Links for 2009-09-03

"In 1877, English physicist Lord Rayleigh observed that when two almost identical organ pipes are played side by side, something strange happens. Rather than each blaring their own tone, the two pipes will barely make a whisper. But put a barrier between them, and they sing loud and clear.

Markus Abel and his team of physicists at Potsdam University in Germany found themselves uniquely poised to investigate the long-standing mystery. "

"That got me thinking," Shen said, "about what wisdom we might find from the people on the fringes of society." So, along with his co-producer, Greg Bennick, Shen set out to make a film about the wisdom of people whom we rarely think of as wise. The two called colleges and universities across the United States to ask if they could interview the janitors."

""I felt like jumping up in my seat in the movie and saying, 'No, no, no!' " says Laura Shapiro, author of "Julia Child: A Life." "There were things that came in cans she liked just fine, like chicken broth. She dubbed Uncle Ben's rice 'l'Oncle Ben's.' " Child adored supermarkets and admired McDonald's. She thought premade pie crust a wonderful invention and was supportive of irradiating food for safety. Cooking, for her, was not in conflict with progress. Rather it was, or could be, in partnership with it."

"My father, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906, had a terrific memory for the hits of his youth and I grew up hearing "The Sheik of Araby", "When Frances Dances with Me", "Yes! We Have No Bananas", over and over. I would sometimes ask, "Who sang that song?" - a normal question for any pop listener born after 1950. But it made no sense to him. Everybody sang those songs; that was what a hit was. Record dealers assumed the average customer would be happy with any decent performance of a hit - just as casual buyers of classical music still shop primarily on the basis of the composition and composer."

"The last track in my mind as I watched the film was a kind of dread at the inevitable appearance of complaints from the sort of Africanist scholars who typically raise a great hue and cry about any film or TV program that doesn't represent Africa and Africans in sanctified terms (or similarly fails to envision colonizers and colonialism in purely demonic fashion). I tried reasoning with this cognitive module: surely, said my inner voice, this film is so richly imagined (not to mention entertaining) that the usual aggrieved griping about representations of Africa will be muted or non-existent. Surely, said my other inner voice, the more cynically experienced one, such quasi-nationalist monitors of representation do not abandon their guardposts nor relax their watch for negative imagery. "

"I have a solution to this problem that I call the 25/25 rule: it doesn't count if you did it more than 25 years ago or before your 25th birthday. Obviously there are exceptions to this. A major scandal (Watergate, say) or career accomplishment (passing a bill) should stay with you more or less forever. Likewise, if you can show a consistent pattern of behavior, then the entire historical track record is fair game."