music
oracknows | July 1, 2010Status report: I'm in the home stretch of writing my grant. It will be finished by 8 AM, when I have to be at work again, in tip top mental condition for the meetings I'll have to endure all morning. (What the heck happened to not doing anything substantive the day before a holiday weekend? At least I don't have to operate or see patients.) Whether it will take an all nighter to do it I am not yet sure. Whatever the case, here is the perfect mood music for late night science and grant writing.
"We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."
Yeah,…
gregladen | June 30, 2010
A Change Is Coming, by Leroy Bell, who happens to be my nephew. Pretty good, huh!?
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2010Californian Roy Zimmerman is a satirical singer in the vein of Tom Lehrer (who endorses him). He recently released his seventh solo album, Real American, and I'm happy to say that Zimmerman has lost none of the brilliance us fans have come to expect.
The disc has 13 tracks of which 3 are spoken political comedy. My favourite is the live-recorded boogie tune "Socialist!", which recalls "I'll Pull Out" from Zimmerman's previous album. It's sung in the voice of a hillbilly Republican who sneers at all the socialists in the audience. They've driven to the gig on public streets, gone to public…
gregladen | June 26, 2010It's called Staring Down the Brilliant Dream.
I'm especially excited about the new versions of Shame on You and Wild Horses
The disk is a collection of 31 songs selected from live shows during 2006-2009. Brandi Carlile and Jill Hennessey do some of the singing.
Technically, it comes out on the 29th, but Staring Down the Brilliant Dream can be pre-ordered here.
jgoldman | June 24, 2010Last week, I asked on twitter, and then on the blog, about peoples' preferences for listening to music while doing various types of sciencey work, and conducted an informal survey.
Today I'll give you the (entirely unscientific) results, and in a few days I'll share what research has to say about music and work productivity.
Fifty three scientists (or scientists-in-training) completed the survey. I had predicted that music would be preferred in general, but that as language demands of the task increased, music preference overall would decrease. Since I'm doing this at home and don't have SPSS…
cevans | June 22, 2010
I believe the world is a complex phenomenological experience that can be explained, rationalized, and lived in myriad different ways. The way I see it, we all begin with the same fundamental mystery -- why are we here? what is life? -- and we attack this problem with whatever tools we find work best; some of us use science, parsing and decoding the secrets of life with a toolbox of methods and reason. Others, with the same goals in mind, use art, arranging ideas and objects in intentional ways designed to root at the questions of existence. Others still depend on the framework of religion to…
jdupuis | June 21, 2010Yes, that David Gilmour.
Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums.
Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense:
I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…
oracknows | June 17, 2010Ozzy Osbourne is, like many rock stars of his advancing age, an amazing creature. Having subjected his body to abuse beyond the ability of most normal people to understand in terms of booze, drugs, and crazy living on the road, like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps going and going and going along. Naturally, given that, against all probability, Ozzy has somehow managed to make it past 60, scientists wonder why he is still alive.
Now some scientists want to find out; they plan on sequencing Ozzy's genome.
Next up, Keith Richards!
The problem I see with this is that we don't necessarily have…
oracknows | June 12, 2010Somehow, this doesn't seem all that far from the truth, except that kitties are cute.
The last line, however, is, sadly, all too prescient-sounding. In fact, I'm not sure that it's even funny because the truth hurts. I guess cute kitties make it easier to take. I wonder if they ever remade A Few Good Men with kittens.
(Warning: One NSFW word near the end.)
grrlscientist | May 31, 2010tags: The Maniacal Drummer from Hell, music, performing arts, Rick K And the Allnighters, Sharp Dressed Man, Knoebels Grove, Pennsylvania, weird, humor, funny, offbeat, streaming video
The drummer in this music video is either amazing or ridiculous. Since he's quite good, I am thinking he's probably amazing. I wonder what Günter Grass thinks of him?
grrlscientist | May 27, 2010tags: Doctor Who Theme Song Accompanied by Tesla Coils, music video, DIY, Do-It-Yourself, science, physics, music, performing arts, weird, offbeat, Tesla Coils, ArcAttack, Maker Faire 2010, streaming video
The musical group, ArcAttack, constructed a set of Tesla Coils that they use to perform "an electrifying" live performance at Maker Faire 2010, held in San Mateo, California. Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to "celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset."
According to the filmographer, the HVDJ pumps music through a PA system…
sastyk | May 27, 2010My children are pirates right now. There's a fallen tree in the woods that makes a superb pirate ship, and my children have boarded and captured it. And they are singing pirate songs. Loudly. It is a very good thing that we live so far from other human habitation - if we lived in the 'burbs the neighbors would kill us.
So appropos to nothing, I'm sharing a collection of pirate songs, in the hopes that you won't notice that I haven't written much of anything this week. If I gotta listen to them, you gotta listen to them. It may, of course, be our fault for teaching the boys pirate songs…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2010
The increasing number of podcasts I subscribe to has tended to crowd music out a bit from my earbuds in recent months. But I do have some good albums to recommend. Here's what's on my smartphone right now.
Fleet Foxes. Fleet Foxes. 2008. Folky guitars and complex vocal harmonies.
Heavy Blinkers. Better Weather. 2002. Bacharach-obsessed orchestral pop.
Jet. Shaka Rock. 2009. It rocks. And shakes.
MGMT. Congratulations. 2010. Psychedelic New Wave.
Midlake. The Courage of Others. 2010. More folky guitars and complex vocal harmonies.
I've run similar lists before in 2008 and 2009.
Then there's…
oracknows | May 18, 2010Over the last week or so, I've been a bit--shall we say?--dismissive of claims by anti-vaccinationists when they insist that, really, truly, honestly, they aren't "anti-vaccine," usually with a wounded, indignant, self-righteous tone. Either that, or they make like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail by demanding the surrender of the public health community, even as limb after limb of their claims have been lopped off by the sword of science, all the while not even realizing how risible it is to demand respect for their views after they have been totally discredited…
cagapakis | May 18, 2010I've written before about artificial life researchers from the 18th and 20th centuries working to create robots that attempt to recreate the human voice. I recently saw this terrifying video over at the PopSci blog of a recent robotic voice machine and wanted to share it:
Over at Noise For Airports, Nick shares a very different way to combine biology, computer science, and music--The Heart Chamber Orchestra, which plays music generated from the rhythm of their combined heartbeats in real time:
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
elerner | May 6, 2010This fall, more than 500 science and engineering organizations, thousands of scientists, and even more young people, will gather in Washington D.C. for a one-of-a-kind festival. The USA Science & Engineering Festival has made ScienceBlogs its blogging partner for the run up to the big event, and have been serving up a ton of cool stories, videos, and contests. The latest is Science Idol, where fans compete to have their song be the official jingle of the Festival. We're down to the final seven contestants, so head over to the USA Science & Engineering Festival blog to listen to them…
cagapakis | May 4, 2010So I had this great post planned about the Boston aquapocalypse but by the time I managed to get some water samples to the lab they had started heavily chlorinating the water and no bacteria were left! Since negative results don't make for good blog posts, please enjoy this video of my silkworms dancing to Flo Rida's Right Round instead.
goodmath | April 23, 2010
Stellardrive, Inlandsix: Reasonably good instrumental prog. They're
not particularly exceptional, but they're decent.
Gong, "The Octave Doctors and the Crystal Machine": Gong is a
perfect example of one of the differences between the great prog bands,
and a lot of the neo-progressive stuff. I can't quite describe exactly what it
is - but you listen to a band like Gong, and you never get bored. You can listen
to it over, and over - and it's always interesting. Even though the individual
features of the music are similar to what a lot of less brilliant bands do,
they manage to…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2010
To my surprise, I found that the Cocteau Twins' 1988 song "Athol-Brose" is not named after a comet but after a Scottish drink consisting of oatmeal, honey, whiskey and cream. I'd like a Bose-Einstein condensate with mine, please.