquil enough, but the clips themselves are brief, leading to some jarring transitions. (One possible workaround for those hoping to lull themselves to sleep: fiddle with the speed settings. Played at .25 and muted, this compilation becomes very relaxing, much like artist Douglas Gordon’s video installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Leave the sound up and the lapping waves, gentle winds, and chuffing trains turn into something worthy of a slasher flick. Finally, with so much attention focussed on Mars these days, we can’t help imagining what alien life forms might make of these earthly visions—ahh, this green, sheep-dotted pasture does lower my stress level… wait, WTF was THAT!? Nothing on my home planet prepared me for the possibility of a monstrous winged house comprised of overgrown bagpipes and chicken legs lumbering through the countryside!
We concede that 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Studio Ghibli is a pleasant thing to have playing in the background as we wait for COVID restrictions to be lifted… but ultimately, you may find these 36 minutes of music from Studio Ghibli films more genuinely relaxing. via Kottke Related Content: A Magical Look Inside the Painting Process of Studio Ghibli Artist Kazuo Oga Studio Ghibli Puts Online 400 Images from Eight Classic Films, and Lets You Download Them for Free Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. De-Stress with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Director Hayao Miyazaki 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 | How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <div class="oc-video-container"http://cdn8.openculture.com/>
<p>Does turning the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 million pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Internet Archive, using Scribe, a specialized scanning machine invented by Archive engineers over 15 years ago. “Listening to 70s and 80s R&B while she works,” Wendy Hanamura writes at the <a href="http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-scanner-and-viral-video-star/">Internet Archive blog</a>, “Eliza spends a little time each day reading the dozens of books she handles. The most challenging part of her job? ‘Working with very old, fragile books.”</p>
<p>The fragile state and wide variety of the millions of books scanned by Zhang and the seventy-or-so other Scribe operators explains why this work has not been automated. “Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages,” says Andrea Mills, one of the leaders of the digitization team. “Our goal is to handle the book once and to care for the original as we work with it.”</p>
<blockquote><p><em>Raising the glass with a foot pedal, adjusting the two cameras, and shooting the page images are just the beginning of Eliza’s work. Some books, like the Bureau of Land Management publication featured in the video, have myriad fold-outs. Eliza must insert a slip of paper to remind her to go back and shoot each fold-out page, while at the same time inputting the page numbers into the item record. The job requires keen concentration.</em></p>
<p><em>If this experienced digitizer accidentally skips a page, or if an image is blurry, the publishing software created by our engineers will send her a message to return to the Scribe and scan it again.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>It’s not a job for the easily bored; “It takes concentration and a love of books,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. The painstaking process allows digitizers to preserve valuable books online while maintaining the integrity of physical copies. “We do not disbind the books,” says Kahle, a method that has allowed them to partner with hundreds of institutions around the world, digitizing 28 million texts over two decades. Many of those books are rare and valuable, and many have been deemed of little or no value. “Increasingly,”<a href="https://blog.archive.org/2021/02/03/internet-archives-modern-book-collection-now-tops-2-million-volumes/"> writes the Archive’s Chris Freeland</a>, “the Archive is preserving many books that would otherwise be lost to history or the trash bin.”</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1086972" src="https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594.png" alt="" srcset="https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594.png 960w, https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594-360x160.png 360w, https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594-240x107.png 240w, https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594-768x342.png 768w, https://cdn8.openculture.com/2021/02/19073038/The-dictionary-of-costume-Wikipedia-example-e1612283869594-300x133.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px" width="500"/></p>
<p>In one example, Freeland cites <a href="https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofcost0000wilc/page/n9/mode/2up"><em>The dictionary of costume</em></a>, “one of the millions of titles that reached the end of its publishing lifecycle in the 20th century.” It is also a work cited in Wikipedia, a key source for “students of all ages… in our connected world.” The Internet Archive has preserved the only copy of the book available online, making sure Wikipedia editors can verify the citation and researchers can use the book in perpetuity. If looking up the definition of “petticoat” in an out-of-print reference work seems trivial, consider that the Archive digitizes about 3,500 books every day in its 18 digitization centers. (<em>The dictionary of costume</em> was identified as the Archive’s 2 millionth “modern book.”)</p>
<p>Libraries “have been vital in times of crisis,” <a href="https://www.apollo-magazine.com/public-libraries-in-times-of-crisis-covid-pandemic/">writes Alistair Black</a>, emeritus <a href="https://ischool.illinois.edu/people/alistair-black">professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois</a>, and “the coronavirus pandemic may prove to be a challenge that dwarfs the many episodes of anxiety and crisis through which the public library has lived in the past.” A huge part of our combined global crises involves access to reliable information, and book scanners at the Internet Archive are key agents in preserving knowledge. The collections they digitize “are critical to educating an informed populace at a time of massive disinformation and misinformation,” says Kahle. When asked what she liked best about her job, Zhang replied, “Everything! I find everything interesting…. Every collection is important to me.”</p>
<p>The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. Enter <a href="https://archive.org/details/texts">the collection here.</a></p>
<p><strong>Related Content: </strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.openculture.com/2019/09/libraries-archivists-are-digitizing-480000-books.html">Libraries & Archivists Are Digitizing 480,000 Books Published in 20th Century That Are Secretly in the Public Domain</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.openculture.com/2020/10/10000-vintage-recipe-books-are-now-digitized.html">10,000 Vintage Recipe Books Are Now Digitized in The Internet Archive’s Cookbook & Home Economics Collection</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.openculture.com/2019/05/classic-childrens-books-now-digitized-and-put-online.html">Classic Children’s Books Now Digitized and Put Online: Revisit Vintage Works from the 19th & 20th Centuries</a></p>
<p><a href="http://about.me/jonesjoshua"><em>Josh Jones</em></a><em> is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/jdmagness">@jdmagness</a></em></p>
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| 3:00p | Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Gives 36 Lectures on Our Future World: Education, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More
Given recent events, 2019 may now seem to us like the distant past. But to those who were thinking hard about the future the year before last, nothing that has happened since has been wholly unexpected — and especially not to those who’d already been thinking hard about the future for decades. Take Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and writer on technology as well as a host of other subjects. It was in 2019 that state telecommunications company China Mobile commissioned him to give a series of 36 short video lectures on the “Future of X”: not the future of the internet in China and the future of India in competition with China, but a range of topics that will surely affect us all, no matter our part of the world.
Self-driving cars, virtual reality, 5G, robots: Kelly has given consideration to all these much-discussed technologies and the roles they may come to play in our lives. But the important thing about them isn’t to know what form they’ll take in the future, since by definition no one can, but to develop habits of mind that allow you to grasp as wide a variety of their possibilities as you can right now. The future, as Kelly frames it in his talk on uncertainties, consists of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Those last, better known as “black swans,” are events “completely unexpected by anybody” that “change the world forever.” As examples of possible black swans to come he names World War Three, the discovery of cheap fusion energy, and, yes, a pandemic.
Societal preparation for the future, to Kelly’s mind, will involve developing “a very systematic way of collecting these unknown unknowns and turning them into known unknowns.” Personal preparation for the future, according to his talk on schools and learning, will involve ceaseless acquisition and refinement of knowledge and understanding.
If we want to thrive in an uncertain future, he argues, we should “adopt a method of learning called deliberate practice, falling forward or failing forward,” in which we keep pushing ourselves into unknown intellectual territory, always remaining “newbies” at something, assisted all the while by technology.
Just a couple of decades into the 21st century, we’ve already caught a glimpse of what technology can do to optimize our learning process — or simply to enable learning where it wouldn’t happen otherwise. “I don’t imagine that we’re going to go away from a classroom,” Kelly says, but we also “have the online video world, and more and more people today are learning how to do an amazing variety of things, that we wouldn’t have thought would work on video.”
Of course, since he spoke those words, one black swan in particular has pushed much of humanity away from the classroom, and we’ve found out a good deal more about what kind of learning works (and doesn’t) over the internet. The future, it seems, is now. You can watch the full playlist of videos, all 36 of them, below. Related Content: What Technology Wants: Kevin Kelly @ Google The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Predicting the Future Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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. Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Gives 36 Lectures on Our Future World: Education, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More 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. |
| 4:00p | The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion
Some YouTuber posted online a pretty nice clip of an espresso shot being pulled from a La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine at 120 frames per second. They recommend muting the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous soundtrack for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll be damned, it syncs up pretty well. Have a better soundtrack to recommend? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.
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: Coffee Entrepreneur Renato Bialetti Gets Buried in the Espresso Maker He Made Famous How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972) Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Printed Circa 1652 The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion 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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