[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Wednesday, May 26th, 2021
| Time | Event |
| 5:03a | Creative Thinking: A Free Online Course from Imperial College London
From Peter Childs (Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London) comes a free course that explores creative thinking techniques, and how to apply them to everyday problems and global challenges. The course description for Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success reads:
You can take Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success for free by selecting the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee. Creative Thinking will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: The Long Game of Creativity: If You Haven’t Created a Masterpiece at 30, You’re Not a Failure David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity Creative Thinking: A Free Online Course from Imperial College London 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 | Who Decides What Words Get Into the Dictionary?
Once upon a time, we were made to believe that words could never acquire sticks and stones’ capacity to wound. Talk about a maxim no longer worth the paper it was printed on! Language is organic. Definitions, usage, and our response to particular words evolve over time. Lexicographer Ilan Stavans’ TED-Ed lesson, Who Decides What’s in the Dictionary?, rolls the clock back to 1604, when schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey assembled the first English language dictionary “for the benefit of Ladies, Gentlewomen, and other unskilled folk.” Other English dictionaries soon followed, expanding on the 2,543 words Cawdrey had seen fit to include. His fellow authors shared Cawdrey’s prescriptive goal of educating the rabble, to keep them from butchering the high-minded tongue the self-appointed guardian considered it his duty to protect. Wordsmith Samuel Johnson, the primary author of 1775’s massive A Dictionary of the English Language, described his mission as one in which “the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.” Lest we think Johnson overly impressed with the importance of his lofty mission, he submitted the following gently self-mocking definition of Lexicographer:
150 years later, Ambrose Bierce offered an opposing view in his delightfully wicked dictionary:
Stavans points to brothers George and Charles Merriam’s acquisition of the rights to Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) as a moment when our concept of what a dictionary should be began to shift. Webster, working by himself, set out to collect and document English as it was used on these shores. The Merriams engaged a group of language experts to curate subsequent editions, striking a blow for the idiom by including slang and regional variants. A good start, though they excluded anything they found unfit for the general consumption at the time, including expressions born in the Black community. Their editorializing was of a piece with prevailing views — see “wife.” But humans, like language, evolve. These days, lexicographers monitor the Internet for new words to be considered for upcoming editions, including profanity and racial slurs. If a word’s use is judged to be widespread, sustained and meaningful, in it goes… even though some might find it objectionable, or even, yes, hurtful. Stavans wraps his lesson up by drawing our attention to Merriam-Webster’s tradition of anointing one entry to Word of the Year, drawn from statistical analysis of the words people look up in extremely high numbers. “They” got the nod in 2019, a testament to how deeply non-binary gender expression has permeated the collective consciousness and national conversation. The runner up? Impeach. Care to guess which word 2020 placed in the dictionary’s path? Related Content: How a Word Enters the Dictionary: A Quick Primer Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Who Decides What Words Get Into the Dictionary? 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. |
| 11:00a | Real D-Day Landing Footage, Enhanced & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence (June 6, 1944)
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan drew great acclaim for its harrowing depiction of “D-Day,” the 1944 Allied landing operation that proved a decisive blow against Nazi Germany. More specifically, Spielberg and his creators recreated the landing on Omaha Beach, one of five code-named stretches of the Normandy coast. The video above depicts the landing on another, Juno Beach. This, its uploader stresses, “is not the famous movie D-day the Sixth of June but actual and real footage.” No wonder it feels more realistic than that 1956 Henry Koster spectacle — and, in another way, more so than Spielberg’s picture, whose use of not just color and widescreen dimensions but advanced visual effects made World War II visceral in a way even those who’d never seen combat could feel. The taking of Omaha Beach was assigned to the United States Army, with support from the U.S. Coast Guard as well as the U.S., British, Canadian and Free French navies. As such, it made a suitable inclusion indeed for an American war story like Saving Private Ryan. Juno Beach, however, was primarily a Canadian job: that country’s army landed there under support from the Royal Canadian Navy (with additional help from several other Allied navies). As on Omaha Beach, the troops who first landed on Juno Beach came under heavy German fire and sustained serious casualties. But within two hours the Allied forced managed to overcome these coastal defenses and began making their way inland — a direction in which the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division managed to push farther than any of D-Day’s other landing forces. These Juno Beach D-Day clips benefit from a technology unavailable even in Saving Private Ryan‘s day: artificial intelligence-based enhancement and colorization processes. Originally shot in black-and-white like most (but not all) Army footage of the 1940s, it’s been “motion-stabilized, contrast- and brightness-enhanced, de-noised, upscaled, restored to full HD and artificially colorized.” The result looks crisp enough that anyone without first-hand memories of the Western Front — a generation, alas, now fast leaving the stage — may well forget that it isn’t a war film but a film of war. None of the participants are re-enactors: not the Allied troops boarding their boats by the hundreds, not General Dwight D. Eisenhower, not the German prisoners of war, and certainly not the wounded and dead. What’s more, none of their actions are rehearsed: as the 77th anniversary of D-Day approaches, we should remember that, whatever the bravery on their faces, not one of these men could have felt assured of victory. Related Content: The Normandy Invasion Captured on 16 mm Kodachrome Film (1944) Photo Archive Lets You Download 4,300 High-Res Photographs of the Historic Normandy Invasion Dramatic Color Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945) Bryan Cranston Narrates the Landing on Omaha Beach on the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day Invasion David Lynch Recounts His Surreal Dream of Being a German Solider Dying on D-Day 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. Real D-Day Landing Footage, Enhanced & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence (June 6, 1944) 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. |
| 2:06p | The Creation & Restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Animated
With The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo intended less to tell a story than to mount a defense of Gothic architecture, which in the early 19th century was being demolished in cities all across France. The book‘s original purpose is more clearly reflected by its original title, Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482, and the titular medieval cathedral’s importance to the capital for nearly two centuries now owes a great deal to the novelist’s advocacy. Hugo would no doubt be pleased by the effort that has gone into preserving Notre-Dame into the 21st century, share in the feelings of devastation that followed the fire of April 2019, and admire the spirit that motivated commencement of the restoration work immediately thereafter.
Or rather, the commencement of the stabilization work immediately thereafter: given the extent of the damage, the then-674-year-old structure had first to be made safe to restore. The AFP News Agency video above explains and visualizes that process, a complex and difficult one in itself. The first priority was to protect the exposed areas of the cathedral from the elements and shore up their flying buttresses (a signature structural element of Gothic architecture) to prevent collapse. Melted together by the fire, sections of scaffolding that had been set up for previous restoration work also posed considerable difficulties to remove without harming the building. As for the rubble heaped inside, sorting through it required conducting a 3D scan, then bringing in remote-controlled robots and a team of archaeologists.
“I saw the disaster unfolding before me,” says one such archaeologist, Olivier Puaux, in the Radio France Internationale video just above. “It was so sad that I went home before the spire fell.” But just a month later he returned to work on the ambitious restoration project, several of whose workers appear to share their experience with its challenges, dangers, and perhaps unexpected learning opportunities. Removing and sorting through all the fallen wood, stone, and other materials — some of which came through the blaze in re-usable condition — has provided new insights into the cathedral’s construction. Even its very nails, says Puaux, turn out on close inspection to be “very large, very well forged.” As distressed as Victor Hugo may have felt about Notre-Dame’s future, its original builders were surely confident that they were creating a survivor. Related Content: How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral A Virtual Time-Lapse Recreation of the Building of Notre Dame (1160) Notre Dame Captured in an Early Photograph, 1838 Take an Aerial Tour of Medieval Paris 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. The Creation & Restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Animated 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. |
| << Previous Day |
2021/05/26 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |