Kevin Carter

When you dive into our collection of 700 Free Online Courses, you can begin an intellectual journey that can last for many months, if not years. The collection lets you drop into the classroom of leading universities (like Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Oxford) and essentially audit their courses for free. You get to be a fly on the wall and soak up whatever knowledge you want. All you need is an internet connection and some free time on your hands.

Today, we’re featuring two classes taught by Professor Richard Bulliet at Columbia University, which will teach you the history of the world in 46 lectures. The first course, History of the World to 1500 CE (available on YouTube and iTunes Video) takes you from prehistoric times to 1500, the cusp of early modernity. The origins of agriculture; the Greek, Roman and Persian empires; the rise of Islam and Christian medieval kingdoms; transformations in Asia; and the Maritime revolution — they’re all covered here. In the second course, History of the World Since 1500 CE (find on YouTube), Bulliet focuses on the rise of colonialism in the Americas and India; historical developments in China, Japan and Korea; the Industrial Revolution; the Ottoman Empire; the emergence of Social Darwinism; and various key moments in 20th century history.

Bulliet helped write the popular textbook The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History, and it serves as the main textbook for the course. Above, we’re starting you off with Lecture 2, which moves from the Origins of Agriculture to the First River – Valley Civilizations, circa 8000-1500 B.C.E. The first lecture deals with methodological issues that underpin the course.

Once you get the big picture with Professor Bulliet, you can find more History topics in our ever-growing collection of Free Online Courses.

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A Crash Course in World History

The Complete History of the World (and Human Creativity) in 100 Objects

The Podcast History of Our World Will Take You From Creation Myths to (Eventually) the Present Day

The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

From Wikipedia: "English: A large wheeled Assyrian battering ram with an observation turret attacks the collapsing walls of a besieged city, while archers on both sides exchange fire. From the North-West Palace at Nimrud, about 865-860 BC; now in the British Museum."

File:Assyrian battering ram.jpg (Thanks, Justin!)

Windows: There are a lot of great desktop email clients available for Windows, but Mailbird promises to bring some elegance, simplicity, and useful new features to your desktop. We've been testing it for a few months now, here's what we think (and how you can try it out too). More »

Forecast.io is a well-designed, good-looking weather site that puts all of the most relevant and useful information you need right in front of you, no clicking, no wading through ads or scrolling through pages of lengthy forecast notes. Just you, your location (automatically detected,) the current conditions, the forecast for the next day or so, and an animated globe to show you weather you need an umbrella. More »

Priority Inbox is one of Gmail's best unsung features. It's amazing at curing email overload, but if you don't give it a chance to learn, all it'll do is muck up your inbox. Here's how to get it working properly. More »

Every networked sensor package in your immediate vicinity can be used to spy on you unless it is well-designed and transparent to you and the wide community of security researchers. If that sounds paranoid, check out the video above, wherein some security researchers show that they can covertly operate WiFi-enabled personal cameras and turn them into bugs.

But, as proven by Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing, security researchers with German-based IT consulting firm ERNW, these capabilities also have security flaws that can be easily exploited for turning these cameras into spying devices.

Mende and Turbing chose to compromise Canon's EOS-1D X DSLR camera an exploit each of the four ways it can communicate with a network. Not only have they been able to hijack the information sent from the camera, but have also managed to gain complete control of it.

In this presentation from Shmoocon 2013, they explained in detail how they managed to mount the attacks, and have also offered advice for users on how to secure their cameras and connections against these and similar attacks.

Stuff like this is why DRM and EULAs are so insidious. The existence of devices that attack their owners affects us all. It is a public health problem. Any time we pass a law that makes it illegal or legally perilous to point out flaws in technology, we make it harder to solve the public health problem, and we're all at risk.

Digital cameras easily turned into spying devices, researchers prove (via /.)

Atheist Shoes ("a cadre of shoemakers and artists in Berlin who hand-make ridiculously comfortable, Bauhaus-inspired shoes for people who don't believe in god(s)") noticed that a disproportionate number of their shipments to the USA were delayed or lost. A customer suggested this may be because USPS workers were taking offense at the ATHEIST packing tape they used to seal the boxes. So the company tried an A/B split, and found that boxes emblazoned with ATHEIST tape were 10 times more likely to go missing in the USPS and took an average of three days longer than their generic equivalents. They've stopped using the ATHEIST packing tape.

ATHEIST / USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? (Thanks, Alice!)

Chrome: Ever start watching a YouTube video on a web site and get annoyed that you can't watch it while you scroll around? Video Tape allows you to reposition the video and keep it locked to the window, so you can watch it as you scroll. More »

Yes, Google Reader is going away, and yes, there are great alternatives. However, if you're tired of web services shutting down on you, why not take matters into your own hands? Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source syncing RSS platform with more features than Google Reader ever had, and it can't get shut down. Here's how to install it and set it up. More »

Reader Ryan Thistle made his home screen a little easier to use with big, tiled icons in a layout similar to the dialer on a phone. Here's how he put it together. More »

This story was co-produced with NPR.

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes—and for free. You'd open up a prefilled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden, and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.

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OS X: Plain text editors tend to cost a lot when they help you write better code, and TextMate (our favorite) is far from an exception. Textastic, on the other hand, offers a very similar feature set and costs a tiny fraction of the price. More »

Tickets at the Studio Ghibli museum near Tokyo are made from snips of actual film from Miyazaki movies. This ticket shows Satsuki from the masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro.

I went to (Miyazaki) Studio Ghibli Museum near Tokyo, Japan. The tickets are made up of cut up film cells. My ticket is from Princess Mononoke.

See also: A visit to Spirited Away creator's museum in Japan

Musically, Tom Waits has come a long way since the 1970s. Absorbing a range of influences, Waits has reinvented himself several times over to become one of the most influential writers and performers of our time.

Along the way he has also made his mark as a character actor. But “parallel career” would be the wrong phrase to describe Waits’s film and television work, for his music and acting have always intersected. Never was this more apparent than in the 1970s, when Waits cultivated the persona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.

That early phase of Waits’s career is preserved in this highly theatrical 54-minute television performance. It was recorded on December 5, 1978 at the University of Texas for a March 24, 1979 broadcast of Austin City Limits. The program was later released on DVD as Burma Shave. Waits is joined by Herbert Hardesty on trumpet and tenor saxophone, Arthur Richards on guitar, Greg Cohen on bass, and Big John Thomassie on drums. Here’s the set list:

1. Summertime Blues
2. Burma Shave
3. Annie’s Back in Town
4. I Wish I Was in New Orleans
5. Ain’t Gonna Rain
6. Bullets
7. On the Nickel
8. Romeo is Bleeding
9. Silent Night
10. Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis
11. Small Change
12. Hey Big Spender
13. Small Change

Related content:

Tom Waits Makes Comic Appearance on Fernwood Tonight (1977)

Tom Waits’s Classic Appearance on Australian TV, 1979

Tom Waits and Keith Richard Sing Sea Song ‘Shenandoah’ for New Pirate-Themed CD

Tom Waits, Playing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Classic 1978 TV Performance is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

A few months ago I had a blast playing with Simon Monk's 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius, and noticed that his 15 Dangerously Mad Projects included a coil gun. I've always wanted to make a coil gun!

Since the coil is wrapped around the tube from a plastic pen, and the iron projectile is inside the tube, it will fly along towards the coil. As all the energy from the capacitors will be spent in a matter of milliseconds, the coil should ideally be turned off by the time the projectile passes its center and exits out the other side of the tube.

Simon's plans and walk-through are wonderful. I learned a lot reading the detailed but easy to understand instructions. He also selects parts and components that I am sure I can source locally and I love that he improvised brackets from a plastic drinking bottle.

I also learned that I will not be making a coil gun. That curiosity is now satisfied!

Simon Monk's 15 Dangerously Mad Projects for the Evil Genius

Luna Lee performs Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" on a gayageum, a "traditional Korean zither-like string instrument" (Wikipedia). She freaking nails it. There's lots more if that strikes your fancy.

Voodoo Chile-Jimi Hendrix / Gayageum ver. by Luna (via Reddit)

Law enforcement agencies in Washington state are having to make lots of adjustments as the state implements a ballot initiative that legalized the use of marijuana. One surprise change has been the need to re-train dogs used for sniffing out illegal drugs.

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Mike McNulty does a Nam June Paik number on the Star Wars movies. In watching all six at the same time, the viewer encounters an infinite number of possible correlations and undercurrents of meanings. It’s like a cinematic variation on the I Ching, a Tarot deck, or the collective unconscious of several million hardcore fanboys.

As a non-fan, I prefer this to watching the films individually.

Imagine this on the big screen. It could be lethal.
 

 
Thanks to Oslo Wentworth.

If you've ever found yourself reading a science article and had no idea what the heck a measurement means than you know it takes away from your understanding of an article. Write Ben Young Landis suggests one way to deal with this is to use Wolfram Alpha to convert that measurement into something you can understand. More »

Aurich Lawson

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

My journey into the Dark-ish Side began during a chat with our security editor, Dan Goodin, who remarked in an offhand fashion that cracking passwords was approaching entry-level "script kiddie stuff." This got me thinking, because—though I understand password cracking conceptually—I can't hack my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I'm the very definition of a "script kiddie," someone who needs the simplified and automated tools created by others to mount attacks that he couldn't manage if left to his own devices. Sure, in a moment of poor decision-making in college, I once logged into port 25 of our school's unguarded e-mail server and faked a prank message to another student—but that was the extent of my black hat activities. If cracking passwords were truly a script kiddie activity, I was perfectly placed to test that assertion.

It sounded like an interesting challenge. Could I, using only free tools and the resources of the Internet, successfully:

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My biggest accomplishments in Minecraft so far have been building my dream home (complete with fireplace, library, greenhouse, and swimming pool) and a five-way track switcher that I definitely did not copy off a Youtube video. Redditor AllUpInHyuh, on the other hand, created what he or she is calling "a working neuron." More »

There were plenty of delicious Borderlands announcements at PAX East today, but those who weren't present for the revelry may be feeling left out. Thus, a treat is in order! Gearbox was apparently handing out SHiFT codes, which give players access to special golden keys. Predictably, golden keys open golden loot chests. Also predictably, golden loot chests have rare loot inside. Seeing a pattern? More »

The good folks at the Mozilla Foundation have unveiled an amazing suite of Web-development tools. Wired's Webmonkey has a great summary:

The most popular request, and by far the coolest of the bunch, is the ability to do live edits in the text editor of your choice — effectively controlling Firefox with your editor. The video below shows an example of live editing via the popular Sublime Edit. This would essentially eliminate the need to jump from your editor to the browser, hit refresh, jump back to your editor, and so on. A dance that most of us are all too familiar with. Perhaps the best part, Rouget says this will work with the mobile version of Firefox as well.

Mozilla is also working on the opposite idea — authoring in the browser. That means putting an editor inside Firefox’s Dev Tools suite. Thus far this idea is less fleshed out, but the possibilities include putting in something like jsFiddle or perhaps a more traditional file-based editor.

Other new tools include some catch up features that bring Firefox’s Dev tools up to speed with what you’ll find in WebKit browsers. Examples include a new network panel prototype and the ability to doc the tools to the right side of the screen — great for wide monitors (this is already available in Nightly). There’s also a new “repaint” view that shows what gets repainted on the page, very useful if you’re trying to improve performance. Rouget has also been working on a new, dark theme for the Firefox dev tools.

Mozilla Shows Off Powerful New Developer Tools for Firefox

A weekly show hosted by John Green, where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week, John debunks 50 common misconceptions that most people have about topics such as vikings, exploding birds and peanut butter.

(Via The World's Best Ever)

Twisted Sifter has a great gallery of snowflake and ice crystal electron microscope photos. At this level of magnification, the ice looks like metal that has been machined by space aliens.

25 Microscopic Images of Snow Crystals

If you think about lactation too hard, it starts to seem a little strange — like the biological equivalent of saying the word "that" over and over until it's just a weird sound you're making. But, writes Nicholas Day at Slate, the sort of existential weirdness of breast milk is nothing compared to what's going on in the stuff at a chemical level. For instance, breast milk contains sugars that aren't actually digestible by human infants. That's because they aren't meant for the infant, itself. Rather, your breast milk is helpfully feeding your baby's intestinal bacteria. Freakier still: In monkeys, the chemical composition of breast milk can change, depending on factors like your baby's sex and whether your baby is showing signs of illness.

What’s surprising about Everest Base Camp is the color. It’s a flinty, gray place littered with shards of Himalayan sandstone and shale. Here and there appears a vivid green pool of alpine water. And then there’s the red, blue and green prayer flags hung by Himalayans to blow blessings in the wind.

Google Street View’s latest project, the World’s Highest Peaks, takes us to Everest and two other mountains included in the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents.

Teams of mountaineers toted digital cameras on treks to the top of each mountain and integrated their images into Google maps so we can trek along with them from the comfort of our laptops, iPhones or Android devices. Like Google Street View’s Ocean gallery, the mountain images bring us to places we may never see with our own eyes.

It’s easy to imagine the dry, cold climate at Camp Colera, where hikers wait for the weather to permit a climb of Aconagua, the highest mountain in the Andes. The views of Tanzania from Arrow Glacier are breathtaking. Hikers camp here before making the treacherous ascent to Uhuru—the “rooftop of Africa” and the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

One of the things Google does really well is create galleries of images that are the kind we might take ourselves, not filtered-lens professional shots that belong on calendars. We see mountaineers resting and hanging out at the frosty Casa de Piedra, on the way up to Aconagua, hikers picnicking at Lemosho Glades as they switch from jeep to foot on the climb up Kilimanjaro, and the weird, abandoned diesel barrels that serve as shelter for folks climbing Mount Elbrus in Russia.

As usual, Google lets us in on the process of collecting all these images with a fun blog written by the photographers.

Related Content:  

Reef View: Google Gives Us Stunning Underwater Shots of Great Coral Reefs

Google Presents an Interactive Visualization of 100,000 Stars

Google Street View Takes You on a Panoramic Tour of the Grand Canyon

Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Read more of her work at katerixwriter.com.

Climb Three of the World’s Highest Peaks on Google Street View is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Hilary "chartgirl" Sargent has created another epic infographic, explaining something complicated and interesting: this time, it's the Gardner Museum Heist (background here).

Here's the PDF in full-rez glory.

CISPA is a bill before Congress that will radically increase the ease with which the government and police can spy on people without any particular suspicion. It is being rammed through by people like Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), who received a small fortune in funding from the companies that stand to get rich building the surveillance tech CISPA will make possible.

What's more, Rogers admits it, and even tweets about it! Nicko Margolies from the Sunlight Foundation writes,

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), a co-sponsor and major supporter of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), deleted a retweet of an analysis of contributions to lawmakers from pro-CISPA companies. MapLight looked at the powerful House Intelligence Committee, where Rep. Rogers serves as Chairman, and followed campaign contributions to the members who are currently considering the bill that would allow companies to share more information on Internet traffic and users with the U.S. government.

Rep. Rogers, or possibly a member of his staff, retweeted the story that identified that members of the House Intelligence Committee "have received, on average, 15 times more money in campaign contributions from pro-CISPA organizations than from anti-CISPA organizations." He retweeted MapLight's tweet of this information from his iPhone and after 23 minutes thought better of it and removed it. Fortunately the Sunlight Foundation's Politwoops project caught it and archived this change of message and of heart. According to the MapLight piece, Rep. Rogers received $214,750 from interest groups that support CISPA.

The EFF has more info on CISPA, and ways you can help kill it.

Pro-CISPA Lawmaker Deletes Retweet about Money Received from Pro-CISPA Groups (Thanks, Nicko!)

Ready for the future? Those with an Oculus Rift developer kit will be able to tinker with virtual reality in Team Fortress 2: to access the VR mode, all you have to do is add "-vr" to your command line options in Steam. From there on out, things sound a little intense according to the Oculus Rift User Guide on the Team Fortress 2 Wiki. More »