Yasutada.sudo

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Hollywood has a long history poaching from abroad. Ask Orson Welles, who along with cinematographer Gregg Toland, incorporated the look of German Expressionist cinema into Citizen Kane. Ask Quentin Tarantino who cribbed much of Ringo Lam’s City on Fire for his breakout debut Reservoir Dogs. And ask George Lucas who was so greatly influenced by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa that he lifted large chunks of his Hidden Fortress for Star Wars.

Above is a video that (if you can get past the bro-tastic narration and mangled Japanese pronunciation) neatly unpacks how Lucas’s seminal space opera owes a lot to Kurosawa. It doesn’t take too much imagination to connect a light saber with a samurai’s katana. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s robes look like something that Toshio Mifune might wear in one of Kurosawa’s epics. Lucas even uses Kurosawa’s trademark screen wipe. Below is an interview with Lucas where he describes how Kurosawa’s visual style influenced him.

Hollywood generally has a better track record with borrowing from foreign filmmaking geniuses than actually working with them. Fritz Lang and John Woo were seduced into coming to America only to be forced by overbearing studios into making anodyne versions of their previous works. Kurosawa himself had a deeply troubling experience in Hollywood; cultural differences, studio politics and Kurosawa’s autocratic directing style – he wasn’t nicknamed ‘The Emperor’ for nothing – got him axed after three weeks from the 20th Century Fox movie Tora! Tora! Tora!. Kurosawa took the blow very personally and, following the box office flop of his next movie Dodesukaden, attempted suicide.

Yet the spectacular success of Star Wars proved to be an unexpected boon to Kurosawa. With his newfound influence in Hollywood, Lucas managed to strong arm 20th Century Fox, the same studio that axed Kurosawa a decade before, into funding Kagemusha. The movie proved to be a commercial and critical hit, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film also gave Kurosawa the clout to raise the money for his last masterpiece Ran.

Of course, Lucas wasn’t the only filmmaker influenced by Kurosawa. Check out Kurosawa: The Last Emperor below — a documentary about the director featuring a host of filmmakers who have been influenced by him, including Bernardo Bertolucci, John Woo and Francis Ford Coppola.

Related Content:

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Introduced Japanese Cinema to the West

The Kurosawa Digital Archive

Akira Kurosawa & Francis Ford Coppola Star in Japanese Whisky Commercials (1980)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

How Star Wars Borrowed From Akira Kurosawa’s Great Samurai Films is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post How Star Wars Borrowed From Akira Kurosawa’s Great Samurai Films appeared first on Open Culture.

The gross and ever-increasing degree of economic inequality in the United States has become a phenomenon that even the country’s elites can no longer ignore since the explosive publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The book’s highly technical marshaling of data speaks primarily to economists and secondarily to liberal policymakers. Piketty’s calls for redistribution have lead to charges of “Marxism” from the other end of the political spectrum—due to some inevitable degree to the book’s provocative title. Yet in the reckoning of actual Marxist Slavoj Žižek, the French economist is still “a good Keynsian” who believes that “capitalism is ultimately the only game in town.”  While the Marxist left may critique Piketty’s policy recommendations for their reliance on state capitalism, another fierce leftist thinker—Žižek’s sometime intellectual rival Noam Chomsky—might critique them for their acquiescence to state power.

Chomsky’s role as a public intellectual has placed him at the forefront of the left-anarchist fight against neoliberal political economy and the U.S. foreign and domestic policies that drive it. Whether those policies come from nominally liberal or conservative administrations, Chomsky asserts time and again that they ultimately serve the needs of elites at the expense of masses of people at home and abroad who pay the very dear cost of perpetual wars over resources and markets. In his 2013 book On Anarchism, Chomsky leaves little room for equivocation in his assessment of the role elites play in maintaining a state apparatus that suppresses popular movements:

If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change.

This excerpt is but one minute example of Chomsky’s fiercely independent stance against abuse of power in all its forms and his tireless advocacy for popular social movements. As Henry Giroux writes in a recent assessment of Chomsky’s voluminous body of work, what his many diverse books share is “a luminous theoretical, political, and forensic analysis of the functioning of the current global power structure, new and old modes of oppressive authority, and the ways in which neoliberal economic and social policies have produced more savage forms of global domination and corporate sovereignty.” And while he can sound like a doomsayer, Chomsky’s work also offers “the possibility of political and economic alternatives” and “a fresh language for a collective sense of agency and resistance.”

Today we offer a collection of Chomsky’s political books and interviews free to read online, courtesy of Znet. While these texts come from the 1990s, it’s surprising how fresh and relevant they still sound today. Chomsky’s granular parsing of economic, social, and military operations explains the engineering of the economic situation Piketty details, one ever more characterized by the title of a Chomsky interview, “The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many.” See links to nine books below. To read, click on links to either the “Content Overview” or “Table of Contents.” The books can also be found in our collection, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989): Based on the Massey Lectures, delivered in Canada in November 1988, Necessary Illusions argues that, far from performing a watchdog role, the “free press” serves the needs of those in power.

Deterring Democracy (1991): Chomsky details the major shift in global politics that has left the United States unchallenged as the preeminent military power even as its economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition from Germany and Japan. Deterring Democracy points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this new imbalance, and reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests — from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Panama to the Middle East.

Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993): Analyzing Haiti, Latin America, Cuba, Indonesia, and even pockets of the Third World developing in the United States, Noam Chomsky draws parallels between the genocide of colonial times and the murder and exploitation associated with modern-day imperialism.

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (1993)

What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1993): A brilliant distillation of the real motivations behind U.S. foreign policy, compiled from talks and interviews completed between 1986 and 1991, with particular attention to Central America.

The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994): A fascinating state-of-the-world report from the man the New York Times called “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”

Secrets, Lies and Democracy (1994): An interview with David Barsamian

Keeping the Rabble in Line (1994): Interviews with David Barsamian

Excerpts from Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (1996): A scathing critique of orthodox views and government policy. See full text in pdf form here.

And for exponentially more Chomsky, see Chomsky.info, which hosts well over a hundred of his topical articles from the Vietnam era to the present.

Related Content:

Watch Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

Filmmaker Michel Gondry Presents an Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Read 9 Books By Noam Chomsky Free Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Read 9 Books By Noam Chomsky Free Online appeared first on Open Culture.

The flower, as a reproductive organ, evolved with one primary purpose in mind – to attract pollinators like insects or birds. This function has driven their astounding evolutionary explosion of distinct colors and shapes, some of which have even come to resemble various recognizable figures, plants or animals.

The colors of these flamboyant orchids attract insects and birds, signaling that these flowers are full of tasty nectar. Their shapes, on the other hand, often evolve to attract or accommodate specific pollinators while dissuading parasites or other, less desirable pollinators. Some flowers are more welcoming to bees, while others are perfect for hummingbirds or different insects.

Their stunning colors and biodiversity have attracted another type of creature as well – us. Orchid lovers value flowers like these for their resemblance to other recognizable objects which, while coincidental, is still definitely entertaining!

Monkey Face Orchid (Dracula Simia)

Source: avaxnews.net

Source: tree-nation.com

Source: gringosabroad.com

Moth Orchid (Phalaenopsis)

Image credits: Christian Kneidinger

Image credits: José Roberto Rodrigues Araújo

Source: thefeaturedcreature.com

Naked Man Orchid (Orchis Italica)

Image credits: Ana Retamero

Source: vladimr.livejournal.com

Source: vladimr.livejournal.com

Hooker’s Lips (Psychotria Elata)

Image credits: unknown

Dancing Girls (Impatiens Bequaertii)

Image credits: unknown

Laughing Bumble Bee Orchid (Ophrys bomybliflora)

Source: arastiralim.net

Source: glaucus.org.uk

Source: thefeaturedcreature.com

Swaddled Babies (Anguloa Uniflora)

Image credits: unknown

Parrot Flower (Impatiens Psittacina)

Image credits: unknown

Source: jittinflowers.blogspot.com

Image credits: Bruce Kekule

Snap Dragon Seed Pod (Antirrhinum)

Image credits: unknown

Flying Duck Orchid (Caleana Major)

Image credits: Michael Prideaux

Image credits: Robert Andrew Price

Orchid That Looks Like A Tiger

Source: funniestmemes.com

Happy Alien (Calceolaria Uniflora)

Image credits: Butterfly voyages

Image credits: Julio Martinich

Angel Orchid (Habenaria Grandifloriformis)

Source: gardenofeaden.blogspot.com

Source: gardenofeaden.blogspot.com

Dove Orchid Or Holy Ghost Orchid (Peristeria Elata)

Image credits: Saji Antony

Image credits: Reji

Image credits: M.a.h.S

Orchid That Looks Like A Ballerina

Image credits: Tere Montero

White Egret Orchid (Habenaria Radiata)

Image credits: Rachel Scott-Renouf

Source: ibonsaiclub.forumotion.com

Image credits: Torisan3500

Darth Vader (Aristolochia Salvadorensis)

Source: hortus.leidenuniv.nl

Image credits: unknown

Source: mondocarnivoro.it

P.S. We always try our best to credit each and every photographer, but sometimes it’s impossible to track some of them. Please contact us if you know the missing authors.

17 Flowers That Look Like Something Else originally appeared on Bored Panda on May 30, 2014.

If you wonder whether you're over- or underpaid at your job, here's one place to start. Reddit user Dan Lin has created one (very long) chart that shows 820 US occupations and how much they pay. Jobs are color-coded by their industry — a few high-paying health care (fuchsia) jobs are clustered at the top, while food service jobs (green) tend to be toward the bottom. Check it out below, or click on the image for a version where you can zoom in.

Now that cocktails in jam jars have made it to EastEnders, what's next for those who would be 'alternative'?

Meet Josh. Josh is a 30-year-old artist/chef who lives in a converted warehouse in Hackney, east London. Josh has a beard, glasses and cares about the provenance of his coffee. He pays his tax, doesn't have a 9-to-5 job and, along with his five polymathic flatmates, shuns public transport, preferring to ride a bike.

On paper, Josh is the archetypal hipster just don't call him one: "I don't hate the word hipster, and I don't hate hipsters, but being a hipster doesn't mean anything any more. So God forbid anyone calls me one."

Continue reading...

Game designer Dan “OtherDan” Emmons analyzes the incredible game design found in the very first level of the 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game in a fascinating video narrated by Daniel Floyd. The video is the first in a new Design Club series by the folks at Extra Credits.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Bacteria which is responsible for most food poisoning is spread by splashes and droplets of water caused during cleaning

The government's food watchdog has urged consumers to stop washing chicken before they cook it to avoid contaminating their kitchen with Campylobacter the most common type of food poisoning in the UK which can cause death as well as serious health problems.

Research for the Food Standards Agency reveals that more than two-fifths of cooks say they routinely wash chicken as part of their food preparations. But the FSA has warned that splashed water droplets can spread Campylobacter bacteria on to human skin, work surfaces, clothing and cooking equipment.

Continue reading...

These days I write more than I code, but one of the things I miss about programming is the coder’s high: those times when, for hours on end, I would lock my vision straight at the computer screen, trance out, and become a human-machine hybrid zipping through the virtual architecture that my co-workers and I were building. Hunger, thirst, sleepiness, and even pain all faded away while I was staring at the screen, thinking and typing, until I’d reach the point of exhaustion and it would come crashing down on me.

Francis Galton is infamous for pioneering the field of eugenics. But he was also, apparently, interested in baked goods, as demonstrated by a 1906 letter to the journal Nature on the proper way to cut a round cake.

Read the rest

Los Angeles-based coffee expert Wes Johansen sits down and reviews cheap coffee in this video by BuzzFeed. The coffee taste test included 7-Eleven, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Maxwell House, Folgers, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts. After smelling and tasting each brand, he then scored them on a 5-star rating system. Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee both reigned supreme with 4-star scores.

Can coffee really be this bad?

We previously wrote about BuzzFeed’s video featuring a wine expert who reviews cheap beer on a five-point scale.

And the Wall Street Journal is on it. Read the rest

Self-presentation style in job interviews: the role of personality and culture, a UBC study presented in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that job interviews were optimized for self-aggrandizing narcissists, while people from cultures that value modesty and self-effacement fared poorly (it probably helps that everyone conducting a job interview had to pass a job interview to get that job, making them more likely to have confidence in the process). (via Reddit)

The Hathi Trust has won another important victory in its court battles against the Authors Guild over the right of academic libraries to scan books under the banner of fair use. Hathi creates full-text indexes of books from academic institutional libraries that were scanned by Google, so that academic libraries can access full-text indexes of the books, as well as offering the books in assistive formats used by people with visual disabilities, and providing long-term archives of rare texts that are still under copyright.

The Authors Guild members are overwhelming trade-book authors; the books scanned by the Hathi Trust are overwhelmingly scholarly books written as part of an academic tradition that takes free access and sharing as its foundation. The court remanded a question of standing in the case, asking the Guild to demonstrate that it represented authors of the affected works. Read the rest

Daily Overview is a new project that shares one satellite photo from Digital Globes a day in an attempt to change the way we see our planet Earth.

The project was inspired by the Overview Effect experience, which is a cognitive shift of perspective and worldview experienced by the astronauts when they get to see the planet Earth from space for the first time.

The people behind this beautiful project write: “The mesmerizing flatness seen from this vantage point, the surprising comfort of systematic organization on a massive scale, or the vibrant colors that we capture will hopefully turn your head.”

More info: Website | Tumblr | Facebook | Instagram (h/t: twistedsifter)

Bourtange, Vlagtwedde, Netherlands

53.0066°N 7.1920°E. Bourtange is a village with a population of 430 in the municipality of Vlagtwedde in the Netherlands. The star fort was built in 1593 during the Eighty Years’ War when William I of Orange wanted to control the only road between Germany and the city of Groningen. Bourtange was restored to its mid-18th-century state in 1960 and is currently used as an open-air museum.

Barcelona, Spain

41°23′27″N 2°09′47″E

309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group Tucson, Arizona, USA

32.170890°N 110.855184°W

Central Park, New York City, New York, USA

40°46’56”N; 73°57’55”W. Central Park in New York City spans 843 acres. That’s 6% of the island of Manhattan.

Great Wall of China, Northern China

40.67693°N 117.23193°E

Desert Shores Community, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

36.211001, -115.266914. The Desert Shores Community in Las Vegas, Nevada contains 3,351 units and four man-made lakes.

New Bullards Bar Reservoir, Yuba County, California

39.42903°N 121.13010°W

Residential Development, Killeen, Texas, USA

31.079844, -97.80145. In 2013, there were 923,400 home construction projects in the United States.

Venice, Italy

45°26′15″N 12°20′9″E

Vineyards, Huelva, Spain

37°42′12″N 6°36′10″W. Vineyards swirl on the hills of Huelva, Spain. The climate there is ideal for grape growing with an average temperature of 64 degrees and a relative humidity between 60% and 80%.

Plasticulture / Greenhouses, Almeria, Spain

36.78234°N 2.74315°W. Plasticulture refers to the practice of using plastic materials in agricultural applications. This is visible in the plains and valleys of Almeria, Spain where nearly 20,000 hectares are covered by these greenhouse structures.

Durrat Al Bahrain, Bahrain

25°50′17″N 50°36′18″E. Durrat Al Bahrain will consist of 15 connected, artificial islands (including six atolls, five fish-shaped, and two crescent-shaped). Construction costs are estimated at $6 billion and the project is slated for completion in mid-2015.

Amazon Rainforest Deforestation, Para, Brazil

5°40′S 52°44′W. Clearcutting operations in the Amazon Rainforest of Para, Brazil branch out from one of the state’s central roads.

Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, Newark, New Jersey, USA

40°40′54″N 74°09′02″W

Boca Raton, Florida, USA

26°22′7″N 80°6′0″W

Venture Out RV Resort, Mesa, Arizona, USA

33.411791, -111.723591

Port of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

33°43′45″N 118°15′43″W

Puente de Vallecas, Madrid, Spain

40.398204°N 3.669059°W

Agricultural Development, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

9°1′48″N 38°44′24″E

Our Lady of Almudena Cemetery, Madrid, Spain

40°25′10″N 3°38′26″W. Our Lady of Almudena Cemetery in Madrid, Spain is one of the largest cemeteries in the world. The number of gravesites – estimated at five million – is greater than the population of Madrid itself.

Palm Island / Hibiscus Island, Miami Beach, Florida, USA

25.783216°N 80.16052°W. Palm Island and Hibiscus Islands are two man-made islands located in Miami Beach, Florida. While the residential neighborhoods on the islands have some of the highest property values in the city, they are also among the first places ordered to evacuate in advance of a hurricane.

Inman Yard, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

33.800083, -84.451936. The Norfolk Southern Railway operates 21,300 miles of track in 22 states, primarily in the Southeastern US. Inman Yard in Atlanta, Georgia, pictured here, is one of the major railyards that houses a portion of the operation’s 3,648 locomotives and 79,082 freight cars.

Spaghetti Junction (A-3 and M-50), Madrid, Spain

40.360051, -3.564548. The A-3 and M-50 highways come together in an interwoven crossroads southeast of Madrid, Spain. This structure is commonly called a “spaghetti junction.”

Agricultural Development, Loxahatchee, Florida, USA

Brøndby Haveby, Brønby Municipality, Denmark

55 ° 38 ’12.836031 “N, 12 ° 23′ 58.386726″ E

Terraced Rice Paddies, Yuanyang County, Yunnan, China

23°09′32″N 102°44′41″E. For the past 1300 years, the Hani people of Yuanyang County, China have cultivated spectacular, terraced rice patties on mountainsides.

Clearcutting in the El Dorado National Forest, Georgetown, California, USA

38°45′01″N 120°20′00″W. 20 acre clearcutting tracts in the El Dorado National Forest.

Edson, Kansas, USA

39°20′14″N 101°32′26″W

Central Pivot Irrigation Fields. Ha’il, Saudi Arabia

27°31′N 41°41′E. These circular patterns occur as crops are watered by overhead sprinklers, which are mounted to motor-driven, rotating towers that distribute water evenly throughout the fields.

“Overview” – a short film explaining the Overview Effect, which inspired the project:

30 Breathtaking Satellite Photos That Will Change How You See Our World originally appeared on Bored Panda on June 13, 2014.

"Although fasting diets have been criticised by nutritionists for being unhealthy, new research suggests starving the body kick-starts stem cells into producing new white blood cells, which fight off infection."

A new study in Annals of Neurology suggests an additional language may have brain benefits comparable to physical fitness and not smoking.

While on assignment in the Philippines, reporter Miles O’Brien had an accident and lost his left arm. In the weeks that followed, he learned that every movement, no matter how small, requires rethinking. Read the rest

In 1964, Margaret Howe Lovatt, working with psychedelic dolphin researcher John Lilly, began to live with one of the animals full-time as part of a NASA-funded study about interspecies communication; a new documentary about Lovatt, titled "The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins," airs on BBC4 later this month.

Read the rest

Masaru Emoto has convinced a lot of gullible people that human intention can change how molecules of water behave and affect how rice ferments.

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Possibly no subject in science has inspired more nonsense than quantum mechanics. Sure, it’s a complicated field of study, with a few truly mysterious facets that are not settled to everyone’s satisfaction after nearly a century of work. At the same time, though, using quantum to mean “we just don’t know” is ridiculous—and simply wrong. Quantum mechanics is the basis for pretty much all our modern technology, from smartphones to fluorescent lights, digital cameras to fiber-optic communications.  

Recent research published in Current Biology indicates that human parents are subject to a previously unknown "baby illusion" that makes them misperceive their youngest child as smaller than he or...

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Researchers tinkered with recall in a spate of recent studies

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Chameleons are often considered the quintessential color-changers. But the octopus outdoes them—using an entirely different mechanism to alter its appearance.

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Researchers used a technique called "mass peptide fingerprinting" to identify proteins in the book, ruling out other possible animal origins like cow, goat, or sheep.

Now these are some nice looking Japanese bike locks.

Airtype is, the keyless keyboard of the future. The innovative device fits in the palm of your hand and let´s you type on any surface, it learns your finger movements and adapts to the way you type, so you don´t need to change your typing habits, it´s no different from typing on a traditional keyboard. And with Airtype there is no need for backspace, the smart device brings dynamic text prediction and correction to your typing experience. watch the amazing video

As I discussed in our recent podcast, the NETGEAR Nighthawk R7000 wifi router has completely rejuvenated my home network. Transfers that were below 2 Mbit/s are now at my theoretical 7Mbit/s maximum.

Read the rest