CULTURE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKyYPSpiC9g When Leonar­do da Vin­ci was 42 years old, he had­n’t yet com­plet­ed any major pub­licly view­able work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while work­ing for the Duke of Milan, Ludovi­co Sforza, he “devel­oped, orga­nized, and...

J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for the sweep­ing fan­ta­sy land­scapes of Lord of The Rings and The Hob­bit. Apart from being a cel­e­brat­ed author, the Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor of Anglo-Sax­on was also a devot­ed father who dot­ed on his chil­dren....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-5yvvpM_as With his cane, his famous waxed mus­tache, and his habit of tak­ing unusu­al ani­mals for walks, Sal­vador Dalí would appear to have cul­ti­vat­ed his own pho­tographa­bil­i­ty. But tak­ing a pic­ture of the man who stood as a liv­ing def­i­n­i­tion...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6kHN92Yv48 Back in 1993, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs wrote and nar­rat­ed a 21-minute clay­ma­tion Christ­mas film odd­ly pro­duced by Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la. And, as you can well imag­ine, it’s not your nor­mal hap­py Christ­mas flick. Nope, this film –...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA “It’s inter­est­ing that some peo­ple find sci­ence so easy, and oth­ers find it kind of dull and dif­fi­cult,” says Richard Feyn­man at the begin­ning of his 1983 BBC series Fun to Imag­ine. “One of the things that makes it...

Physi­cist and sax­o­phon­ist Stephon Alexan­der has argued in his many pub­lic lec­tures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Ein­stein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in com­mon. Alexan­der in par­tic­u­lar draws our atten­tion to the so-called...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I A month ago, drones were spot­ted near Mor­ris Coun­ty, New Jer­sey. Since then, reports of fur­ther sight­ings in var­i­ous loca­tions in the region have been lodged on a dai­ly basis, and anx­i­eties about the ori­gin and pur­pose of these...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXpSrT7jVb0 I’m not sure the Sex Pis­tols had “avail­able for children’s par­ties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christ­mas in 1977, that’s exact­ly what hap­pened. While many Britons were set­tling in for a warm yule­tide, the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l4I-caLoxY The video above from Sabins Civ­il Engi­neer­ing promis­es to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Sup­port­ing Bridge.” That sounds like a typ­i­cal exam­ple of YouTube hyper­bole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvi­ous how the frag­ile-look­ing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXYpvBS7RWE Kind Read­er, Will you do us the hon­or of accept­ing our hol­i­day invi­ta­tion? Carve five min­utes from your hol­i­day sched­ule to spend time cel­e­brat­ing The Insects’ Christ­mas, above. In addi­tion to offer­ing brief respite from the chaos of con­sumerism...