Relevant History

The strangest thing I've ever seen in my entire life

This is truly astounding: a Japanese reenactment of "We Are the World."

via wonkette

Tags: music, humor, Japan

Closing doors

This (via Lifehacker) is an interesting game, and an interesting experiment.

Look out Amy Winehouse

This Japanese McDonalds commercial, featuring what looks like a Japanese girls' do-wop group that watched Memoirs of a Geisha once too many times, seems weird in so many ways....

This kind of thing is pretty much all my brain is good for tonight.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Shhh / Peaceful," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: Japan

On my way to Irvine

I'm on my way to southern California tonight. I'll be there for a couple meetings at the National Academies.

I'm in San Jose airport, which I think is the most business-oriented airport I travel through. San Francisco has lots of tourists, as well as business people; Oakland I only see late at night when I'm doing the redeye to DC, and everyone looks the same at 11 PM. San Jose, in contrast, seems like it's 90% lawyers, Intel and Cisco people, and other high-tech types. Of course there are some tourists or families, but the proportion of people checking their Blackberries and talking on their Bluetooth headsets is much higher than SFO or OAK.

My flight is seriously delayed, but that just means I'm working on my talk in the airport rather my hotel room. Business travel is an odd combination of going somewhere, and ignoring your surroundings.

I don't think I'll be able to get to Disneyland, except possibly on evening between the first and second meetings. This is a shame, as I'm very fond of Tomorrowland, and consider it an essential destination for any futurist. There's nowhere else quite like it-- and certainly the future shows no sign of being like it.

[To the tune of Bruce Hornsby, "Every Little Kiss," from the album "The Way It Is".]

Technorati Tags: IFTF, Irvine, National Academy, work

Why is the best dystopian fiction British?

My wife and I have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on in the background as we work this evening. I'm really impressed by their rendering of the Ministry of Magic, which is an interesting mix of Gothic revival, 1920s Art Deco (particularly all the dark tile), and Brazil. It's wonderfully dark and dsytopian-- equal parts George Edmund Street and Terry Gilliam-- and it makes me wonder: why does the best dystopian fiction come out of Britain?

Of course, the Russians did some damn good stuff too, but it seems to me that the British work-- including Koestler, Orwell, Burgess, Huxley, et al-- is incomparable.

ah, the future

From 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments:

It's like a cross between I Can Has Cheezeburger and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Lady Blue

This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."

There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.

Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall  several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.

For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.

And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.

[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, memory, music

Reprints!

Got a pleasant surprise today: a package of reprints for my latest article, a piece on "The Industrialization of Vision in Victorian Astronomy" in Bildwelten des Wissens. It's always nice to get these. I'll have to send them off to various academic friends, for whom the ritual of receiving reprints holds some cultural meaning.

The article is one I wrote a while ago, but never quite got around to publishing; so when the chance came last year to contribute to this issue, I figured, why not make good use of it? I'm not doing much work on Victorian science now, but still it's a subject that never ceases to be interesting.

And in an ironic twist, last night I was up late answering queries from an editor who's working on a piece of mine on mobility and the end of cyberspace. My old and new intellectual lives overlapping.... Though actually I think that's not quite correct: you don't really have old and new intellectual lives, unless you completely change fields and go from, say, string theory to eschatology; you just mobilize your interests and intellectual skills around different subjects.

[To the tune of Ben Folds & William Shatner, "In Love," from the album "Fear of Pop, Vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: academia, history of science, postacademic

It's funny because it's so true

Spotted on The Neurocritic:

[To the tune of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Tank," from the album "Works Live".]

Technorati Tags: humor

Quotes

We do not remember the days, we remember the moments. (Cesare Pavese)

The chief cause of problems is solutions. (Eric Sevareid, 1970)

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "It's About That Time," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: quotation