Richard Muller teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents. You can download the course in audio (iTunes - Feed - MP3s) or watch it on YouTube (see first lecture below and get full course here). And now you can buy Muller’s new book. Just published by W.W. Norton, Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines gives citizens the scientific knowledge they need to understand critical issues facing our society — is “Iran’s nascent nuclear capability … a genuine threat to the West,” are there “viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government,” and should “nuclear power should be encouraged.” These issues (and more) get tackled here. For more info on the book, you can listen to a good interview conducted this morning (mp3) here in San Francisco.

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A good find by the folks at BoingBoing: Dementia 13, Francis Ford Coppola’s slasher/thriller from 1963, can be downloaded for free over at Archive.org (which is where you can also download a nice version of Orwell’s 1984).You can watch an embedded version below, or download an AVI file here. Here’s the gist of the plot: “An old Irish family is haunted by dark secrets around the death of a little girl seven years earlier. Two women, one married into the family and one soon to be, start unraveling the secrets at a price that couldn’t have imagined.” And, if you haven’t already, feel free to subscribe to our feed.

What’s the “theoretical minimum” for thinking intelligently about modern physics? Here’s your chance to find out. Below, you will find three courses (the first of eventually six) presented by Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who helped conceptualize string theory and has waged a long-running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking (see his new book on that subject here). Freely available on iTunes and YouTube (see below), these video lectures trace the beginnings of modern theoretical physics, taking you from Isaac Newton (or Newtonian Mechanics) to Albert Einstein’s work on the general and special theories of relativity. Notably, these courses were originally presented within Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, which means that the content was pitched to an audience much like you — that is, smart people who don’t necessarily have an extensive knowledge of physics. Watch the video below — the first lecture that kicks off the series of courses — and you will see what I mean.

Finally, in case you’re wondering, the next three courses (covering quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, cosmology, black holes, and more) will be presented this coming academic year and, once taped, we will give you a heads up. Sign up for our RSS Feed and you will be sure to get an update. Also see our collection of Free Online Courses for many more courses along these lines.

Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum

• Classical Mechanics (Fall 2007) iTunes YouTube
• Quantum Mechanics (Winter 2008)  iTunes YouTube
• Special Relativity (Spring 2008) iTunes YouTube

Bonus Material

In 2006-2007, Susskind taped a separate series of lectures on Quantum Mechanics. You can download them as free video lectures as well:

• Fall 2006 iTunes YouTube
• Spring 2007 iTunes YouTube

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What can you say about this? A quick trip back to the 1950s… File this under Random …

(For foreign readers, all you need to know is that The Flintstones was a classic American cartoon.)

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Rewind the Videotape: Mike Wallace Interviews 1950s Celebrities

Joerg, one of our readers, wrote us rather joyfully and declared: “Today I found the site of my dreams: Supposedly most of the greatest new documentaries can be watched online” and they’re “financed by ads.” The site is called SnagFilms, and indeed, it finds “the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and mak[es] them available to the wide audience these titles deserve.” In exchange for making the films free, you do have to sit through some ads, but it is perhaps a small price to pay. Below we have posted Super Size Me, the 2004 documentary by Morgan Spurlock, which offers some startling commentary on the fast food industry. Other notable titles include the 2004 rock documentary Dig!, Under Our Skin, and Run Granny Run. You can see their full collection here.

And, by the way, if you’re wondering whether the site is legit, you just need to know that the Chairman of the organization is Ted Leonsis, a former major executive from AOL.

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YouTube’s New Screening Room (Free Indie Films)

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How does modern neuroscience make sense of the current McCain-Obama race? Have a listen to Christopher Lydon’s fascinating conversation with George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (iTunes - MP3 - Feed - Web Site).

Lakoff is the author of the new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, and he’s essentially arguing here that the Democrats have traditionally framed their arguments with a cold rationalism …. and lost … while the Republicans have grounded theirs in a kind of emotionalism that squares with how the brain functions. But, with Obama, things are starting to change…

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In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead “3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects.” And the video was made entirely with visualizations of that data. You can watch the video below and find out more about the making of the video here.

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I want to send a quick apology to our email subscribers. Long story short, we encountered some problems with our email subscription list over the past week (problems that we’re beyond our control). But things are working again, and I wanted to highlight some of the posts you may have missed. Sorry again. And here it goes:

• 70 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube
• 10 New iPhone Apps for the Thinking Person
• Download Paul Coelho’s Bestseller, “The Alchemist,” for Free on iTunes
• Stephen Colbert Reads Joyce’s Ulysses
• The African-American Freedom Struggle & Barack Obama’s American Dream (Free Stanford Course)
• The First Unintended Horror Film (1895)?
• Online Courses in the Age of High Gas Prices
• Architecture in Motion
• Will Google Kill Science?
• Seymour Hersh Reveals Covert Operations In Iran
• E=mc²: Einstein Explains His Famous Formula
• Animated Version of Howard Zinn’s History of the American Empire
• Craphound: Download Cory Doctorow’s Short Story via Free MP3 (and other Goodies)

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Now featured in The YouTube Screening Room: Jake Polonsky’s School of Life. “The film may be set in an elementary school, but it tells a poignantly ironic story that any adult will relate to. School of Life won the 2004 British Independent Film Award for Best Short.” A higher quality version can be watched here. But make sure you have a high speed connection.

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How about a blog post that doesn’t deal with the controversy surrounding The New Yorker’s clumsy attempt at satirizing Barack and Michelle Obama …. ? (Update: See the imagined, right-wing satirical cartoon of John McCain.)

When Stanford launched its new YouTube channel several weeks ago, it debuted with a complete series of lectures from an undergraduate course called “African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle.” Taught by Clayborne Carson, a prominent history professor who has edited and published the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., the course overviews the struggle for liberty and complete equality, moving from W.E.B. Du Bois (early 20th century), to MLK and Malcolm X, down to Barack Obama today. The lecture below, entitled “Barack Obama’s American Dream,” situates Obama within the larger sweep of African-American history. It’s rather conversational in style, and it does a good job of getting into Obama’s personal biography. The complete lectures can be watched in their entirety on YouTube here, or downloaded in video via iTunes. And be sure to see our larger collection of 250 Free Online Courses from Leading Universities, where you will also find this course.

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Howard Zinn, a historian from Boston University, best known for his book People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, has been brought to YouTube. This video presents an animated version of Zinn’s essay, Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire. Zinn cartoon-style, here it goes (and you can otherwise find it on our YouTube playlist):

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Here’s a free audio version of Craphound, the first short story published by Cory Doctorow, who is otherwise known for his new book, Little Brother, and for his work on the very popular BoingBoing blog. (As an fyi, you can find an alternative reading of the same story here.)

Looking for more free downloads? Try the items below.

George Orwell’s 1984: Download Free Audio Book Version

Download Paul Coelho’s Bestseller, “The Alchemist,” for Free on iTunes

Scott Sigler’s Infected: Free via Podcast, $16.47 on Amazon

Free Audio Book Collection

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Smart video collections keep appearing on YouTube. But rather antithetical to the ethos of its parent company (Google), YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find. So we’ve decided to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits. There are about 70 collections in total, and the list will grow over time. If we’re missing anything good, feel free to let us know, and we’ll happily add them. You can find the complete list below the jump.

Also, feel free to check out our YouTube playlist.

(more…)

In advance of tomorrow’s release of the new 3G iPhone, Apple has launched its new App Store on iTunes, which features new tools that will immediately make the iPhone (and iPod Touch) a more versatile — and, in some cases, enlightening — device. Below, we have highlighted ten apps worth exploring if you’re hungry for enriching information. 9 of the 10 are free. (Please note: To access the App Store, you will need to download the latest version of iTunes (here) and also the new iPhone 2.0 firmware, which has yet to be officially released — although you can find an unofficial release and directions on how to install it here. The official release should be coming any time now.)

1.) The New York Times: Thanks to this app, you can read “All the News That’s Fit to Print” on your iPhone. It lets you customize the news you read, and also read articles offline.

2.) AOL Radio: One downside to the first generation iPhone is that it didn’t allow you to access internet radio. This app helps to change some of that. It gives you access to 150 CBS radio stations across the US, including some key news stations.

3.) Mandarin Audio Phrasebook: Lonely Planet, the publisher of fine travel guides, has produced a free Mandarin audio phrasebook, which includes 630 commonly used phrases. Via the iPhone you can hear how the phrases are spoken (and also see how they are phonetically written). For $9.99, you can purchase phrasebooks in nine other languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese and Czech. See full collection here.

4.) Truveo Video Search: The Wall Street Journal calls Truveo the “best web-wide video-search engine.” And now, with this Truveo app, you can use the iPhone to find videos from across the web, and, regardless of their format, play them all in one application. This sounds like a great addition, especially since many videos weren’t playable on 1st generation iPhones.

5.) NetNewsWire: With this app, you can add an RSS reader to the iPhone, allowing you to read RSS feeds in a neat and clean way. It also lets you “clip” articles that you like and read them later. Don’t forget to sign up for our feed, and you can always add more cultural feeds by perusing our list of 100 Culture Blogs.

6.) Google Mobile App: Let’s face it. In today’s information world, Google is a must-have. And so it’s nice to have an app that makes Google and its many functionalities completely iPhone friendly.

7.) AppEngines E-Books: For 99 cents, you can download a classic e-book to your iPhone, and read it in a quite legible format. In this collection, you will find Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, Dickens’ Great Expectations, and about 40 other e-books.

8.) Talking Spanish Phrasebook: Too busy to learn a new language? Then you’re in luck. This app will do the talking for you. It takes basic phrases in English and then converts them into spoken Spanish. There are also free versions in French, German, and Italian.

9.) Epocrates: This free app turns your iPhone into a comprehensive drug database. Very handy for the medical community.

10.) NearPics: If you’re traveling, and if you want to discover great places nearby, this app lets you discover pictures that have been taken in the vicinity. The app offers a way to discover intriguing places (or things) that normally fly below the radar. Also, this other app lets you put Flickr on your iPhone. More ways to satisfy your inner photographer.

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10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget

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The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into 56 languages. A huge bestseller, in short. Here it is unabridged and free. I am not sure how long this offer will last. So I would grab it sooner than later — and while you’re at it, don’t forget to look through our collection of free audio books.

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A contribution (which we always welcome) from one of our readers in Romania:

“The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created the first publicly shown movies, the first documentaries and, with this 50-second film shot at a Provence railway station, the first horror picture. It is said that as Paris audiences watched the train chug toward the screen, they believed it was about to crash out of the frame and into the auditorium, and ran out screaming. True or not, the story indicates the power the medium would wield over its audience.

The 50-second silent film captures the entry of a steam locomotive into the train station in the French coastal town of la Ciotat. Like most of the other early Lumière films, L’Arrivée d’un train consists of a single, unedited ‘view’ illustrating an aspect of everyday life.”

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Gas prices are up. Most sectors of the economy are down (see this WSJ bit) as a consequence. The exceptions? Apparently hybrid cars and online courses, according to this piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Feeling the pinch, students are skipping the drive to campus and taking courses online. The net result: many schools are seeing enrollments in online courses increasing 25% over last year.

And, yes, we feel your pain. So feel free to fill your iPod (or other MP3 players) with our collection of free educational resources. Lots of value here:

• Free Online Courses
• Free Foreign Language Lessons
• Free Audio Books
• Ideas & Culture Podcast Collection
• University Podcast Collection
• Intelligent Life at YouTube
  

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When completed in Dubai, this “dynamic building” designed by David Fisher will be in constant motion, always changing its shape, and also generate its own electric energy. You can reserve your apartment today, or wait for similar buildings to get erected in Moscow and New York. The whole concept feels a bit Las Vegas-esque. But who knows, maybe this is the wave of the future. To see what I’m talking about, watch the video below and get more info here.

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Without Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Americans wouldn’t have the Declaration of Independence. Rather strangely, both men died on the same day, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration - July 4, 1826.

Every June 16 is Bloomsday, which commemorates Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio here). In Dublin and around the world, celebrations usually include a reading of Joyce’s classic. This year, in New York City, one high-profile event featured Stephen Colbert reading the part of Leopold Bloom, the character around which the sprawling novel turns. You can listen to Colbert read here and here. Enjoy, and I will catch you back here after the holiday weekend.

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Not an obvious conclusion, I’ll agree. However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, presents the argument like this: as all sorts of data accumulate into a vast ocean of petabytes, our ability to synthesize it all into elegant theories and laws will disappear. The story is the cover of this month’s issue of Wired but I came across it in a newsletter from The Edge, a group of thinkers trying to promote a “third culture” of online intellectual thought.

Anderson’s argument isn’t really that the scientific method will disappear, but rather that correlation will become as good as it gets in terms of analyzing real-world data. Everything will be too messy, noisy and changing too quickly for proper hypotheses and theorems. As Anderson puts it, it will be “the end of theory.”

The nice thing about reading this on Edge is that the newsletter comes with several critical responses included from “The Reality Club,” which includes thinkers like George Dyson, Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand. But I say that as the consumers and producers of most of these masses of data, the vote should lie with you, reader: does Google’s brute force approach to data hording spell the end scientific elegance?

A quick fyi: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersch has a new piece in The New Yorker detailing “a major escalation of covert operations against Iran.” The plans drafted by the Bush administration and funded by Congress brings the US another step closer to a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, and such a strike becomes all the more likely, Hirsch believes, if Obama wins the November election. (Why? Because Obama favors having direct talks rather than using preemptive force.) You can find an accompanying audio interview with Hersch here. He also appeared yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air and elaborated on all of this. You can listen here: Stream - iTunes - Feed.

Download 250 Free Online Courses here

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Darwinmania (as The New York Times dubbed it) is about to begin. During the next year, we will celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species (download zip audio here) and the discovery of natural selection. It’s pretty much a given that the minutiae of Darwin’s life will get thoroughly reexamined. So I figured why not get ahead of the curve and give you this — Darwin’s writing room. It’s provided courtesy of the Guardian Book Section, which lets you take a peek at the writings rooms of Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, Rudyard Kipling, Martin Amis and many other important writers. (You can also visit our piece from last year for more room photos.)

When art meets engineering:

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Tinysong.com offers a service that’s rather impressive. You go to their homepage, search for a song, and then you can listen to it online and share it with a friend (via a specially created url). Just how it all works (copyright included), and just how deep the collection actually goes, I am not totally sure. But, the various tests that I threw at it suggest that there’s a fair amount of depth there.

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Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quantitative or qualitative judgment, I am not sure.  On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talking about how to avert a climate crisis, David Gallo showing amazing underwater creatures, and Ken Robinson describing why schools kill creativity (we’ve posted that one below). Again the full list is here.

Article begins: “Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures. They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation. But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?” The rest here.

“In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.” If you want to get deeper into Greene’s work on string theory, I would recommend referring back to this previous post.

This dynamic presentation was made at the TED conference. (PS You may also want to see BoingBoing’s new post: Top 10 TedTalks.)

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The chance of ice disappearing this summer? 50/50. Worrisome, I’d say.