3rd Avenue El

July 21st, 2009 · 5 comments or link to (permalink)

A short film made in the early 1950s about the elevated rail line that traveled from the base of Manhattan, up the Bowery and 3rd Avenue, to Gun Hill Road in the Bronx.

New Yorkers, how many places do you recognize as they zoom by? What brewery was that on 3rd Avenue?

The characters are an arty type, a drunk, a little girl, a young couple, and the drama or plot, such as it is, revolves around a nickel stuck in the wooden floorboards of the train (also notice the padded seats). The main characters here are really the subway and the city.

(via The Prelinger Archives)

5 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: New York City business history nostalgia society talks

Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer

September 13th, 2008 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

The New York Public Library ran a particularly great selection of lectures last year. Here is the culmination: Gunter Grass followed by both Grass and Norman Mailer.

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Chris Bangle: Great Cars Are Art

August 7th, 2008 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

BMW designer, Chris Bangle’s TED talk. I’m putting this up because of the death of Andrea Pininfarina, today.

There’s a list of some classic Pininfarina designs, through three generations of the family, on Oobject.

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John Maynard Smith – Royal Institution Discourse on “The Origin of Life”.

April 28th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Here, the late, great, Maynard Smith talks about what it means to say something is living. Like many virtuosos, he makes something difficult seem simple, with utterly clear explanations – the lecture is a small masterpiece.

He considers that what some biologists (such as Stuart Kauffman) define as life i.e. self reproducing things that metabolize, does not differentiate between life and something like a flame and that we must always add heredity (of infinite possible variety) to account for what we consider to be truly alive.

This leads to life as seen from an information perspective i.e how we transmit information between generations, and he outlines 9 milestones in the evolution of life from this vantage point, from replicating molecules to electronic information communication.

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42 Hour Film of Buckminster Fuller

February 19th, 2008 · 5 comments or link to (permalink)

This has to be the most extreme example of what Smashing Telly set out to promote, the antithesis of ‘moronic 30 second dog on skateboard’ clips, this is 42 hours of gloriously intelligent video.

With people not much older than Fuller, like George Orwell, having not a single audio or video recording of themselves in existence, Buckminster Fuller fans can consider themselves lucky that such a film legacy exists.

In 1975 Buckminster Fuller recorded these sessions entitled ‘Everything I know’, in Philadelphia. This is the first film in the series, the entire set is available at the Wiki below.

1 hr 19 min 59 sec

conversationswithbuckypbwiki.com

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Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics

February 19th, 2008 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics

Gell-Mann is possibly the single most important human being alive. Worth a listen. I particularly like his innocent, eccentric giggling at his own jokes and his enthusiasm – the mark of someone who has never been coached in public speaking by a PR flack, because he transcends that kind of crap and appears genuine.

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Steve Jobs: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

January 15th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Playwrights and poets currently garner more cultural prestige than innovative computer makers, but this may be partly because the present rarely has the prestige of the past even if the here and now is where great art is born. The most prestigious art form of Ancient Greece was Lyre playing, hardly a venerated activity now.

I would argue that in a hundred years people will not have heard of most of the people that cover the arts sections of the broadsheets, but that Steve Jobs will be remembered not just as an industrialist, but as a cultural innovator – an artist.

Jobs is considered sartorially elegant, yet he dresses from the waist down in high waisted, beltless, over-length, bleached jeans and sneakers – like an average suburban mall shopper. He is though of as a great speaker, but his delivery is sometimes horribly rehearsed and his voice thin and nasal. But, listen to this speech from when he had just recovered from cancer, it is a masterpiece. For me this is the thing above all others, to show people who don’t get what all the fuss is about when he speaks at a tawdry trade show, tomorrow at the Moscone Center, and people cover it like it was the sermon on the mount.

Link

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The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2007 | Dr. J. Craig Venter

December 12th, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

BBC 1 43 min 31 sec Dec 11, 2007
This year’s prestigious BBC lecture is given by the entrepreneur that puts founders of web 2.0 companies to shame – Craig Venter.

Link

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Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

September 18th, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

Link

If people had behaved in the 20th Century as they did in the Bible, several billion people would have died in war, not several hundred million. There are more people alive today, meaning that the raw numbers of deaths are higher, but people are fundamentally far less violent and in percentage terms violence has continually decreased since the enlightenment.

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The Origin of Life

May 27th, 2007 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

A talk by the excellent John Maynard Smith about the celebrated topic, ‘the Origins of Life’ at London’s Royal Institute, in 1995.

Running time: 59 mins

Full screen

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Harold Pinter’s Excoriating Nobel Prize Speech

April 23rd, 2007 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

Running time: 46 mins.

Link (no embed available for this)

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Dawkins TED talk on Atheism

April 23rd, 2007 · 4 comments or link to (permalink)

Dawkins infamous call for ‘militant atheism’ in an inspiring talk at TED.

Running time: 31 mins.

Full screen

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Norman Mailer and Marshall Mcluhan

April 12th, 2007 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Two intellectual giants debate violence, alienation and the electronic media in 1968.

Running time: 28 mins.

Full Screen

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A New Kind of Science – Stephen Wolfram

February 19th, 2007 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

Stephen Wolfram, a child prodigy and creator of the very successful Mathematica software application, locked himself away for several years and produced a 1000 page plus, mammoth tome – A New Kind of Science. He shunned peer review, suppressed findings from people working for him and duplicated much of the work of others either by accident or, as some have suggested, as the result of direct plagiarism. Nevertheless, there is something in what Wolfram says when he talks about a new kind of science, based upon cellular automata and emergent iterative systems, the unpredictable iteration of equations rather than equations themselves. This is an idea that is brewing in a different form in the work of others such as Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin.

Running time: 1 hour 27 mins.

Full Screen

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Talk by Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

February 13th, 2007 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Harris looks at the dangers of the Intelligent Design movement.

Running time: 23 mins

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The Impact of Web 2.0 – at Davos

January 31st, 2007 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

The World Economic Forum at Davos is where presidents of countries and global corporations meet. It is the conference to end all conferences, and whenever there is a technology bubble, Davos organizers quickly jump on the bandwaggon and invite a bunch of bewildered nerds to explain the ‘Internets’ to them. The end result is absolutely fucking hilarious, in a very understated way.

This year, alongside Global Warming and WWIII, with a straight face, Davos attendees examined the ‘Impact of Web 2.0′. They did not suggest that the impact relative to the aforementioned topics is that of a mosquito farting on the moon.

Running time: 56 mins.

Link

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Jared Diamond – How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed

January 23rd, 2007 · Comments Off or link to (permalink)

The Man with the ultimate Boston (?) accent, talks about his book, Collapse, at the Long Now Foundation.

(I just realized that I went to this lecture).

Running time: 1 hour 14 mins.

Link

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