Rather humorous. You can catch more of Steve Spangler’s scientific work on his YouTube channel and web site. We’ve also added him to our list of Intelligent YouTube Collections.

A little something for the language buffs among us. The Structure of English Words (iTunes) is another Stanford course. To be exact, it comes out of the Stanford Continuing Studies program (my day job), and we’re opening enrollments for our Fall term next Monday. (If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, give our offering a look.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, we have Jimi Hendrix playing the U.S. national anthem. It’s not your usual anthem. Nope, this is the anthem played dissonantly in a new counter-culture style, the anthem turned into a blistering commentary on the Vietnam War.

A memorable scene from The Graduate (1967). But, as the New York Times tells us today, plastics is out; statistics is now in.

John Hughes films. The Who. Now you’ve got the backdrop for my teenage years. This is for me, and perhaps even for you… (Sorry to those who can’t relate. We’ll be back on track soon enough.

Straight from Metafilter. Seemed worth passing along to our readers:
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam invites you to compare Caravaggio and Rembrandt. For an overview of Rembrandt’s work here are Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings. For Caravaggio there’s caravaggio.

I first heard about Junot Díaz in the early 90s. He was only in his 20s, already publishing in The New Yorker, and getting a lot of wunderkind talk. By 1996, he published, Drown, a bestselling collection of short stories that earned high praise. And then, things slowed down.

On the lighter side. Thanks Rachel for sending this along…

Find the link to the original video here.

Chris Anderson, the author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price (download a free audio file of the book here) is making the rounds, promoting his new book.

Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Inherent Vice, is on sale today. Check it out. Below we have, yes, a video trailer for the new book, and it sounds like Pynchon (who has famously stayed out of the public eye) is actually narrating the thing.