music
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2009
Spring's finally reached Stockholm! To celebrate, here's a song by one of the city's finest folk singers, Stefan Sundström, off of his 1992 album Happy Hour Viser, "Happy Hour Songs". I translate:
Spring Samba
By Stefan Sundström
One morning when he awoke spring was already here
He was bleary, tired and hung over, pretty bedraggled
She got in through the window like a crazy samba in April
And took him right there, no ifs ands or buts
She danced around the room like a stoned tornado
Like a fairy there to wake the mountain trolls
And she ran up to the window and yelled "Our time is now!"
And…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2009
The Mama Mia movie has revitalised interest in Swedish 70s pop giants ABBA. The other day I heard 10-y-o Junior's school choir perform "As Good As New". 5-y-o Juniorette and her pals at daycare sing garbled versions of all the hits, such as "Oo-nay-boo" ("Voulez-Vous").
I grew up with ABBA and I'm still a big fan. But I haven't listened systematically through their oeuvre, haven't really paid much attention to the lyrics as I do when I encounter new music. Looking at "Voulez-Vous", the title track of the band's sixth 1979 album, I found something funny.
"Voulez-Vous" is a rousing disco tune…
edyong | March 25, 2009We're used to thinking of neglect as a lack of appropriate care, but to a neuroscientist, it has a very different meaning. "Spatial neglect" is a neurological condition caused by damage to one half of the brain (usually the right), where patients find it difficult to pay attention to one half of their visual space (usually the left).
This bias can affect their mental images too. If neglect patients are asked to draw clocks, many only include the numbers from 12 to 6, while some shunt all the numbers to the right side. When two famous neglect patients were asked to describe a familiar square…
oracknows | March 21, 2009This is about as geeky as it gets, but since a couple of the genes I study are homeobox genes, one of which is a HOX gene, one of which is not, I found this hilarious:
There you go: All you need to know about homeobox genes if you're not an expert in them.
Hat tip to Bioephemera.
goodmath | March 20, 2009
Valley of the Giants, "Back to God's Country": I mentioned Valley of the Giants a few weeks ago, as one of my favorite post-rock bands. A few weeks of listening to them incessantly hasn't changed that. They're absolutely brilliant. This track is very typical
of them; it's got a slow start, with an almost droning main melody. And they take that,
and develop it, through rhythm and harmony, until it's almost unrecognizable. And then
everything changes.
Hawkwind, "World of Tiers": typical Hawkwind. If you like them, you'll like
this. If you don't, you won't.
The Flower Kings, "Rumble Fish…
edyong | March 14, 2009
Have you ever looked at a piano keyboard and wondered why the notes of an octave were divided up into seven white keys and five black ones? After all, the sounds that lie between one C and another form a continuous range of frequencies. And yet, throughout history and across different cultures, we have consistently divided them into these set of twelve semi-tones.
Now, Deborah Ross and colleagues from DukeUniversity have found the answer. These musical intervals actually reflect the sounds of our own speech, and are hidden in the vowels we use. Musical scales just sound right because they…
sciencepunk | March 14, 2009Musical parody duo Hard'n'Phirm are best known for their bluegrass medley of Radiohead songs, but also conjured up this nugget of surreal joy, a song about everyone's favourite irrational number, Pi.
edyong | March 13, 2009The songs of birds certainly sound beautiful to our ears but listen closely and you'll hear a world of conflict and subterfuge. Take the Preuvian warbling antbird (Hypocnemis peruviana). Males and females live in pairs and they will defend their territories from other duos by singing beautifully coordinated duets.
Theirs is a most melodious partnership but throw another female into the mix and the harmony breaks down. The duet turns into an acoustic battle - the female tries to jam the song of her partner with her own, so that the notes of his amorous solo fail to reach the ears of the…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2009Dear Reader Derek asks,
Perhaps you can help me out here. For years I've been confused as to whether "Goths", "Geats", and "Jutes" are the same people with different spellings, related people with different spellings, or different people with coincidentally-similar names. Also, where "derek" (or "dietrich", or "teodric") comes from. Is it goth, or hun, or something else?
It's really easy to get confused here, because we're dealing both with historical reality and with historical fiction written a long time ago.
Goths: a Germanic-speaking ethnic group that took a major part in Migration…
oracknows | March 8, 2009Sadly, the meeting's over, and I'm winging my way back home as this very post shows up on the blog for your edification. Because it's Sunday and, more importantly, because I'm too tired to produce anything substantive, I leave you with this bit of Asian weirdness sent to me by my sister. It left me scratching my head:
My sister informs me that this is actually a parody of this band:
Wow. This is just...incredible.
You know, I really have to get back to serious blogging about medicine and science. I can hear my traffic plummetting after this. Oh, well. Perhaps people more in the know than…
gregladen | February 28, 2009Since someone is posting love songs, I figured I could do that too.
Peace Monday!
OK OK so that was not a love song. But the love song is not a video, just a still with the music in the background, and that just isn't commercial. Well, maybe with a couple of Margaritas in the right company, but not here not now. So the love song is below the fold.
LeRoy Bell on CD:
A Change Is Coming
Spending Time
Two Sides To Every Story
oracknows | February 28, 2009Why? Because I feel like it. For example, there are times I've felt like this:
Except that maybe I should sing a version called "I'm Afraid of Antivaccinationists." Nahhh. Instead let's go back. Way back:
terrasig | February 25, 2009Okay people, these students in Miss Stacy Baker's biology classes and Extreme Biology blog have been rocking my world for quite some time. They've now burst onto the national media and were all the buzz of the recent ScienceOnline'09 conference.
For those not familiar with the story, Stacy Baker is a biology teacher at the Calverton School in Huntingtown, Maryland, who began a website for student activities and class notes back in 2006. With the boundless enthusiasm of ninth-graders and more seasoned AP biology students, the site has become interactive: a blog, Extreme Biology, with videos…
terrasig | February 22, 2009
You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard,
Some that you recognise, some that you've hardly even heard of,
People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame,
Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.
Celluloid Heroes, The Kinks, 1972
Star-generator hat tip: Pharmagossip
With gratitude to Johnny G. for taking me and T.P. to our first big concert, The Kinks at Nassau Coliseum, 1979-ish.
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2009
Back in 2006 I gave Silver, the then latest album from Philadelphia folk rockers Maggi, Pierce and E.J., a rave review. Since then the band has put out a collection of covers, a documentary DVD, a side-project duo album, and last fall a new trio album mainly of original songs. I just bought it, and it's great!
Kahchee Moochee is named after Pierce's mom's term for good food. It has ten tracks, and the trio's signature eclecticism is much in evidence. There's folk, folk rock, bluegrass, jazz, power pop, boogie rock and punk rock on this disc, there's three-part harmony and there's some…
ddobbs | February 19, 2009
The Amygdaloids at the 92d Y, 4/3/08. Music starts at about 3m. LeDoux's the guitarist who is NOT singing. (Maybe it scares him?)
A few months back I gave a heads-up that NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux and his band, t the Amygdaloids, were playing in NYC. Well, the virus has spread! At Rock-It Science, March 3 in NYC, LeDoux and his band, the Amygdaloids (LeDoux pretty much owns the amygdala via his work on fear mechanisms) are to be joined on March 3 in NYC by other musical scientists-would-be-rock-stars, science bands, and science writers such as Pardis Sabetti (Harvard), David Soldier (…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2009
The BBC's global tech news show Digital Planet reports from Belém in Brazil on a rootsy version of the new business model that's likely to supersede the traditional music industry. It's musical sneakernet.
Since the invention of sound recording, musicians (and to an even greater extent, record companies) have made their money by putting out recordings and controlling who could copy them. In the analog era, this was fairly easy, as sound quality degraded with each successive copy generation. Whoever had the master tape of a hit song easily made money off it. Also, song lyrics and other…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2009
With thanks to Dear Reader Shelley, here's a 1969 French cover version of the Muppets' famed song: "Mais non, mais non", as written and sung by Henri Salvador.
pontiff | February 12, 2009Over at the fact builders blog, the fact master discusses The Physics of....Pink Floyd. Being two areas I greatly enjoy, I was reminded by the fact builders picture of the cover of "The Dark Side of the Moon" of a little known piece of Pink Floyd strangeness. Anyone notice something peculiar about the back and cover of DSOTM:
Update: Ian provides a picture of the inside of the DSOTM, where, we find, all hell breaks loose:
edyong | February 6, 2009Ants are among the most successful of living things. Their nests are well-defended fortresses, coordinated through complex communication systems involving touch and chemical signals. These strongholds are stocked with food and secure from the outside world, so they make a tempting prospect for any burglars that manage to break in.
One species of butterfly - the mountain alcon blue (Maculinea rebeli) - is just one such master felon. Somehow, it manipulates the workers into carrying it inside the nest, feeding it and caring for it. The caterpillar does so little for itself that it packs on 98…