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Tuesday, May 18th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 4:57a | Introduction to Philosophy: A Free Online Course from the University of Edinburgh
Created by the University of Edinburgh, the online course Introduction to Philosophy introduces students to “some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. In each module, a different philosopher will talk [students] through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise.” The course begins by asking “what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects?” Then the online course (offered on the Coursera platform) provides an overview of several different areas of philosophy, including: Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, and Metaphysics. You can take Introduction to Philosophy for free by selecting the audit option when you enroll. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee. Introduction to Philosophy will be added to our list of Free Philosophy Courses, a subset of our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: Oxford’s Free Course Critical Reasoning For Beginners Teaches You to Think Like a Philosopher Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Free Online Course from Yale University Michael Sandel’s Free Course on Justice, the Most Popular Course at Harvard, Is Now Online
Introduction to Philosophy: A Free Online Course from the University of Edinburgh is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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.  |
| 8:00a | One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo System in the World
To make Fitzcarraldo, a movie about a rubber baron who drags a steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle, Werner Herzog famously arranged the actual dragging of an actual steamship over an actual hill in the actual Peruvian jungle. This endeavor ran into all the complications you’d expect and then some. But the reasonable question of whether it wouldn’t be wiser to cut his losses and head back to civilization prompted Herzog to make an artistically defining statement: “If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life, with this project.” Ken Fritz is a man with dreams, and the documentary above concerns one he pursued for nearly 30 years: that of building “the best stereo system in the world.” He set about realizing this dream in successful middle age, the time of life when the thoughts of no few men, he acknowledges, turn to audiophilia. But in Fritz’s case, the drive that made him a business success in the first place fixed his sights permanently on something more than a hi-fi fit for a man cave. Indeed, it entailed building something downright cavernous, a veritable concert hall of an addition to his house scaled to accommodate custom-made speaker towers and designed for the optimal dispersion of sound with a minimum of interference. Much of Fritz’s system is custom-made, most elaborately notably its three-armed, 1,500-pound “Frankenstein turntable.” How much did it cost asks his son Scott? “I’ve seen turntables that sell for $100,00, $120,000, and they’re nowhere near as complicated and as involved as this,” he says. But to the true audiophile, every investment is worth it, whether of money, time, or effort. For “once it’s built, if you don’t like it, if doesn’t work, you’re stuck with it. You just lie to yourself: ‘It sounds good.'” Fritz’s music room stands as a testament to his determination not to lie to himself — as well as to his love of music and will to give that love a concrete form. “I just cannot go day after day without accomplishing something,” Fritz says. “They say that when you’re retired, you shouldn’t have to do anything. I don’t buy that at all. Fortunately, all my goals have been fulfilled. I’ve built everything I’ve wanted to build.” This includes all his music room’s shelves and cabinets, each perfectly proportioned to the component it contains. And though a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has brought Fritz’s woodworking days to an end, it hasn’t put him off the notion that “if the mind doesn’t keep the body going, and the body doesn’t fulfill the thoughts that a man has, he becomes senseless. He might as well just pack it up.” Few of us will ever know the kind of satisfaction he must feel listening to Swan Lake, his favorite work of classical music, on the sound system that could fairly be called his life’s work. But many of us will wonder: how must “Deacon Blues” sound on it? Related Content: Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satirical Film About the Invention of the Audiophile (1959) Jimi Hendrix’s Home Audio System & Record Collection Gets Recreated in His London Flat How Steely Dan Wrote “Deacon Blues,” the Song Audiophiles Use to Test High-End Stereos 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. One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo System in the World is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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 | How to Take the Perfect Nap, According to Cognitive Scientist Sara Mednick
Napping is serious business, despite the fact that when some of us think of naps, we think about preschool. We’ve been taught to think of naps as something to outgrow. Yet as we age into adulthood, so many of us find it hard to get enough sleep. Millions currently suffer from sleep deprivation, whose effects range from memory loss to, well… death, if we credit the dire warnings of neuroscientist Matthew Walker. “Sleep,” Walker says, “is a non-negotiable biological necessity.” In light of the latest research, napping begins to seem more like urgent preventive care than an indulgence. In fact, sleep expert Sara Mednick says, naps are a “miracle drug” that “increases alertness, boosts creativity, reduces stress, improves perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, enhances your sex life,” helps you lose weight, feel happier, and so on, all without “dangerous side effects” and with a cost of nothing but time. If this sounds like hype, consider the quality of the source — Dr. Sara Mednick, a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and a fellow at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Mednick runs a “seven-bedroom sleep lab at UCI,” notes her site, that works “literally around-the-clock to discover methods for boosting cognition through a range of different interventions, including napping.” Maybe you’re sold on the benefits and simple pleasures of a nap — but maybe it’s been a few years since you’ve scheduled one. How long, exactly, should a grown-up nap last? The animated TED-Ed lesson above, scripted by Mednick, answers that question with a short course on sleep cycles: how we move through different stages as we snore, reaching the deepest sleep at stage 3 and concluding a cycle with R.E.M. The length of the nap we take can depend on the kinds of tasks we need to perform, and whether we need to wake up quickly and get on to other things.
Mednick expands substantially on her evidence-based advocacy for naps in her book Take a Nap! Change Your Life. (See her discuss her research on sleep and memory in the short video just above.) In the book’s introduction, she tells the story of her “journey from skeptic to nap advocate.” Here, she uses uses a different metaphor. Naps, she says, are a “secret weapon” — one she reached for just minutes before she stood up at the Salk Institute to present research on naps. “I never imagined,” she writes of her journey into napping, “that a healthy solution to facing life’s multiple challenges could be as simple and attainable as a short nap.” Given how much sleep we’re all losing lately, maybe it’s not so surprising after all. Related Content: Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health What Happens To Your Body & Brain If You Don’t Get Sleep? Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains Dr. Weil’s 60-Second Technique for Falling Asleep Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How to Take the Perfect Nap, According to Cognitive Scientist Sara Mednick is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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 | How to Shop Online & Check Your E-Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates
“Links between computers and television sets are, it is always threatened, about to herald in an age of unbelievable convenience,” announces television presenter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the sociability of going down to your corner shop to order the week’s groceries will be replaced with an order over the airwaves.” Do tell. Live though we increasingly do with internet-connected “smart TVs,” the only unfamiliar-sounding part of that prediction is its reference to television sets. But back then, most every home computer used them as displays, and when also plugged into the telephone line they granted users the previously unthinkable ability to make instant financial transactions at any hour of the day or night, without leaving the house.
Mundane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our entertainment online, paying bills was a draw for early adopters, who could come from unlikely places: Nottingham, for instance, the Nottingham Building Society being one of the first financial institutions in the world to offer online banking to its members. Closer to Thames Headquarters, North London couple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demonstrate how to use something called “e-mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and connect to Prestel (a national online network that in the United Kingdom played something like the role Minitel did in France), an “extremely simple” process that will look agonizingly complicated to anyone who grew up in the age of wi-fi.
I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Model 100, an early laptop inherited from my technophile grandfather. Bastable whips out the very same computer in the segment above, shot during Database‘s trip to Japan. “The big advantage of a piece of equipment like this is to be able to couple it up back to my home base over the telephone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, holding up the acoustic coupler designed to connect the Model 100 directly to a standard handset, in this case the pay phone in the front of the carriage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to England,” forcing him to check his messages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effortless experience connecting to wi-fi onboard a train crossing South Korea just yesterday. The future, to coin a phrase, is now. Related Content: How to Send an E-mail: A 1984 British Television Broadcast Explains This “Simple” Process From the Annals of Optimism: The Newspaper Industry in 1981 Imagines its Digital 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. How to Shop Online & Check Your E-Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, 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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