Music

While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture: Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects. From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…

Via Kate, a call for love songs. I like most of the songs on Kate's list, but as I tried to think of songs to add, I realized a couple of things: 1) I own more really good kiss-off songs than I do traditional love songs, and 2) even the songs that I like about loving relationships tend to be a little... odd. Make of this what you will. Anyway, as a complement to Kate's list of relatively conventional love songs, here's a list of some odder tracks, mostly by less well-known artists. They're all songs about love or people in love, but not quite the sort of thing you should expect to hear as the…

Lest you think that the previous couple of posts indicate that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who doesn't like anything he reads, let me put in a plug for Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. I read about half of this piecemeal over a couple of months, then finished it on the plane to the March Meeting. Subtitled "An Alternative History of American Popular Music," it meticulously documents the fads and changes of American music over the first two-thirds or so of the 20th Century, and in the process tells a very different story than what you may think you know. The origin of…

What's the application? CD and DVD players use lasers to read (and in some cases write) digital information from convenient plastic disks. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we store a large amount of digital information in a convenient and stable fashion?" 2) "How do we make everybody buy the White Album a second time?" How does it work? The optics at the core of a CD player are very simple, and illustrated in this graphic that I lifted from the excellent explanation at HyperPhysics: Light from a diode laser is collimated and then focused down onto the surface of the CD. The…

What's the application? The use of lasers to provide an entertaining light show for humans, dogs, or cats. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How will I entertain my dog or cat?" 2) "How can we distract people from the fact that Roger Daltrey has no voice left?" Why are lasers essential? Lasers provide coherent beams of light, which remain small over very large distances, allowing you to project a small spot or a tight beam across a room, or even a football stadium. Why is it cool? Duuuuude! Lasers, duuuuude! Why isn't it cool enough? 1) It's fundamentally just a toy. 2) No amount…

I'm safely back, well ahead of the Snowpocalypse!!! I'm kind of out of it, though-- yesterday was a very long day, and I find air travel draining at the best of times-- so in lieu of substantive blogging, I offer you this thematically appropriate poll: Which of these travel-related songs is the best?(survey software) (Strictly speaking, two of those are the same song, but the end results are different enough to list them separately.)

There's an expert-level debate going on in the comments of Wednesday's quantum essentials post, and I do have some thoughts on the matter that I will eventually type up (in a top-level post rather than a comment, at this point). It's Friday, though, and I'm kind of fried. So here's some wibbling about pop music instead. On the way into work this morning, the Bryan Adams chestnut "Summer of '69" came on the radio. I'm probably destroying any credibility I have on the subject of popular music by saying that I have an unironic fondness for that tune, primarily for nostalgia reasons, but also…

Everybody with an opinion seems to be doing a decadal wrap-up of one sort or another, but I'm too tired to do anything serious. So, I'll let you do it for me: here's a list of ten songs that are, in my mind, inextricably bound up with the events of the decade. Which of them do you like the best? Which of these songs of 2000-2009 is your favorite?(survey) I'm not claiming that these are necessarily the best songs of the decade-- some of them aren't even the best song on their album-- but these are songs that, years from now, I'll hear and it will instantly be 200x in my head. Which ought to…

I continue to be boggled by the Bob Dylan Christmas album. Thus, a deeply silly poll: Having recorded a Christmas album, what should Bob Dylan's next project be?(polls) Happy Holidays!

It's officially December, so there are no longer really solid reasons for objecting to the playing of Christmas music. With the exception of the sort of stuff that shows up in Mellowmas, that is. And speaking of Mellowmas, there is this. About which, a poll: A Bob Dylan Christmas album:(survey software) Please choose only one, hard as it may be to believe.

As a companion piece to Steve Albini's famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement: I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero…

The Onion kindly provided this Patton Oswalt demolition of the "Christmas Shoes" song. while it's funny, it is a reminder that we have reached the time of year when radio stations across the country will begin inflicting holiday "cheer" on their listeners. which seems like an excellent subject for a poll: Which of these holiday songs is the most excruciating?(opinion) This is thrown together very quickly between steps in the food preparation for tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner, so I'm sure I've forgotten several horrible songs that belong on the list. Please feel free to offer your own least…

If you want to be a musician, there are some simple rules you must follow: And now you know... (The squeaky toy noises in the early part of this drive Emmy nuts...)

Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir: The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts. This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler…

I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point, they talk about the question of what modern act will be deemed sufficiently old and safe to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Klosterman has some amusing things to say, but this also seems like a perfect topic for a blog poll: Who will play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020?(polls) Klosterman,…

I was up until almost midnight grading labs, and I have forty-odd grant proposals to read today, so I'm going to be unplugging from the Internet and working on, well, work. For entertainment while I'm paying for my procrastination, here's another two-word lyrics quiz. These two-word phrases each uniquely identify a pop song (I hope). If you know the song from the phrase, leave the answer in the commnets, and add a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess. The first three are left over from the last round: up drivel town predicts wicked strict unlovable hand NYPD choir stained-…

(I think that's the right number...) I've got a ton of stuff to do today, and it's the last Friday of summer, so here's a little light entertainment. As in previous editions, each of the two-word phrases on the list below should hopefully uniquely identify one pop song. If you think you recognize the song, post your guess in the comments, and post a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess. First, a few holdovers from the last round, which was all proper names: a) Jean Content b) Mojo Nixon c) Billy Idol d) Rocco Sifretti While at least one of these people has recorded a song…

For my birthday, my parents got me two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen play in Saratoga Springs last night. The idea was that Kate and I would go, and they would come up and spend an evening with the grandbaby. Unfortunately, Kate had some sort of intestinal bug (which I now have, joy), and couldn't make it out, so my father came along with me. The show was scheduled for 7:30, and we walked in the gates at about 7:20, having been forced to pay for parking when a traffic cop suddenly declared that the giant empty field for free parking was full, and steered everybody into the $10 lot. The…

Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because the people making them up don't know how to make a good quiz. Making up good questions is a skill that takes time to master. The key elements that the people behind most Facebook quizzes are missing are good distractors-- the plausible-sounding wrong answers that lead…

I should queue up some more PNAS posts, but I think I'm going to save a bunch of them for when we're at Worldcon. And I do have more serious science-related stuff that I've marked to talk about, but it's Friday, and everybody could use a break. So here's a silly pop-music thing instead. As with past editions, the following two-word phrases are taken from pop songs, and (I think) uniquely identify a single song. At least, I can only think of one song in my collection for each of them. The twist this time around is the each of the two-word phrases is a person's name. If you think you know the…