Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith were canoeing somewhere in Ireland when they had a chance encounter with one of nature’s greatest and most fleeting phenomena — a murmuration of starlings. The spectacle is a magical case of mathematical chaos in action. And, it’s all driven by the quest for survival. The Telegraph has more.…
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On Wednesday night, Peter Gabriel brought his 46-piece orchestra to the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City and treated the audience to a 65-minute concert featuring orchestral versions of some classic Gabriel songs: Red Rain, Solsbury Hill, Biko, Intruder, Mercy Street, Wallflower, San Jacinto, Rhythm of The Heat, Signal to Noise — they were all on the setlist, though not in that particular order. The concert, presented as part of the Live on Letterman webcast series, features songs and musicians appearing on Gabriel’s latest LP, New Blood.…
Atheist Christopher Hitchens was asked earlier this year how his struggle with cancer has affected his views on the question of an afterlife. “I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation element of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it,” he responded. “It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.”
Hitchens spoke (see above) during a debate on the question, “Is there an afterlife,” with Sam Harris and Rabbis David Wolpe and Bradley Shavit Artson at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles on February 15. (You can watch the entire event here.) Hitchens’ views on the subject have remained consistent over the years. “It’s a religious falsification that people like myself scream for a priest at the end,” Hitchens said before he was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in the summer of 2010. “Most of us go to our end with dignity.”
Paine’s closing years, pitiful as they were, contained one closing triumph. He might have become a scarecrow-like figure. He might have been forced to subsist on the charity of friends. He might have been denied the right to vote by a bullying official, when presenting himself at the polling station, on the grounds that the author of Common Sense was not a true American. But as the buzzards began to circle, he rallied one more time. It was widely believed by the devout of those days that unbelievers would scream for a priest when their own death-beds loomed. Why this was thought to be valuable propaganda it is impossible to say. Surely the sobbing of a human creature in extremis is testimony not worth having, as well as testimony extracted by the most contemptible means? Boswell had been to visit David Hume under these conditions, because he had been reluctant to believe that the stoicism of the old philosopher would hold up, and as a result we have one excellent account of the refusal of the intelligence to yield to such moral blackmail. Our other account comes from those who attended Paine. Dying in ulcerated agony, he was imposed upon by two Presbyterian ministers who pushed past his housekeeper and urged him to avoid damnation by accepting Jesus Christ. ‘Let me have none of your Popish stuff,’ Paine responded. ‘Get away with you, good morning, good morning.’ The same demand was made of him as his eyes were closing. ‘Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?’ He answered quite distinctly: ‘I have no wish to believe on that subject.’ Thus he expired with his reason, and his rights, both still staunchly defended until the very last.
A quick fyi: To mark Remembrance Day, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has made Claude Guilmain’s documentary The Van Doos in Afghanistan available online for a limited time. You can watch it free until Monday. The NFB writes:
In this documentary, we hear directly from francophone soldiers serving in the Royal 22e Régiment (known in English as “Van Doos”) who were filmed in the field in March 2011, during their deployment to Afghanistan. They speak simply and directly about their work, whether on patrol or performing their duties at the base. The film’s images and interviews bring home the complexity of the issues on the ground and shed light on the little-understood experiences of the men and women who served in Afghanistan.
You’ll find other free films by the NFB in our big collection of Free Movies Online. It now has north of 435 films on the list.
Electronic musician John Boswell has just released the 12th installment in his “Symphony of Science” series. Onward to the Edge celebrates the adventure of space exploration and features the auto-tuned voices of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, particle physicist Brian Cox and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. It’s a mashup of material from four sources: Tyson’s My Favorite Universe video course, Cox’s BBC series Wonders of the Solar System, a TED talk by Porco and scenes from National Geographic’s A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets.
The “Symphony of Science” grew out of Boswell’s 2009 video, A Glorious Dawn, which stitches together scenes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe and has been viewed over six million times on YouTube. You can download a free digital album of all 12 songs from the series, along with a bonus track, here. H/T BoingBoing
Don’t blame the lamestream media for this one. When it comes to our protracted economic stagnation, there is ultimately one place to point the finger: It’s those pesky mainstream economists.
That’s the conclusion of Niall Ferguson, history professor at Harvard and author of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Ferguson makes his point in the first installment of a new animated series of “Op-Vids” from The Daily Beast. “What is an Op-Vid,” writes The Daily Beaston Vimeo? “Opinion, without the pundits yelling. Handmade animation, without the caricatures. Essays without the text. Complex topics, without the boring.” Without the boring what? Complexity?
Ferguson makes some curious claims. He admits that stimulus spending has worked up to a point: It helped avoid another Great Depression. But it didn’t create a sustained recovery. Why? Because there wasn’t enough of it? No. Because it leaks. In a global economy, Ferguson argues, you would need chaos theory to understand where the stimulus actually ends up. Even more curiously, Ferguson argues that rising income inequality in America “limits the effectiveness of Keynesian policies, because they need average households to boost their spending.” (So you can forget about hiring teachers, firefighters or construction workers; that wouldn’t help “average” households spend more.)
Having thus defeated Keynesianism, Ferguson moves on to offer a solution: Simplify the tax code. Never mind the shortfall in aggregate demand for goods and services. Never mind that corporations–sitting on $2 trillion in uninvested cash reserves–have maintained near-record profits despite the shortfall by cutting production and laying off workers. Simplify the tax code, says Ferguson, and American companies will hire more American workers. Problem solved.
As a footnote, it’s worth pointing out that in early 2009 Ferguson was involved in a very public debate with Princeton economist Paul Krugman over the effectiveness of fiscal expansion. Ferguson argued that government borrowing would damage the economy by driving up interest rates. Nearly three years later, interest rates have remained very low. Looking back on the debate, Krugman said of Ferguson, “He doesn’t understand Macroeconomics 101.”
In late October, Computerworld unearthed a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs originally recorded back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Computer, and still two years away from his triumphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral history project, the wide-ranging interview begins with Jobs’ childhood and his early school days, and it all sets the stage for Jobs to muse on the state of public education in America. He began:
I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.
Asked what changes he would make, Jobs continued:
I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.… The problem that we have in this country is that [parents] went away. [They] stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control … is that the service level almost always goes down.
And so the answer. Vouchers, entrepreneurship and market competition:
I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years.… The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that’s like saying “Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a ten thousand dollar car.” I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You’ve got all the Japanese playing in it. You’ve got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You’ve got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You’ve got Chrysler with the Neon.…
The full transcript appears here. Or, if you want to watch the interview on video, you can jump to Computerworld, where, rather lamely, you will need to register before watching the actual talk. Bad job by Computerworld.
Kellogg’s first started marketing Rice Krispies way back in 1928, and, ever since, we’ve grown accustomed to wholesome advertising campaigns that feature the cartoon mascots Snap, Crackle and Pop. (See ad from 1939.) For a brief moment in 1964, all of this wholesomeness was put aside when the J. Walter Thompson ad agency worked with the Rolling Stones to create a hipper, more inspired jingle. The resulting commercial aired briefly only in the UK…
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