Free NASA eBook Theorizes How We Will Communicate with Aliens

During the past few years, NASA has released a series of free ebooks, including NASA Earth As Art and various interactive texts focusing on the Webb and Hubble space telescopes. Last week, they added a new, curious book to the collection, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication. Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch (the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute), the text contemplates how we’ll go about “establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence.” The scholars contributing to the volume “grappl[e] with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected.” And to make sure that we’re “prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come,” they draw on “issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology.” Why archaeology and anthropology? Because, says Vackoch, communication with intelligent life probably won’t be through sound, but through images. We will need to read/understand the civilization we encounter based on what we observe. Vakoch says:

[D]on’t think of “sound worlds” or music or speech as the domains, vehicles, or contents of ETI [extra terrestrial intelligence] messages. Regardless of semiotic concerns, the accessibility of acoustic messaging must remain doubtful. Furthermore, there will be intended and unintended aspects of performance, which elaborate the difficulties of using sound. In my view avoidance of the sound world need not be controversial.

On the other hand, vision and the use of images would appear to be at least plausible. Although spectral details cannot be considered universal, the physical arrangement of objects on a habitable planet’s surface will be shaped in part by gravity (the notion of a horizon might well be universal) and thus multispectral images might plausibly be considered worthwhile for messages. More generally, the implications for considering SETI/CETI as some sort of anthropological challenge need teasing out.

The 300-page book, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication, has been made available in three formats, and added to our own collection, 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices:

› Kindle readers: MOBI [2.8 MB]

› All other eBook readers: EPUB [3.8 MB]

› Fixed layout: PDF [1.7 MB]

Below you can watch Vakoch give a TEDX talk called,”What Would You Say to an Extraterrestrial?”

via Gizmodo/Kim Komand0

Free NASA eBook Theorizes How We Will Communicate with Aliens 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 Free NASA eBook Theorizes How We Will Communicate with Aliens appeared first on Open Culture.

Open Culture

Free NASA eBook Theorizes How We Will Communicate with Aliens

7 Kids in the Same Family All Enrolled In College By Age 12

Kip and Mona Lisa Harding are the parents of 10 children but that’s not the craziest fact about them. Of their 10 kids, the seven oldest all enrolled in college by the age of 12, KSL.com reports. 

It all began when Kip and Mona Lisa decided to pull Hannah, their oldest, out of school in third grade. 

“We saw that maybe we could do better,” Kip Harding told KSL.com. “There was a lot of homework in the evenings, and we just decided to pull her out. It was a scary time at first, but we started and it was working out great and we just never looked back.” 

They enrolled Hannah in junior college courses, and as she continued to excel and express interest in a full-time college course load, her parents finally enrolled her in college full-time.

The Harding’s philosophy on homeschooling is simple: “One teacher has 30 students on average. We can do better than that. Kids get left behind in a classroom … This is where homeschooling really teakes off because these kids are getting extra attention,” Kip Harding told KSL.com. 

More than ten years later, the Hardings continue to homeschool their children, and the results have been nothing short of astounding. The parents recently wrote a book, entitled “The Brainy Bunch.” It documents the family’s story and offers advice for parents looking for an alternative schooling method.

Although the Harding parents insist they never pushed their children to enter college early, 93% of voters in a recent Today Show Facebook poll still said they would not raise their children like the Hardings.

Learn more about the “Brainy Bunch” children below (via The Today Show): 

Hannah (26):

Started online college courses at age 12, earned a degree from Auburn University at Montgomery at age 17. She now has two masters degrees and is set to begin her doctorate in engineering this fall.

Roseannah (24):

At 18, became the youngest member of the American Institute of Architects and is now an architect in New York City.

Serennah (23):

Possibly the youngest doctor in U.S. history, now at Walter Reed hospital for her internship in internal medicine. 

Heath (18):

Called himself the family “slacker” — earned a Bachelor’s degree in English at age 15 and a masters in computer science at 17, but took time off between his two degrees.

Keith (15):

Just graduated from Faulkner University with a degree in music and is an aspiring composer.

Seth (13):

Currently a sophomore at Hunnington College studying history, and plans to be an archaeologist.

Katrinnah (11):

A first-year student at Faulkner University, majoring in legal studies and minoring in theater. 

The Hardings have three more children, all of whom are homeschooled but too young for college, even by the family’s standards. Mariannah (8) and Lorennah (6) both say they want to be pediatricians, while Thunder (4) already has his sites set on lifeguarding. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Education

7 Kids in the Same Family All Enrolled In College By Age 12

Patti Smith Presents Top Webby Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mocking Video

Presenting at the 18th annual Webby Awards last week, Godmother of Punk Patti Smith managed to Adele Dazeem street art provocateur Banksy not once, but twice. Banksky? Ban-ski? It’s a measure of the lady’s august standing that emcee Patton Oswalt passed on the comic opportunities of this giant blunder. He did call her “fucking adorable,” but I like to think he did so with the kindest of intentions.

As to why an artist famous for using the real world as his canvas should be dubbed “Person of the Year” by an outfit that recognizes excellence on the Internet, Smith was nothing short of eloquent. The impermanence of his oft-illegally installed creations make them the perfect candidate “to be archived, shared and stored … through the World Wide Web.” (Apparently, she only just realized this is a synonym for the Internet, but no matter. I’m with Oswalt! It would be a cringeworthy admission in just about anybody else, but from her, it’s pretty dang cute.)

The necessarily low-profile honoree surprised no one by failing to accept his award in person. Rather than sending Sacheen Littlefeather as his proxy, he proffered a delightful, self-mocking short film, which you can see above.

The short revisits some of the high points of “Better In Than Out,“ last fall’s month-long, piece-a-day takeover of New York City. Keep your eyes peeled for Sirens of the Lambs, a truck hauling a load of squeaking, ostensibly doomed plush farm animal toys and Queens, an inflatable tag thrown up on his final day as “Artist in Residence for the City of New York.”

My favorite work from his autumnal siege of my city was Art Sale, in which he stocked a Central Park vendor table with half a million dollars’ worth of uncredited stencil art, then installed a decidedly unhip-looking senior citizen to man it. The day’s receipts totaled $ 420 from a handful of tourists, one of whom successfully bargained her way into a 2-for-1 deal.

I want to know more about these people who unwittingly lucked into such a lucrative role in 21st-century art history, but to my consternation, they seem to be flying incognito, just like the artist who so increased their value. You know, the guy who’s all over the internet, without revealing his identity? The Webby Awards’ Person of the Year!?

Maybe if I spend another hour poking around online… (A bad use of time, for all but Patti Smith, who claimed it took her 48 minutes to unsuccessfully download the video we can click with such ease, above.)

Related Content:

Banksy Creates a Tiny Replica of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Hear Patti Smith Read 12 Poems From Seventh Heaven, Her First Collection (1972)

Ayun Halliday occasionally tears herself  free of the Internet to labor over The East Village Inky, an entirely handwritten, illustrated zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

Patti Smith Presents Top Webby Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mocking Video 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 Patti Smith Presents Top Webby Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mocking Video appeared first on Open Culture.

Open Culture

Patti Smith Presents Top Webby Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mocking Video

11 Shockingly Accurate Predictions From Nostradamus

French apothecary and purported prophet Nostradamus may have his skeptics, but you can’t deny his ideas have staying power.

He wrote his first book, “Les Propheties,” in 1555, and publishing companies still roll out copies today. There’s even a “Nostradamus For Dummies.”

In the text of his book, each four-line block, called a quatrain, attempts to predict the future.

While logic might suggest Nostradamus’ claims could apply to almost any event, some of them come eerily close to reality. In these 11 cases, we couldn’t ignore his speculative prowess.

The Death of Henry II

Prediction:

“The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.”

What happened:

France’s King Henry II lined up to joust Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, seigneur de Lorges, a nobleman six years his junior, in the summer of 1559.

In their final pass, Montgomery’s lance tilted up and splintered into two shards. One went through the king’s visor and hit his eye, and the other lodged in his temple. Henry suffered for 10 days before dying in his bed.

Some reports say their shields displayed lion emblems, though disagreement exists. Skeptics also claim “field of battle” in the quatrain probably shouldn’t apply to the friendly jousting match that killed Henry II.

The Great Fire of London

Prediction:

“The blood of the just will be lacking in London,
Burnt up in the fire of ’66:
The ancient Lady will topple from her high place,
Many of the same sect will be killed.”

What happened:

On Sept. 2, 1666, a small fire in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane in London turned into a three-day blaze that consumed the city. It became known as the Great Fire of London.

Peasant deaths weren’t recorded at the time, but many historians claims at least eight people died in the blaze. Thousands of houses and business burned, as well. 

“Blood of the just” might refer to the elimination of millions of flea-carrying rats that spread the Black Death. That deadly plague died out during the Great Fire.

The French Revolution

Prediction:

“Songs, chants, and demands will come from the enslaved
Held captive by the nobility in their prisons
At a later date, brainless idiots
Will take these as divine utterances.”

What happened:

In 1789, the French people decided they’d had enough of aristocratic rule. They revolted, storming the Bastille, a Paris fortress used as a prison. The fall of the Bastille, which symbolized the monarchy’s abuses, marked the height of the French Revolution.

The peasants quickly took control of Paris and enforced their demands by kidnapping the royals. Some of them were even beheaded.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Education

11 Shockingly Accurate Predictions From Nostradamus

Here Are Some Horrific Projections For Anybody Who Expects To Pay For College Some Day

It’s no secret that college tuition and textbook inflation is just out of control.

Expensive as it seems now though, the picture is only expected to get scarier, according to a new report from Michael Conrath and his team at JP Morgan Funds.

This chart shows that future college costs are expected to inflate 5% per year, taking annual private college costs (for tuition, fees, room and board for a year) from $ 39,518 today to $ 90,576 in 2030 (in 2012 dollars).

For you parents, the younger your child is, the more expensive college is likely going to be going forward. A child that’s currently 18 years old will likely pay $ 76,979 for a four-year public college education. But for a child on the way, that cost will surge to $ 185,259.

Much has been made about surging medical care costs. And most people see gas prices increasing right before their eyes. But none of this compares to tuition. This chart shows that since 1983, tuition costs have risen faster than any other major household expense.

JP Morgan advisors are telling clients that putting money into a savings account won’t do. In order to better prepare themselves, parents are being advised to take some risk and invest in stocks and bonds.

SEE ALSO: Here’s Why Saving For College Isn’t Enough

Join the conversation about this story »

Education

Here Are Some Horrific Projections For Anybody Who Expects To Pay For College Some Day

Charts Show That Segregation In US Schools Is Still A Major Problem

UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a lengthy report earlier this month showing increasing segregation in U.S. public schools 60 years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education first led to desegregation.

The report, titled “Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future” looks only at U.S. public schools and defines segregation as separation among students by race or ethnicity.

The report includes some eye-opening charts, like the one below focusing on the South — the region arguably most impacted by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. That year, no black students in the South attended school with white students. Even a decade later, only one in 50 black students had been integrated, with 2.3% attending majority white schools. But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, greater federal enforcement of desegregation led to more rapid integration.

Desegregation peaked in the South in 1988 when 43.5% of black students attended majority white schools. But that percentage began a steady decline in the 1990s, down to just 23.2% by 2011. “The reality is that segregation has been increasing since 1990, for almost a quarter century, and that today black students are substantially more segregated than they were in 1970,” the UCLA Civil Rights Project report said. “The direction of change, however, suggests that things will continue to worsen.”

This next chart reveals that the percentage of black students in extremely segregated schools — where 90-100% of students are minorities — has increased in every region of the U.S. since the early 1990s.

Black students started becoming more segregated in the early 1990s, the same period when a conservative Supreme Court began ending desegregation plans in many of the country’s school districts, according to the UCLA Civil Rights Project report.

Despite the increase in segregation, the Northeast is the only region where more black students are extremely segregated now than in 1968. The “border” region in the above chart includes Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

This next chart takes into account the Latino minority group, whose share of total school enrollment has increased substantially since the 1960s, while the share of white enrollment has decreased substantially. It reveals that, like black students, the percentage of Latino students in extremely segregated schools has largely increased in recent decades.

The next chart shows the nationwide racial composition of schools for the average student of each race.

White students are the most isolated by race, followed by Latino students and black students. “[I]n a classroom of 30 students, the classmates of the typical white student would include 22 whites, 2 blacks, 4 Latinos, one Asian and one ‘Other,’” the report states. “On the other hand, the typical black or Latino student would have 8 white classmates and at least 20 black and/or Latino classmates.”

For perspective, the next chart displays the percentage of enrollment among each racial group throughout the country. By combining the numbers from these last two charts, we can see more about the extent of segregation in U.S. schools.

Although white students comprise 51.5% of nationwide public school enrollment, on average they attend schools where 72.5% of students are also white. Whereas black students comprise 15.4% of total enrollment, on average they attend schools where 48.8% of students are also black and only 27.6% are white. Latino students make up 24.3% of total enrollment, but on average they attend schools where 56.8% of students are also Latino and only 25.1% are white.

These charts show clearly that segregation in public schools has increased in recent decades. But when comparing today’s public schools to the past, it is important to keep in mind that Latino public school enrollment has risen from only 2 million in 1968 to 11.9 million in 2011, according to the report. Meanwhile, white enrollment has declined from 34.7 million in 1968 to 25.1 million in 2011.

“Given the vast changes in U.S. school enrollment, even if there were a perfectly even distribution of students from all racial groups, there would still be a decline in contact by students of other races with whites, because the share of the total who are white has declined substantially,” the report said. “There would also be a very substantial increase in contact with Latinos, because their share of the total has increased.”

Click here to read the full report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project >>

SEE ALSO: Amazing New Tool Lets You See The Racial Disparities At Your Old High School

Join the conversation about this story »

Education

Charts Show That Segregation In US Schools Is Still A Major Problem

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Comedy Routine Becomes a NSFW Animated Film (1968)

If you ever really wanted to know what was the deal between The Lone Ranger and Tonto, the above video of Thank You, Mask Man might answer a few questions. Warning: it’s seriously NSFW.

The audio for Thank You, Mask Man is taken from a stand up routine from Lenny Bruce, who ruthlessly, hilariously takes apart the legendary crime fighter. After years of getting saved by a masked hero on a white steed, the denizens of a small Western town corner him into accepting something, anything as a token of their gratitude. The hero points to a nearby Native American and says that he wants him. He proclaims that he wants “to perform an unnatural act.” The townspeople are horrified. “I’ve read a lot of exposes on how bad it is,” the Masked Man explains, “and I want to try it, just once.”

Jeff Hale, who later went on to animate that groovy Pinball Number Countdown bit on Sesame Street, made the short in 1968, two years after Bruce’s death. The movie had a hard time getting booked into theaters reportedly, in part, because Bruce ruffled more than a few feathers in the film industry. Ultimately though Thank You, Mask Man became a staple at gay and cult film festivals.

Bruce was, of course, the original bad boy comic. He laced his free form, lightning quick performances with frank discussions of sex, social issues and lots of swearing. Nowadays, F-bombs are par for the course in a comedian club but, back during the Kennedy administration, they were shocking. And they got him thrown in jail on several occasions. You can listen to another (unanimated) Bruce routine below. It’s completely NSFW.

You can find Thank You, Mask Man in the Animation section of our collection, 675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

Related Content:

Lenny Bruce Riffs and Rants on Injustice and Hypocrisy in One of His Final Performances (NSFW)

George Carlin Performs His “Seven Dirty Words” Routine: Historic and Completely NSFW

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.

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Comedy Routine Becomes a NSFW Animated Film (1968) 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 Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Comedy Routine Becomes a NSFW Animated Film (1968) appeared first on Open Culture.

Open Culture

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Comedy Routine Becomes a NSFW Animated Film (1968)

Here's The Incredible Argument For Why New Grads Shouldn't Work On Wall Street

Numbers show that the majority of elite college graduates consider success to be landing a job in finance, consulting, or law in a thriving city like New York, San Francisco, or D.C.

Venture for America founder Andrew Yang thinks this is a serious problem for the United States.

Too many smart, talented young people are convinced that the only way to validate their education is by following the pack, Yang argues. That means there’s not enough talent flowing to businesses that create jobs and bring capital back to cities like Detroit and Baltimore, Yang explains in his new book “Smart People Should Build Things.”

It tells the story of how he came to found Venture for America in 2012 as a way of recruiting top college graduates to work at startups in business-starved cities throughout the U.S.

Today, VFA has 108 fellows helping startups grow in cities like Las Vegas and New Orleans. Over 100 more fellows are preparing to begin their two-year program.

Yang, who’s goal for the VFA is to create 100,000 jobs by 2025, created a visual summary of his book. He’s allowed us to republish it here.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Education

Here's The Incredible Argument For Why New Grads Shouldn't Work On Wall Street

19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873)

Students and lovers of Victoriana, we have a treat for you. The 1873 book above, Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day, offers caricatures of forty-nine prominent men, and one woman, of the 19th century, some of them less-than-famous now and some still veritable giants of their respective fields.

Accompanied by lively biographies, the portraits were all drawn by illustrator Frederick Waddy, who is perhaps best known for the drawing on page six of a white-bearded Charles Darwin (above) entitled “Natural Selection”—often reproduced in color and found hanging on the office walls of biology teachers. Darwin appears second in Cartoon Portraits, preceded only by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame.

In addition to professor’s offices, you may also encounter some of Waddy’s work at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In his time, Waddy was one of the foremost caricaturists of the day—an important position in periodical publishing before the advent of cheaply mass-reproducible photography. All of the portraits originally appeared in a magazine called Once a Week, founded in a split between Charles Dickens and his publisher Bradbury and Evans, who started the journal with editor Samuel Lucas in 1859 to compete with Dickens’ All the Year Round. Once a Week ran until 1880, publishing pieces on history and current affairs and occasional poems by Tennyson, Swinburne, Dante Rossetti and others. Its popularity was buoyed by Waddy’s drawings and the detailed illustrations of several other graphic artists. Above, see Mark Twain riding his celebrated jumping frog, and just below, poet and critic Matthew Arnold does a high-wire act between two trapezes labelled “Poetry” and “Philosophy.” Twain’s portrait is titled “American Humour”— and he is the only American in the series—and Arnold’s is called “Sweetness and Light.”

Though the book’s title promises only “Men of the Day,” it does include one woman, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (below, simply titled “M.D.”), the first Englishwoman to officially work as a physician. Her biographical sketch begins with a long and somewhat tortuous historical defense for female doctors, stating that “social prejudices are almost as hard to eradicate as those of religion. It was not till quite lately that the feeling against woman’s rights as regard education was successfully combated.” Once a Week was a progressive-leaning magazine, its editor a noted abolitionist, and it regularly published the work of women writers like Harriet Martineau, Isabella Blagden, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, though one wonders why they didn’t warrant caricatures as well.

Below, see Waddy’s portrait of central African explorer Henry Morton Stanley, standing twice the height of the native African next to him. It’s a fitting image of colonial ego, though the scene may be drawn after a photo of Stanley with his adopted son Kalulu. The title refers to his search for—and famous exclamation upon discovering—Scottish missionary David Livingstone. All in all, Cartoon Portraits gives us a fascinating look at Victorian visual media and a representative sample of the most popular literary, scientific, and political figures in England during the middle of the century. While the names of Waddy and his fellow comic artists are hardly remembered now, the authors of The Smiling Muse: Victoriana in the Comic Press assert that in their day, “they were the ones who had their fingers on the pulse of what we now call the ‘popular culture’ of the time.” See The Public Domain Review for more highlights from the book.

via The Public Domain Review

Related Content:

The British Library Puts Online 1,200 Literary Treasures From Great Romantic & Victorian Writers

Explorer David Livingstone’s Diary (Written in Berry Juice) Now Digitized with New Imaging Technology

Mark Twain Writes a Rapturous Letter to Walt Whitman on the Poet’s 70th Birthday (1889)

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

19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873) 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 19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873) appeared first on Open Culture.

Open Culture

19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873)