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Monday, January 20, 2014

Paintings by Caravaggio, Vermeer, & Other Great Masters Come to Life in a New Animated Video

With his short video “Beauty,” the Italian director Rino Stefano Tagliafierro takes “a series of well selected images from the tradition of pictorial beauty” and uses the “fire of digital invention” to animate sentiments lost on immobile canvasses. In the video above, you will see works by Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rubens and others put into digital motion. A complete Paintings by Caravaggio, Vermeer, & Other Great Masters Come to Life in a New Animated Video is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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Student Rickrolls Teacher By Sneaking Rick Astley Lyrics into Quantum Physics Paper

Here’s a funny little variation on “rickrolling,” a term some of our readers might not be familiar with. So let’s quickly refer you to Wikipedia:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch; a person [...]

Student Rickrolls Teacher By Sneaking Rick Astley Lyrics into Quantum Physics Paper is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky Draws Elaborate Doodles In His Manuscripts

Few would argue against the claim that Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of such bywords for literary weightiness as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, mastered the novel, even by the formidable standards of 19th-century Russia. But if you look into his papers, you’ll find that he also had an intriguing [...]

Fyodor Dostoevsky Draws Elaborate Doodles In His Manuscripts is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Century Manuscripts

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

–Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808-90)

When Emir O. Filipovic, a medievalist at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, visited the State Archives of Dubrovnik, he stumbled upon something that will hardly surprise anyone who lives with cats today: a 15th century manuscript with inky paw prints casually tracked across [...]

Medieval Cats Behaving Badly: Kitties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Century Manuscripts is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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Quentin Tarantino Lists His Favorite Records: Bob Dylan, Freda Payne, Phil Ochs and More

Quentin Tarantino cares about music, as you can tell from watching any of his films, from his maximally discomfiting use of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs on out. A Telegraph article on that song’s writer Gerry Rafferty describes it as “written as a parody of Bob Dylan’s paranoia,” “little more [...]

Quentin Tarantino Lists His Favorite Records: Bob Dylan, Freda Payne, Phil Ochs and More is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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Big Friday Night? Discover Hunter S. Thompson’s Personal Hangover Cure (and the Real Science of Hangovers)

Last year, we brought you a description of Hunter S. Thompson’s daily drug and alcohol regimen, consisting of frightening amounts of cocaine and liquor, supplanted by the occasional cup of coffee or acid tab. While the story may be apocryphal, Thompson was no dilettante when it came to psychoactive substances. The father of [...]

Big Friday Night? Discover Hunter S. Thompson’s Personal Hangover Cure (and the Real Science of Hangovers) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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See Neil Young Perform Classic Songs in 1971 BBC Concert: “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold” & More

A theory of merit states that Neil Young reinvents himself every 10 years or so, but the work in-between isn’t always pretty. Yet for an artist with a somewhat limited range, he remains one of the most interesting singers and songwriters in rock and roll well over four decades after his start. Young once [...]

See Neil Young Perform Classic Songs in 1971 BBC Concert: “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold” & More is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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176 Big Thinkers Answer the Question: What Scientific Idea is Ready to Be Dead and Buried?

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2014 edition asks the question, “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” The question came prefaced by this thought:

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas [...]

176 Big Thinkers Answer the Question: What Scientific Idea is Ready to Be Dead and Buried? is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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An Undertaking: Woodworker Honors His Grandma with a Custom-Made Coffin

Good thing Austin-based designer Michael Yates studied abroad. Three months spent in the vicinity of Kyoto as a Texas A&M electrical engineering student ultimately inspired him to abandon the profession for which he had trained, in order to pursue woodworking. “…the sacredness of the process and attention to detail resonated with me in [...]

An Undertaking: Woodworker Honors His Grandma with a Custom-Made Coffin is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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New Jerry Garcia Web Site Features 5,000 Hours of Free Music, Plus Some Fantastic Archival Material

A little something for the Dead Heads among us. JerryGarcia.com  relaunched this past week, and boy does it deliver. Run by Garcia’s family, the new site offers great visual timelines of the singer-songwriter’s life and the 26 bands he played with; a cool look at the many guitars he owned and loved; interactive [...]

New Jerry Garcia Web Site Features 5,000 Hours of Free Music, Plus Some Fantastic Archival Material is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

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