~openculture | Bookmarks (55)
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An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Cathedral That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years
In less than a year and a half, the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death will be...
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An Animated Introduction to the Rosetta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Understanding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
In 1799, Napoleon’s army encountered a curious artifact in Egypt, a black stone that featured writing...
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An Introduction to the Astrolabe, the Medieval Smartphone
Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in...
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The Book of Colour Concepts: A New 800-Page Celebration of Color Theory, Including Works by Newton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint
The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing...
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The Founder of the Red Cross Creates a Diagram of the Apocalypse (1887)
History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and...
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6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal...
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How Engineers Straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa
?si=WxyK2XAukThVTpa7 Construction on the Tower of Pisa first began in the year 1173. By 1178, the...
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How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee: An Animated History
Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of...
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The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than We Thought, Emerging in Renaissance Italy
Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the...
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Watch the Film That Invented Cinema: Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895)
The brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often referred to as pioneers of cinema, and their...
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The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)
Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons Those of us who were playing video games in...
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Discover the World’s Oldest University, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Million Manuscripts, and Then Educated Students for 800 Years
In the Buddhist Asia of a dozen centuries ago, the equivalent of going off to study...
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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be “at the Center of Everything;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs
Four decades ago, our civilization seemed to stand on the brink of a great transformation. The...
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Scenes from Life in Paris During the 1920s, Colorized and Restored: Cafés, Notre Dame, Street Life & More
Few cities have been as romanticized as Paris, and few eras in Paris have been as...
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A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea
A cool tool. Software engineer Ian Webster has created a website that lets you see how...
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A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)
Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still...
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Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
We’re nearly halfway through February, which the United States of America also knows as Black History...
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Watch Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)
Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera,...
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A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires Come Together
Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind:...
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A 500-Page Book Explores the Ghosts & Monsters from Japanese Folklore
Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and...
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Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Animations Showing 500 Million Years of Continental Drift
Things change… Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in...
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The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond
Oliver Hermanus’ latest film Living transplants the story of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to postwar London. Apart...
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Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)
For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm...
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Before ChatGPT, There Was ELIZA: Watch the 1960s Chatbot in Action
In 1966, the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which diagnosed...