The Coolest 9 Minutes and 35 Seconds Ever Broadcast?

A little more than 49 years ago, on July 21, 1960, CBS broadcast "The Sound of Miles Davis" on an episode of Robert Herridge Theater. The show featured a set recorded on April 2, 1959.

At the top of the program, the Miles Davis Quintet (including John Coltrane on tenor) launched into a soulful, stunning rendition of So What, the studio version of which was laid down one month earlier on March 2, 1959. For the millions of fans of jazz music who have memorized the studio version, the CBS version opens a window into how the song evolved in the months following its famous recording.

Since So What is the most memorable track on Kind of Blue, the most famous jazz album of all time, I think you're forced to conclude that these are the coolest 9 minutes, 35 seconds in the history of broadcast television.
Update (8/17): Kind of Blue was released fifty years ago today.

O Court, Please Leave Room for Great Use

It's been a long time since I've ruminated on the fair use copyright standard for video sharing websites, but whatever standard the court settles on, I hope they make room for fan-made music videos that I find amazing:

Death Cab for Cutie - Little Bribes from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

MOMA — I See

After experiencing the Met and MOMA both with and without audio tours, I'm now of the opinion that going to an art museum without a good audio tour or an informed guide borders on a waste of time.

MOMA's new short film does a good job of summing up the difference in your appreciation when you can approach a piece on a more than aesthetic level:

Get Rich! Just Like Me!

Facebook ads were strange and are just getting stranger.

Based on the pattern on this fellow's collar – which looks an awful lot like the military's new MARPAT camouflage pattern – I suspect this fellow is a member of the U.S. military holding up some Iraq or Afghanistan reconstruction money, not some entrepreneur showing off his hard-won earnings:


As our country spindles downwards into economic darkness, I feel like I've noticed a trend whereby the claims of internet advertising have become more ambitious and outlandish. As our lives get plainer, ads promise only more luxury.

Today, we're all suddenly focused on living within our means, we wonder how we'd manage if that job disappeared, we know that our current shared struggle was hatched from the simultaneous failure of our fellow countrymen's fatally flawed get-rich-quick schemes.

Yet we're still not attentive enough to notice that the image of the fellow holding tens of thousands of dollars in his hand is a ploy, a lie in plain sight. That money is not his and it's not yours, but maybe you're more likely to click the ad today than you were a year ago, because just for a second, you want to believe that you can succeed economically without wait or effort. Just for that moment, you look at the image without seeing, hoping for the chance to get rich because you're sick of a world that says you're lucky to get by.

The Chicago Tribune's Crystal Ballcirca January 2005

On January 20, 2005, Chicago Tribune writer Eric Zorn penned a blog post entitled '08 reasons why Obama will run for president in 2008.

Looking ahead almost 4 years, Zorn observes:

• "Sure, Obama is a huge celebrity now" but his star might fade
• Democrats would not choose Clinton due to her status as a "poisonously polarizing figure"
• Senator John McCain will be too old to run for President in 2008
• "Obama is the Midas of fundraisers" because he had $600k in his campaign fund (Obama's campaign raised $150 million September 2008 alone)

He ends the article with the following:

[Then Obama spokesman Robert] Gibbs denied again Wednesday that Obama will run in 2008.
Don't you believe it.

Thanks, Ryan!

Poor, Desperate Souls — Click Here!

When I made my Facebook account, I gave the website my age; therefore, I'm not bothered just because Facebook occasionally reminds me of my age when it serves ads on the pages I load.

Still, something about this ad is beyond creepy.

If Moses Had Known About This, I Suspect It Would Have Been Forbidden in Leviticus

I have been introduced to the possibility that a dog might wear a sweater woven of its own fur.

Last week, I was looking over Steph's shoulder as she casually perused a short online article, How to Card Angora Fiber. As she got to the bottom of the article, both of us immediately saw a Related WikiHow link that loomed large on the screen, demanding to be clicked:

How to Make Dog Yarn

Yes, gentle reader. It can be done. It is called Chiengora and according to the scholarly work, Evaluation of Non-Traditional Animal Fibers for Use in Textile Products (.pdf link), the following breeds are more-or-less house sheep walking among us: American Eskimo, Poodle, Old English Sheep Dog (pause to let irony sink in), Shih Tzu, Schnauzer, Labrador Retriever, Pekingese, West Highland White Terrier, Bichon Frise, Cockapoo, Lhasa Apso, Pomeranian, and Australian Shepherd.

Yes, gentle reader, it can be done. But should it be done?

Time, Patience, & Quite a Bit of Paint

I've stumbled across a longer version of MUTO, the incredible art installation that I posted to the blog last September:


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan)

Impressive. Most Impressive. Obi-Wan Has Taught You Well.

This Obama supporter thinks The Empire Strikes Barack does a pretty good job of summing up the last couple months of our Democratic Demolition Derby:If down the road you find this to be removed by Google, then the search engine is policing the boundaries of YouTube a little bit too closely. This is clearly a fair use of the underlying material.

Update (5/2): Of course, Hillary is hardly Darth Vader. She's more Lando Calrissian, an ally and kindred spirit who has temporarily been wooed by the dark side. It just wouldn't be such a fun video if she were Lando, so let's permit the talented creators a little artistic license.

(Hat tip to Ben Smith)

Target Demographic?

Grand Theft Auto IV was released today. For those unfamiliar with the GTA series, here's how IGN described the game action: you "blow up cop cars, run down innocent civilians, bang hookers, assist drug dealers and lowlifes and do many, many other bad deeds." I've never actually played the game, but apparently it has inspired gameplay—inspiring, at least, reviewers to describe it in glowing terms, such as a "thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun."

Nonetheless, I think that Rockstar Games might have overreached their target demographic with the ad buy I noticed this morning:


In case you can't make them out, some of the headlines on the page are:
Consumer Confidence Slips as Home Prices Drop;
China Jails 30 Tibetans for Riots; and
Clinton Seeks Gas Tax Break; Obama Says No.

What Emily Post Didn't Anticipate

I had planned to just keep my typing fingers still until the end of April (at which point the powers of academia will either fail me or pass me on to the next set of flaming hoops), but I am faced with an ethical dilemma to which I have no answer.

What do you do when you get a friend request from someone you don't know? Or worse yet, someone you know and just don't like all that much?

If I were a member of the 19th century landed gentry, I could invite the caller into my sitting room for cigars, and allow him no further and offer him sub-par sherry. That would have certainly driven home the message and no one would lose face or social grace.

Thoughts from the public are welcome.

Look on the Bright Side

At least our drinking water is rock & roll-free.

CSTV's New Basketball Gametracker Interface: The Finest Sports Ticker Tape Yet

As an out-of-market fan of Stanford basketball, Nebraska football, and Fulham football/soccer, I'm accustomed to "watching" games online via dramatizations of game statistics. It can be pretty dull stuff, since you're merely watching statistics like 10:25 Free Throw GOOD by STAN's Lopez, Brook being stitched together via a dynamic web interface.

There's only so much drama that you can inject into the snippets of game information some poor drone is feeding into the information service that ESPN et al. use for these displays. Familiar with the general un-watchability of these screens, I'm STUNNED by one that I just discovered. As far as basketball goes, CSTV's new basketball interface raises the bar. Obviously, the action still has the Morse Code pacing of erratic statistical blurbs, but the representation is beautiful and flowing:


It's nearly watchable.

Seeing is believing. Watch a bit of a game yourself. Good job, CSTV.

The Best Invertebrate Biology Project Ever.

I study sea urchins. This is not the most exciting model system, I admit. But every once in a while someone working with urchins really does something to push back the frontiers of science. I present to you, dear readers, the best of urchin biology.

Smarty Pants

This cool gizmo lets you know what level of education is required to understand a given blog.

Found On The Internets: Unusual Instruments' Music Videos

The creative and strange set of folks who brought you A Soviet Poster A Day now bring you the Unusual Instruments' Music Videos blog. As with its sister site, once you've written the title there's really no need to describe site's contents.

One of the gems from the site:



The instrument at the core of that performance is a theremin, played masterfully in the video by a musician adjusting the proximity and shape of his hand relative to two antennae. If you've ever heard the Beach Boys' song Good Vibrations, you've heard a theremin an instrument designed to sound like a theremin (see comments). The model above is an Etherwave Pro Limited Edition theremin recently manufactured by Moog.

Internets are better than parents or school

I think I've found my new favorite website: www.videojug.com


It's basically a home economics class online done by some wacky brits.
You can learn some useful things like how to make a chicken masala or how to care for your bearded dragon.

But the best section by far? Love and sex. Really. This is how sex ed was supposed to go.
The links, I think, speak to their own utility.

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-undo-her-bra-with-one-hand

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-put-on-a-condom-2

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-avoid-trapped-arm-whilst-cuddling-in-bed

http://www.videojug.com/film/a-girls-guide-to-looking-good-naked

Things I Love about Durham. Part I: Weird puppets.

Durham, NC is a strange and wonderful little city. Since moving here three years ago, I've totally fallen in love with the place, not least of all because of the strange folks who live here, work here, and sometime do strange puppet shows out of their garage for, as far as I can tell, no financial benefit whatsoever.

Its things like this that make me love Durham.

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Found On The Internets: YouTube — Gallery for the Unconventional Artist

First up, this guy is the Bob Ross of one-minute spraypainting:

Next, I can't even fathom how much time and effort went into this stop-motion work of art:

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan for the second link)

Science does it again!

Every once in a while we stumble across a paper that brings the office to a standstill for a while, a paper the epitomizes what good science is all about.

This week's wonder comes to us from Japan, no stranger to unusual technological achievements.

Yes, we can now continue to eat species long after we've eaten them down from a stable, reproductively viable population size.

Science brings you Inter-species Sperm Transfer.


Awesome.