Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Open Culture
World War II officially ended on September 2, 1945. It followed, by less than three weeks, an equally momentous event, at least in the eyes of cinephiles: the birth of Wim Wenders. Though soon to turn 80 years old, Wenders has remained both productive and capable of drawing great critical acclaim. Witness, for example, his […]
It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past and future.” The painting caused an uproar, even among the artist’s peers. It was […]
Image by Rizka, via Wikimedia Commons In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respected as Habodeu. Children dream of it; adults seemingly do anything to play up their own connections to it, however tenuous those connections may be. But what is Habodeu? An electronics company? A line of clothing? Some […]
Though its answer has grown more complicated in recent years, the question of whether computers will ever truly think has been around for quite some time. Richard Feynman was being asked about it 40 years ago, as evidenced by the lecture clip above. As his fans would expect, he approaches the matter of artificial intelligence […]
Is perpetual motion possible? In theory… I have no idea…. In practice, so far at least, the answer has been a perpetual no. As Nicholas Barrial writes at Makery, “in order to succeed,” a perpetual motion machine “should be free of friction, run in a vacuum chamber and be totally silent” since “sound equates to […]
More in history
‘America, América’ by Greg Grandin review JamesHoare Mon, 06/02/2025 - 09:07
From their first encounters with Europeans in 1642 to the Musket Wars in the first half of the 19th century, the Māori, the Indigenous people of New Zealand, actively resisted British rule, both peacefully and violently. Led by their chiefs, Māori tribes from both the North and South Islands navigated the upheaval triggered by […]
Duke Ellington (born Edward Kennedy Ellington; April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) had a voracious appetite for sex and food. The elegant American jazz pianist, composer, master of instrumental colour and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra wrote thousands of songs and performed all over the world, not least in his role as … Continue reading "32 Hotdogs and A Pocketful of Chops: Eating With Duke Ellington" The post 32 Hotdogs and A Pocketful of Chops: Eating With Duke Ellington appeared first on Flashbak.
Belief bias is a cognitive bias that makes us assess knowledge claims based on how believable they sound, rather than how logical they are. As a result, we may accept believable yet logically invalid claims, and reject unbelievable yet logically valid ones. As one of the earliest biases to be studied in cognitive psychology, […]
