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Thursday, January 16th, 2025
- Google: Over 1,000 free certificates and badges in topics like digital marketing, Android development, and AI.
- Harvard: Free certificates for their popular CS50 series and other online courses.
- Stanford Medicine: Medical courses offering free certificates and CME credit.
- LinkedIn Learning: 110+ hours of free certifications in business, technology, and design.
- Semrush Academy: 90+ courses with free certificates focused on marketing and SEO.
- CodeSignal: 700+ free skill certifications to validate coding, technical abilities, and soft skills.
| Time | Event |
| 1:59a | 10,000+ Free Online Certificates & Badges: A Resource for Lifelong Learners
For those looking to boost their skills or explore new fields without breaking the bank, Class Central has done the heavy lifting. Known as a search engine for online courses, Class Central has compiled what might be the largest collection of free online certificates and badges available anywhere. From tech giants like Google and Microsoft to elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, this list covers a diverse range of subjects and skill sets. There was a time when the world’s top universities used to offer free certificates for completing online courses. While most of those certificates are no longer free, many of the courses themselves remain open to learners, covering topics like Computer Science, Literature, and Business. Certificates can serve as both motivation and proof of achievement for completing online courses. While platforms like Coursera and edX have moved toward paid certifications, a surprising number of free options remain — if you know where to look. Thankfully, Class Central’s guide makes it easy to find these opportunities. What’s Included in the Guide? The article organizes free certificate offerings by providers, including: If you’re ready to explore the full list of free courses and certifications, head over to Class Central’s detailed guide: Massive List of Thousands of Free Certificates and Badges. It’s a treasure trove for anyone looking to learn something new, enhance their resume, or simply satisfy their curiosity — all for free!
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| 3:36p | Freddie Mercury & David Bowie’s Isolated Vocals for Queen’s “Under Pressure” (1981)
In the summer of 1981, the British band Queen was recording tracks for their tenth studio album, Hot Space, at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland. As it happened, David Bowie had scheduled time at the same studio to record the title song for the movie Cat People. Before long, Bowie stopped by the Queen sessions and joined in. The original idea was that he would add backup vocals on the song “Cool Cat.” “David came in one night and we were playing other people’s songs for fun, just jamming,” says Queen drummer Roger Taylor in Mark Blake’s book Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Freddie Mercury and Queen. “In the end, David said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t we just write one?’ ” And so began a marathon session of nearly 24 hours, fueled, according to Blake, by wine and cocaine. Built around John Deacon’s distinctive bass line, the song was mostly written by Mercury and Bowie. Blake describes the scene, beginning with the recollections of Queen’s guitarist: ‘We felt our way through a backing track all together as an ensemble,’ recalled Brian May. ‘When the backing track was done, David said, “Okay, let’s each of us go in the vocal booth and sing how we think the melody should go–just off the top of our heads–and we’ll compile a vocal out of that.” And that’s what we did.’ Some of these improvisations, including Mercury’s memorable introductory scatting vocal, would endure on the finished track. Bowie also insisted that he and Mercury shouldn’t hear what the other had sung, swapping verses blind, which helped give the song its cut-and-paste feel. “It was very hard,” said May in 2008, “because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. Passions ran very high. I found it very hard because I got so little of my own way. But David had a real vision and he took over the song lyrically.” The song was originally titled “People on Streets,” but Bowie wanted it changed to “Under Pressure.” When the time came to mix the song at Power Station studios in New York, Bowie insisted on being there. “It didn’t go too well,” Blake quotes Queen’s engineer Reinhold Mack as saying. “We spent all day and Bowie was like, ‘Do this, do that.’ In the end, I called Freddie and said, ‘I need help here,’ so Fred came in as a mediator.” Mercury and Bowie argued fiercely over the final mix. At one point Bowie threatened to block the release of the song, but it was issued to the public on October 26, 1981 and eventually rose to Number One on the British charts. It was later named the number 31 song on VH1’s list of the 100 greatest songs of the 1980s. “ ‘Under Pressure’ is a significant song for us,” May said in 2008, “and that is because of David and its lyrical content. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now.… But one day, I would love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.” After listening to the isolated vocal track above, you can hear the officially released 1981 mix below:
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013. Related Content: Watch David Bowie & Annie Lennox in Rehearsal, Singing “Under Pressure,” with Queen (1992) The Making of Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 Hit “Under Pressure”: Demos, Studio Sessions & More 200 Bassists Play the Famous Bass Line of Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”
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| 4:30p | Watch Design for Disaster, a 1962 Film That Shows Why Los Angeles Is Always at Risk of Devastating Fires
“This is fire season in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion once wrote, relating how every year “the Santa Ana winds start blowing down through the passes, and the relative humidity drops to figures like seven or six or three per cent, and the bougainvillea starts rattling in the driveway, and people start watching the horizon for smoke and tuning in to another of those extreme local possibilities — in this instance, that of imminent devastation.” The New Yorker published this piece in 1989, when Los Angeles’ fire season was “a particularly early and bad one,” but it’s one of many writings on the same phenomenon now circulating again, with the highly destructive Palisades Fire still burning away. Back in 1989, longtime Angelenos would have cited the Bel Air Fire of 1961 as a particularly vivid example of what misfortune the Santa Ana winds could bring. Widely recognized as a byword for affluence (not unlike the now virtually obliterated Pacific Palisades), Bel Air was home to the likes of Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Joan Fontaine, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Aldous Huxley — all of whose houses counted among the 484 destroyed in the conflagration (in which, miraculously, no lives were lost). You can see the Bel Air Fire and its aftermath in “Design for Disaster,” a short documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department and narrated by William Conrad (whose voice would still have been instantly recognizable as that of Marshal Matt Dillon from the golden-age radio drama Gunsmoke). Los Angeles’ repeated affliction by these blazes is perhaps overdetermined. The factors include not just the dreaded Santa Anas, but also the geography of its canyons, the dryness of the vegetation in its chaparral (not, pace Didion, desert) ecology, and the inability of its water-delivery system to meet such a sudden and enormous need (which also proved fateful in the Palisades Fire). It didn’t help that the typical house at the time was built with “a combustible roof; wide, low eaves to catch sparks and fire; and a big picture window to let the fire inside,” nor that such dwellings were “closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads.” The Bel Air Fire brought about a wood-shingle roof ban and a more intensive brush-clearance policy, but the six decades of fire seasons since do make one wonder what kind of measures, if any, could ever subdue these particular forces of nature. via Boing Boing Related content: NASA Captures the World on Fire When Steve Buscemi Was a Firefighter — and Took It Up Again After 9/11 Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961) Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films Behold 19th-Century Japanese Firemen’s Coats, Richly Decorated with Mythical Heroes & Symbols Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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