COURSEKEEPER.COMPlay Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map
Scholars of ancient history and IT experts at Stanford University have collaborated to create a novel way to study Ancient Rome. ORBIS, a geospatial network model, allows visitors to experience the strategy behind travel in antiquity. (Find a handy tutorial for using the system on the Web and YouTube). The ORBIS map includes about 750 mostly urban settlements of the Roman period. Users of the model can select a point of origin and destination for a trip and then choose from a number of options to determine either the cheapest, fastest or shortest route. Select river or open sea transport for the cheapest route. Pick road travel by pack animal or wagon for the shortest, but most expensive, trip. In creating ORBIS, historians used ancient maps and records along with modern-day weather information and results from experiments sailing in ancient-style ships to calculate the travel conditions of 2,000 years ago.
Aside from the site’s interactivity, there’s enough discussion in ORBIS about ancient Roman transport to satisfy the biggest history buff but the real fun is in exploring how people and goods were moved across the empire. Cities on the edge of the empire, for example, were more expensive to transport to, even if they weren’t that far away. All trips vary in time and cost, however, depending upon the time of year and mode of travel. The fastest route to deliver wheat from Carthago (modern-day Tunisia) to Londinium (London) would take more than 27 days under the best travel conditions (during July). Cargo would move across the Mediterranean by open sea, across southwestern France by riverboat and along the coast to southeastern England. The cost? A little less than 8 dinarii per kilogram of wheat using a donkey for land transport. Compare that to other routes that eliminate the open sea during winter months, or road travel to save money, and you’re close to understanding why it was no picnic ruling the Roman Empire.
Play Caesar: Travel Ancient Rome with Stanford’s Interactive Map is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
Einstein Explains His Famous Formula, E=mc², in Original Audio (Plus More Cultural Curiosities)
Last week we played for you the only known recording of Sigmund Freud’s voice (1938). Now it’s time to revive the voice of another intellectual giant, Albert Einstein. In this recording, the physicist offers the briefest explanation of the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2. When was this recorded? We’re unfortunately not sure. Let’s just say somewhere between the time Einstein worked out the equation in 1905 and his death in 1955. Somewhere in those 50 years, give or take a few. Don’t miss the recently-opened Einstein archive and many free Physics courses in our collection of Free Online Courses from top universities.
Now it’s time for more good culture links, all previously featured on our Twitter stream.
BBC Radio 4 Profile of William S. Burroughs Narrated by Laurie Anderson (2008)
The New Yorker Wants You to Write a Facebook Status Update for any Literary Character
The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You and Why
New Yorker Covers That Were Too Provocative to Print
Oxford University’s Lectures on Great Writers and Why They Inspire (on iTunes)
Ancient Language Discovered on Clay Tablets Found in 2800 Year Old Middle Eastern Palace
Graphing Jane Austen: Using Science to Extrapolate the Human Condition from Victorian Literature
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Live in Sanremo, Italy 1963. 54 Minutes of Vintage Jazz
Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize Winning Chemist, Recounts His Moving Story of Hiding from the Nazis
Janis Joplin’s Last Interview on The Dick Cavett Show
Picasso’s Light Drawings: Still Shining from 1949
Albanian Refugee Works as Janitor by Day, Student by Night, Earns Columbia Degree with Honors at 52
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Einstein Explains His Famous Formula, E=mc², in Original Audio (Plus More Cultural Curiosities) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
The Miracle of Flight, the Classic Early Animation by Terry Gilliam
As Michael Palin once put it, “there’s no getting away from the wit, wonder and wizardry of the man Cahiers du Cinéma once described as Terry Gilliam.”
Those qualities are clearly visible in this very funny early film by Gilliam called The Miracle of Flight. The film was made in 1971 for the American-British TV show The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine. Monty Python was on hiatus that year, so Gilliam went to work for the short-lived Comedy Machine, creating the opening credit sequence and various animated features using his trademark airbrush and paper cutout techniques. (Watch his primer on doing your own cutout animation here.) The material for The Miracle of Flight was apparently packaged as a stand-alone film in 1974, right after Gilliam’s first film, Storytime. It was later used as a bonus feature before theatrical screenings of Gilliam movies, and during live Python performances. The film version is slightly different from the one aired on the Comedy Machine. According to Smarter Than The Average, “for the theatrical version it lost a grizzly punchline where a man who had failed at his attempt to fly by emulating the ergonomics of a bird takes his revenge by ripping the bird to pieces.” The writer then goes on to describe details only a Python fanatic could notice:
The Miracle of Flight in particular is a cornucopia of oddities for the Python connoisseur, containing as it does one line recorded by Terry Jones, the tarred-and-feathered character who appears in Animations of Mortality, the mountain in the finale of the Meaning of Life computer game and the animated woman from Python who says “Turn that television off–you know it’s bad for your eyes”. Most baffling of all is the muzak in the airport terminal, which is the same as used in the Dental sequence of the Meaning of Life CD-Rom nearly thirty years later. For sheer numbers of Python iconography appearing in a non-Python production, The Miracle of Flight‘s only rival is Eric Idle’s music video for George Harrison’s Crackerbox Palace. But I digress.
Indeed. But we enjoyed it. And you’ll enjoy The Miracle of Flight, which might more accurately be called The Triumph of Gravity.
The Miracle of Flight has been added to the Animation section of our big collection of 475 Free Movies Online.
The Miracle of Flight, the Classic Early Animation by Terry Gilliam is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
Morgan Freeman Teaches Kids to Read in Vintage Electric Company Footage from 1971
Every actor has to start somewhere, and Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption, and Million Dollar Baby) could have done worse than joining the cast of The Electric Company, the PBS children’s television series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The original cast included Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno (not bad company), and the versatile Freeman played a series of characters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vincent the Vegetable Vampire,” and then, of course, Easy Reader. If you’re of my generation, you might recognize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Reader (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rider) in action, teaching kids to read in his effortlessly cool, hipster way. H/T Metafilter
Morgan Freeman Teaches Kids to Read in Vintage Electric Company Footage from 1971 is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
Studs Terkel Reads Pete Seeger Poem ‘Blessed be the Nation’
Studs Terkel would have turned 100 years old today. A legendary broadcaster and the author of ground-breaking oral histories of the American experience in the 20th century–including his Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of World War II, The Good War–Terkel was a beloved cultural figure in his native Chicago up until his death in October, 2008. The headline of his New York Times obituary called him “Listener to Americans.” It was an apt phrase. “The thing I’m able to do, I guess, is break down walls,” Terkel once said. “If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation than an interview.” With Studs, they talked.
To celebrate his 100th birthday we bring you a little clip from the “Eight Forty-Eight” show on Chicago public radio station WBEZ, with a listener calling in from his car to play a reading by Terkel of a poem written by Pete Seeger and Jim Musselman called “Blessed be the Nation.” It’s from the 1998 tribute album Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger. The brief clip reveals something of Terkel’s values, and of the esteem in which he is still held in the Windy City.
Studs Terkel Reads Pete Seeger Poem ‘Blessed be the Nation’ is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
True Story: The Time Pixar Almost Deleted Toy Story 2
During the late 1980s, two short films – Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy – saved Pixar from bankruptcy. During the late 1990s, another film, Toy Story 2, almost created a financial catastrophe for the company. In this clip excerpted from the Blu-ray version of the film, Oren Jacob (former CTO of Pixar) and Galyn Susman (Pixar producer) remember the time when Toy Story 2 nearly became the victim of the computers that generated it. One command — RM* — almost deleted an award-winning film that went on to make $ 485 million at the box office. via Kottke
True Story: The Time Pixar Almost Deleted Toy Story 2 is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.
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