Inspired by Danzig vs. Shakira, I've hand picked some rather good (if I do say so myself) mashups and put them together in this easily digestible format...
You are watching
Cruising the internet as I'm apt to do, I just came across a Mancunian Generation X of a blog about the joys and emptiness of living in the city centre. RenterGirl lives in Dovecot Towers and writes of a fairly lonely, natureless existence pockmarked by the odd Eastern European gang murder and a constant barrage of early morning wake-up shouting courtesy of students returning from some club or other. Is this the legacy of Manchester's recent building boom? Block after block of 'prestigious' (?!) new developments going up unfeasibly fast only to be filled with twenty-something serial tenants, paying off student loans and rattling around their open plan living spaces bedroom mezzanines. It smacks of a souless distopia.
Perhaps I'm being pessimistic in my sudden horror that indeed, all city centres might be like this and those of us somehow drawn to city living are doomed to the RenterGirl experience.
Check out:
I was first sent this back in 2005 at which point I didn't really know what it was all about. Now that I'm finally in the position where I actually get the jokes, I figure I can share it with you without loss of face. Behold the Klein Four: an A Capella group composed of mathematics students at Northwestern University near Chicago. They're clearly differential geometers/mathematical physicists. It's what all the cool kids do.
This simply cannot be beaten for sheer density of maths puns. Buy T-shirts here.
No comment necessary, but here's a quote (to read, click on the title).
A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children's home.
Philonous: Here's a picture of the offending installation:
Whoa. Yeah that's the headline in the Guardian. Say what??? I thought I smelled some conservative anti-feminist anti-sex thing going on. But actually the scientific study here references tests done that claim women are unable to 'smell' appropriate partners, who would be best suited to produce offspring, and be potential mates. What???
"Not only could MHC similarity in couples lead to fertility problems, it could also ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odour perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners."I realize that smell and hormones play a big instinctual part in creating these relationships, but I think that the tagline of this article and its message are anti-contraception. And I am not down with that. I'm apt to think that this study was supported by funds with interests in my aforementioned 'anti-' list.
Ok, so here's the long awaited solution.
Let us suppose for a moment that in fact all the beads are of the same colour, i.e. indistinguishable. Then we know that they will return to the same configuration: any collision of two beads may as well be thought of as beads passing straight through each other so we will have the same configuration after one second.
Now to the problem. Here we can distinguish between beads. Nonetheless, by the previous argument, we know that after a second, the configuration of the beads will be the same apart from some of the beads perhaps being swapped. Well performing this permutation of beads again and again must lead to the original position at some point. Et voila.
According to Philonous I must now defend myself and my tastes. Why did I like Man on Wire? In a bizare way, I do agree with P in many respects. I wouldn't want to be friends with Phillipe Petit and his entourage. What annoyed me most was the fact that Philippe is so egocentric and self-absorbed when all the others (especially his former girlfriend) seem to have no life of their own, and devote their time to him. I couldn't sympathise with any of them although I found it quite entertaining to see how they were trying to intellectualise funambulism - describing their friend's act as beautiful, poetic art. All I saw was a man on a wire. What I find fascinating is the marginality of it. Isn't it a funny thing to set yourself the objective to walk on a wire set between the two highest towers on the planet? I think what made the film so interesting was the lack of common sense and vertigo of Philippe Petit. My perception is: rather than having something than no one has, he lacks something that everybody has. The idea of standing in the void entertained me for the whole length of the film. I strongly recommend that you see it....
Le Fox and I on Monday went to see Man on Wire, the story of Phillipe Petit who today in 1974 walked a tightrope strung between the then newly built World Trade Center towers. The film tells the story of the meticulous planning involved, the setbacks, the triumphs. It is a sort of documentary mixed with an action adventure movie with some original footage and other parts acted out with interviews with the main protagonists in the background.
Petit is a French nutcase of the highest order, endowed with the classic one-slice-short-of-a-loaf eyes and the odd maniacal twitch. The footage of him on the wire is truly breathtaking and incredibly beautiful. He even comes across as rather eloquently poetic, if a little bat-shit crazy. Tying the whole thing together are his partners in crime; it was after all illegal as is made clear at every possible opportunity. Ever present is his long suffering and slightly obsessed lover who he seems to have plucked from a life more ordinary aided by his incurable zaniness. With Alistair Darling like hair/eyebrow colour disparity is his rather more sensible friend whose role it was to provide the sanity, though I would argue he fell somewhat short.
It promised to be a gripping and breathtaking thrill ride. It wasn't. The film felt bloated, self obsessed, melodramatic and completely overdone with a ridiculous soundtrack of pretentious semi-ethereal music for which Michael Neimann presumably went to the considerable effort of taping Smooth Classics at Seven. Rather than wasting the cartilage in my fingers, I think I'll leave it to the following scathing review posted on IMDB.
Utterly Pathetic, 3 August 2008,
Author: nickclarkel99 from Ireland
I went into this movie with an open mind but fascinated to find a character who so completely encapsulated everything that i hate. Phillipe Petite and sycophantic friends disgorged their version of events as if they had discovered a cure for aids/cancer/death. I found their admiration of this glorified clown confusing in the extreme, only surpassed in intensity by Phillipe's admiration for himself. Petite manages not only to blow his own trumpet but also the horn, tuba and saxophone. This event seemed primarily concerned in stroking the ego of Phillipe and his desperate aching and repulsive need for approval, probably motivated by a childhood lack from his military father. I eventually felt sorry for Phillipe, though he seemed perfectly happy continuing on, riding even now the wave on his perceived greatness. Though this is like pity for a dog one thinks has a boring life - pointless, Petite is bizarrely fulfilled and to reveal to him the irrelevance of his deed would surely crush his fragile and childlike mind. 1/10
Philonous' verdict: Man on Wire = Crap on Film
Check out the following links if you must:
Here's a great puzzle I heard at a conference in Leicester the other week.
On a circle of wire are a number of (point) beads moving at the same constant speed; for simplicity's sake let's suppose that they would complete one complete circuit in a second. Since they are not all necessarily moving in the same direction, they may collide - we assume that any such collision is completely elastic, that is, they are still moving at the same speed after the collision, just in opposite directions. Suppose all the beads are different colours.
Given any starting position for the beads, will they return to precisely this position in some finite time?
Answer to follow soon.
This video is a project from NASA's artists in residence, Semiconductor. As you may imagine (although it took me a little while to realise) all of the magnetic fields drawn in the picture are computer generated rather than physical streams of particles. Having something of an interest in science myself, I wonder what the aim of this artwork is supposed to be, if indeed it has one. There can be no doubt that these magnetic phenomena are incredibly beautiful in many ways, as is most of physics, but is producing such a movie slightly underselling the real science behind these pretty images? Perhaps not. I must admit being a cynic of the first water, but in my mind, this reminded me very much of videos I'd been shown at school in physics lessons or perhaps on BBC2 as part of Open University programmes. There's no doubt that this film is diverting, but in this light, it seems slightly odd for Semiconductor to have been elevated to the status of 'artist'. But then I'm a cynic.
One of the most unbelievable sights to greet me in Warsaw was that of the devout Catholics at all times of the day and night. The churches are so full of the faithful that despite their cavernous interiors, that a significant proportion of those attending services spill outside onto the street, often hearing (and saying) mass after dark bathed in the sodium yellow of street lamps. Christmas and Easter services often fill British churches to capacity with casual believers and those craving tradition, but never have I seen anything quite like this. The congregation peer in through the open door, straining to see over those on the steps and kneel on the cobbles at the appropriate moments. The priest's singing is piped outside through loudspeakers.
Poland seems to have acquired something of a reputation as a religious country. Certainly from what I've seen over the last couple of days this is certainly true. Wandering along some street or other, I noticed a cyclist who crossed himself as he passed a church. People in restaurants regularly say grace. If this wasn't enough, at around midnight in Warsaw airport, the departure lounge was filled by what looked like a school party. Having moved the furniture to suit their purposes, I supposed that they would either catch a flight or bed down for the night. In fact their unrolling of sleeping mats was to construct a makeshift altar.
I was eyed with a certain degree of suspicion so decided to take a photo somewhat incognito (and therefore badly framed) - check out the massive golden cross on the left. I must say, I was slightly taken aback by the whole thing. I'd never seen so much devotion in a public place before and I was impressed.
In Euclidean Space:
Let V be a finite-dimensional Euclidean space, with the standard Euclidean inner product denoted by . A root system in V is a finite set Φ of non-zero vectors (called roots) that satisfy the following properties:
In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant body that typically lies below the surface of the soil. But, this is not always the case, since a root can also be aerial (that is, growing above the ground) or aerating (that is, growing up above the ground or especially above water). On the other hand, a stem normally occurring below ground is not exceptional either (see rhizome). So, it is better to define root as a part of a plant body that bears no leaves, and therefore also lacks nodes. There are also important internal structural differences between stems and roots. The two major functions of roots are 1.) absorption of water and inorganic nutrients and 2.) anchoring the plant body to the ground. Roots also function in cytokinin synthesis, which supplies some of the shoot's needs. They often function in storage of food. The roots of most vascular plant species enter into symbiosis with certain fungi to form mycorrhizas, and a large range of other organisms including bacteria also closely associate with roots.
On TV:
Roots is a 1977 American television miniseries based on Alex Haley's work Roots: The Saga of an American Family, his critically acclaimed but factually disputed genealogical novel.
In the Charts:
Roots is the sixth studio album by Brazilian thrash metal band Sepultura, released in 1996 through Roadrunner Records. It was the band's last album to feature Max Cavalera. The majority of the themes presented on Roots are centered on Brazilian politics and culture.
The inspiration for Sepultura's new musical directon was two-fold. One was the desire to further experiment with the music of Brazil, especially the percussive type played by Salvador, Bahia samba reggae group Olodum. A slight influence of Northeastern Brazil's native music is also present in the guitar riffs, especially baião and capoeira music. Another innovation Roots brought was the inspiration taken from the (then) cutting-edge nu metal sound of the Deftones and KoЯn - especially the latter's debut, with it's heavily down-tuned guitars.
Roots was released in February 1996 and received with unprecedented enthusiasm. Even the popular press, that usually doesn't pay a lot of attention to metal records, halted the presses to appreciate the unusual rhythms mixture of Sepultura. American newspapers like The New Times, the Daily News[disambiguation needed] and the Los Angeles Times reserved some space for the Brazilian band: "The mixture of the dense metal of Sepultura and the Brazilian music has a intoxicating effect", wrote a Los Angeles Times' reviewer. The Daily News went even further: "Sepultura reinvented the wheel. By mixing metal with native instruments, the band resuscitates the tired genre, reminding of Led Zeppelin times. But while Zeppelin mixed English metal with African beats, it's still more moving to hear a band that uses elements of its own country. By extracting the sounds of the past, Sepultura determines the future direction of metal".
Acknowledgements: This post would not have been possible without the untiring effort of all of those kind folk at Wikipedia who are up at all hours of the day and night writing entries. I'd also like to thank they keys Ctrl, C and V
“I woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I said to my roommate, ‘Can you believe this? Everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’ ” (Steven Wright)
The lover of mind has landed in Warsaw. This city is extraordinarily beautiful, green and without blemish. From the old town which was rebuilt after having been destroyed during the second world war, to the grandiose 43 storey stamp of the Pałac Kultury i Nauki, one can't help but be impressed by it all. I'm staying in a very lovely hotel just south of the city centre next to a grand park and all of the various embassies. From there i was advised (by folk in the know) to go to the old town (Stare Miasto) to have a look at all of the lovely old (new) Polish buildings. During the second world war, Warsaw was essentially gutted. Most of the historic buildings were completely destroyed and the old town centre was rebuilt from scratch.
Wandering around European cities, one becomes accustomed to the sight of buildings which if not exactly crumbling, show all of their three hundred or so years. Here everything comes across a little bit Disney. The entire old town is so incredibly pristine that rather than being 300 years old, most buildings look as if they have travelled through time. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole Stare Miasto was injection moulded in one piece from fadeproof plastic in a Detroit factory and shipped over as part of some covert Marshall plan. It's a great shame that so much of this great city was destroyed in the carnage of 1939-45.
Still imposing upon the skyline is Stalin's great stamp of authority, the Pałac Kultury i Nauki-a full blown propaganda factory mass producing and distributing Soviet pronouncements in the form of films, books, plays and exhibitions. Now though, the huge tower is somewhat eclipsed by the skyscraping testaments to Poland's new legacy. Viewed from one side, the Stalinist face of hard nosed totalitarianism is still there to be seen. Viewed from the others, the huge Carlsberg parasols, the brightly coloured advertisments and the various other skyscrapers peer over Stalin's long-dead message. Perhaps even more ironically, underneath one face is a massive skate park full of teenagers humming Green Day and periodically rescuing their trousers from the ever present clutches of gravity. If you look carefully at the right hand photo, you might just be able to see on the left the massive cuboid of the Intercontinental along with various other skyscrapers belonging to foreign banks. The man of steel would turn is his grave.
It seems that the internet has spawned a great number of heroes of the 15½" screen. Here are a few examples of folk whose fame is in no small part due to the internet:
Eventually, ornery folks like me decided to get in on the act and start blogs detailing the minutiae of their humdrum existences from their fury at milk having gone sour to diatribes on the meaning of Pokemon. Various actors and artists have quickly siezed upon sites such as YouTube as conduits for expression and more recently, actual famous people have started using the internet and its inherently viral mechanism (and small world properties) to further promote themselves. Here are video blogs from (in order) Chris Crocker, lonelygirl15, P.Diddy and Imogen Heap. This seems to me to typify the transition from the internet as a means of distribution of traditional media to a medium in its own right, with the production of film solely for internet transmission. Joss Whedon (of Buffy fame) along with various less well known collaborators is the latest fairly big name to have dipped his toe in the water with the low-budget, three act musical video blog Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog. This foray into internet television is a direct result of this year's writers strike which left Whedon twiddling his thumbs for a few weeks. It is designed primarimy as an experiment on the financial viability of online media. The show itself is divided into three parts, with a staggered release throughout this week. The last of these will be released on Saturday at which point all three may be watched back to back and for free. After Sunday, they become available as a DVD and at a premium. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out (though I suspect Whedon has nothing to worry about since it is already topping the iTunes chart). Check out the trailer below. If you do see the full production, have patience - it takes a while to get going...
First, a shout-out to my main man Chris who posted a link to this video in a comment after Le Fox's Flying Rats Go Human! post : I think you'll all agree, it's a triumph.
After Le Fox's critique of the slow pervasion of air-rats into urban consciousness (featuring track bike), I suddenly remembered about 2007 Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger and his film, Sleeper. Check out this video of Wallinger talking about it. Here are a few links:
