12Mar09 — 0

The Mother Of All Funk Chords

Brothers and sisters, watch and listen as the universal language of music meets the multimedia multi-ethnic mega-mashup that is teh Interwebz and a groove is born [YouTube video].

Kutiman, a 26-year-old citizen of [sarcasm]the Evil Zionist Entity, isn’t too busy baking the blood of Palestinian babies into matzos[/sarcasm] to do a reggae one, with a ginga Rasta sharing lead vocals, and a cool hip-hop-jazz-funk-classical one, and a banging Mediterranean-Middle-Eastern one, and a 60s-lounge-meets-home-keyboard one [all links to YouTube videos]. I love the background household details in this one, and this is sweet.

Here’s Kutiman’s ThruYOU project homepage and his explanation of his work.

[via Tim Almond]

11Mar09 — 0

The Squeaky Wheelchair

Paul Evans worked for a company that built Websites for political organizations long before the current crop of johnny-come-latelys started twittering about “digital engagement” and “campaigning 2.0”. This post of his about the kinds of people who use the Net to harass politicians and the kind of people politicians should listen to—two groups that, in Paul’s imagination, could well be more closely related in real life than they are in their attitudes—is excellent.

11Mar09 — 2

Noblesse blancmange

For some lucky and rich people who describe themselves as Left-wing, one of the worst things about free markets is that they have given the oiks the freedom to enjoy the pleasures that were previously restricted to their betters. A real “socialist” state would provide the lower orders with more suitable goods: perhaps they would be allowed to see People Like Us with nice vowels do Shakespeare—only matinees, mind; wouldn’t want the unwashed sitting too close by in the evenings.

This piece by the legendary Liz Jones—is she a creation of Craig Brown? we should be told—exemplifies that attitude perfectly. Under the headline “IF ONLY WE’D HAD GREEN CUSTARD WHEN I MARCHED WITH THE MINERS”, ex-Communist Jones praises Leila Deen, the eco-warrior who slimed the Business Secretary Peter Mandelson. I reproduce the best bit of the article here, so you don’t have to visit the Daily Maily Website:

I was about to board a Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to LA a couple of weeks ago.

I asked the woman at the check-in desk how full the plane was. “Rammed.” How many children are near me? “Ooh, quite a few infants.”

As I only had a seat in economy, and didn’t want to spend 11 hours being made more deaf than I already am, I asked if I could pay to sit in premium economy.

“It’s full,” she said. Upper class?

“No, that’s full as well.” But I’d have thought that, what with the recession and the weaker pound and global warming, the plane would be almost empty?

“No, it’s business as usual,” she said, smiling sweetly. Bugger.

I had hoped the dire straits in which the world now finds itself would have at least guaranteed a spare seat next to me on the plane. And I had consoled myself—while briefly thinking about my carbon footprint—with the thought that the plane would take off whether I was on board or not, so what did it matter?

This is the problem. Each of us feels so ignored, so disenfranchised, we no longer believe individual actions can make a difference.

So, well done indeed to a determined young woman called Leila Deen, who on Friday decided to get up early, make some custard and dye it green (rather than spend two hours deciding which ridiculous pair of shoes to wear, which is what most women of her generation seem to do these days), plonk herself outside the Royal Society and fling the custard in Peter Mandelson’s smarmy face.

It’s not April yet, but surely this is a parody?

25Feb09 — 1

Not Dead

Thank you very much to the PooterGeeker who sent me a Minolta SLR camera, lenses and other exciting goodies. You are star. I feel guilty writing so little lately when my readers are so nice to me.

The person who sent me that amazing gift is someone I have never met in my life, which brings me to my second point, a point that also links my two previous posts here. The photo of me and Thatch shows her presenting me with a scholarship at and on behalf of (the Association for Science Education and) the Royal Institution, where Susan Greenfield is currently a full professor and director—and responsible for rubbish like this. Greenfield’s an embarrassment to science. Normally it’s non-scientific academics who flit from medium to medium under the amusing banner of “public intellectual” making fashionable, unsubstantiated claims and demanding action. We expect that sort of thing from them and, usually, our elected representatives are sensible enough to ignore them.

I have attacked gibberish from Greenfield in the past on PooterGeek. Watch this YouTube video in which Ben Goldacre (who provided the link in my previous post) does the same on BBC’s Newsnight.

25Jan09 — 3

Jew Do You Think You Are?

Whenever someone implies that anti-Semitism isn’t racism, I point out that it’s one of the few examples of discrimination that really is racism (unlike, for example, the invented thoughtcrime “Islamophobia”1 ) because the Ashkenazi Jewish population is as close as you can get scientifically to the common (and deeply flawed) notion of what a “race” is.

Adam Woolfe, who did his PhD at the HGMP-RC before it closed down, drew my attention to this paper in Genome Biology, “A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans“, that shows this more rigorously:

Background

It was recently shown that the genetic distinction between self-identified Ashkenazi Jewish and non-Jewish individuals is a prominent component of genome-wide patterns of genetic variation in European Americans. No study however has yet assessed how accurately self-identified (Ashkenazi) Jewish ancestry can be inferred from genomic information, nor whether the degree of Jewish ancestry can be inferred among individuals with fewer than four Jewish grandparents.

Results

Using a principal components analysis, we found that the individuals with full Jewish ancestry formed a clearly distinct cluster from those individuals with no Jewish ancestry. Using the position on the first principal component axis, every single individual with self-reported full Jewish ancestry had a higher score than any individual with no Jewish ancestry.

  1. Many who use the word “Islamophobia” are, however, actual racists because they lump together multitudes of human individuals and assign to them both an inaccurate label and a set of presumed characteristics and/or grievances. [↩]
15Jan09 — 4

For Statistical Sneerers Everywhere

This has to be one (if only one) in the eye for all those people who say there’s no point in listening to passenger plane safety announcements about how to slide down the inflatable ramp and put on your flotation aid because if there’s a crash the best you can hope for is to be a smear on a mountainside:

A US Airways Airbus A320 passenger plane carrying at least 150 people has crashed into the Hudson River in New York City.

…

A passenger who escaped from the aircraft told CNN: “A couple of minutes after taking off we heard a loud bang, the plane shook a bit and immediately we could smell smoke and fire.”

Fox News also quoted passengers as saying that everyone from the plane had escaped alive.

12Jan09 — 1

Offensive Language

Harry Windsor is a “thug” for referring to another soldier by the nickname “Paki”, according to Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, quoted by the BBC. The BBC page links to the Website of that organisation, where Shafiq also claims that the government of Israel is like that of the Nazis.

The organization’s Chairman and Patron, Muhammad Umar, has his own page there also, headed with an image of Umar “presenting Services to Humanity award” [sic] to Mahathir bin Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia. Here are some of the words of bin Mohamad, offered in the Service of Humanity:

The Jews for example are not merely hook-nosed, but understand money instinctively.

The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so, hence they do this, depress the ringgit.

We [Muslims] are actually very strong, 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million [during the Holocaust]. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries. And they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

04Jan09 — 0

Family Resemblance

One thing I forgot to say when I posted those old photos: if you look at my father in the second one you can see why my sister and I reacted the same way to seeing Willem Dafoe in Mississippi Burning1 : “That’s dad in the 60s!” Until then, he’d been a Graham Greene character, working undercover for the Secret Intelligence Service in West Africa and wrestling with Catholicism; but now we knew he’d had to flee to Sierra Leone to assume a new identity after fighting the Ku Klux Klan with Gene Hackman.

  1. Brad Dourif‘s in it too. He doesn’t play a kindly park keeper. [↩]
01Jan09 — 5

Happy (western, heliocentric) New Year!

I hope that, wherever you are, you enjoyed the extra second imposed upon you by the imperialist forces of the dominant scientific-capitalist worldview and that you have a prosperous 2009.

As for my year so far, I jogged wearily to the gym this morning, dreading the crowds of resolutioners (though it hasn’t been too bad in the past), only to find that the place was closed for the day. This didn’t happen under the old management. Weaklings!

This might be a Message From God. I used to ride a real bicycle—a handbuilt tourer, the sort of thing the maker won’t hand over until you’ve signed a pledge to keep a woolly bobble hat on your head and a Thermos of industrial-strength tea in one of your pannier bags at all times—and sneer at people on exercise bikes, but fat as my thighs grew on my daily three-quarter-hour commutes across London, they have recently reached seam-busting proportions. The sad truth is that my legs no longer fit into my gay trousers.

On the subject of bicycle thighs, here’s New Year’s honorand Victoria Pendleton, gold-medal-winning cyclist:

Nerdy Vicky
nerd girl

Sexy Vicky
goddess

Who could resist a woman who can lift twice her own bodyweight?

30Dec08 — 14

In Search Of The Perfect Pitch

Clive Davis is a champion of singer/musician Curtis Stigers, who had a couple of enormous mainstream hit singles and then made the journey from pop to jazz years ago. Sadly, it seemed at first that only seven people noticed his migration, including Clive—or as, as wardy observed, seven and two ragged tigers.

This year, on the basis of one single I heard on the radio, I bought East Of Angel Town by Peter Cincotti, who made the opposite transition. I’m making that single, Angel Town [MP3, 4.3Mb], available temporarily to encourage you to buy the album too. Download it now before it’s gone. East Of Angel Town sounds like it had the budget of Gladiator spent on it. In fact, some of the people involved in the last over-produced album I raved about were also involved in the making of this one. After a live small band performance of another track from the album, you can see the cash being thrown at parts of the fully arranged recording in this extract from a TV show on YouTube [lower-resolution—and therefore faster downloading—version here.]

When that sequence was shot, last year, Cincotti was only 24. It’s an advantage for him (I think), given his demographic, that he looks like a well-preserved thirtysomething. He certainly performs like someone older. Two interesting things: according to his MySpace page, although East of Angel Town has been released and promoted all over Europe, it doesn’t come out in the States until the 27th of January next year; according to the intriguing blog thread headed by the following post, Cincotti’s producer, David Foster, used to have perfect pitch, but he doesn’t any more:

Is Perfect Pitch Dying Out Like the Honeybees?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard several accounts of perfect pitch recently starting to fade for people who’d possessed the faculty all their lives. Other musicians have reported hearing the same.

I’m no expert on perfect pitch, but, as a musician, it’s something I’ve been around for years. (I, myself, don’t possess it – and wouldn’t want to, as it would annoy me when listening to musicians tuned above or below the standard A440, or using non-traditional and microtonal tunings.) But I’ve never before heard of perfect pitch fading. I’m guessing it’s a new – or, at least, newly common – phenomenon, and surely a great subject for some enterprising psychology graduation student to study.

The discussion below this is fascinating. I don’t believe perfect pitch is “dying out”. And I also think that people are becoming more sensitive to deviations in relative tuning, just as they became more sensitive to deviations in timing, and for similar reasons. When drum machines became widespread in the 80s and I was listening to lots of music that relied on them, the rhythmic looseness of a lot of recorded music from the 60s and 70s started to set my teeth on edge. Similarly, since the arrival of quartz-locked electronic instrument tuning and pitch correction software, I find it increasingly difficult to tolerate errors in my own or anyone else’s intonation. I don’t have anything like perfect pitch, but there are albums of stuff I can’t listen to any more.

This technological trend has had other odd side-effects. When bands used to play with instruments that were less accurately tuned to begin with and which also were more prone to drift out of (and into) tune during performances, the differences between the guitars and keyboards and vocals at any given moment and over the course of a track “thickened” the overall sound. This richness now has to be generated with various kinds of electronic post-processing. A related kind of manipulation—now made possible by pitch-correction software itself—that has become fashionable is to shift a generally accurate vocal performance up slightly so that it is, on average, microtonally sharp. This has two flattering effects: because most pop singers slide up to notes, it renders the attack of each of their top lines closer to the correct note; and because the melody is then slightly out of tune with the rest of the recording (which, as pointed out previously, is very tightly in tune with itself) it psychologically lifts the singer out of the backing and into the foreground. [And I’m not even going to get started on this year’s Kanye West album…]

Irony roundup:

  • Curtis Stigers migrates from pop to jazz in the face of stubborn opposition from Clive Davis the record producer, but his change of direction is praised by Clive Davis the music critic.
  • Peter Cincotti goes the other way, insisting on being backed by New York’s finest, and then tours the resulting album around Europe for months before it even gets a US release.
  • Computer scientists develop technology to manipulate the pitch of any melody instrument, including the human voice, almost undetectably and it’s used by music producers to put bad performances in tune and good ones out of tune.

That’s showbiz.

22Dec08 — 10

Time Travel

There aren’t many photos of me and my sister as children so I was especially touched when my (British) cousin, Teresa, sent me a couple she had found when scanning her father’s collection.
The first one I’ve posted here is of Teresa and me visiting our grandmother in Walton in Lancashire. Uncle Bernard has always been a keen photographer. All credit to him for getting the exposure right on a scene with so many differently reflective elements in it, back in the days when slide film was even less forgiving than it is now.

My dad was teaching on the payroll of the UK civil service so I suppose I must have been fresh from a boat or plane trip paid for by Her Majesty. (I used to be a member of the BOAC Junior Jet Club!)

Teresa and Damian

Here’s a close crop (the original is portrait format) from one of me, my father, and all of my British cousins—including Andrew at the back, who comments here from time to time as “Andy C”. You’ll notice I’m wearing the same sandals you saw back here.

family outing

Now, if I can just find one of me on a beach with a white grandparent, I can start thinking about becoming Prime Minister.

16Dec08 — 6

On The Thrown

[J]ust how effective is it to insult someone in an alien cultural idiom? Bush, naturally enough, looked bewildered, but he ducked speedily and seemed none the worse for wear afterwards. Gordon Brown, I suspect, would have stolidly absorbed the blows; Obama would probably have caught one shoe in each hand before throwing them across the room for three points into a waiting waste-paper basket. But none of them, surely, would actually have been offended.

–Tom Chatfield at Prospect magazine’s blog

[Reporter, Muntadar al-Zaidi’s action was a] victory for human rights

–Aicha, daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, while declaring that her charity would honour the reporter with a medal of courage

15Dec08 — 1

“It’s not the despair; I can cope with the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

Cornershop Man watches every single cricket international he can on his satellite TV under the counter—and, unlike me, he fails the Tebbit test. At the start of the week, I asked him: “Suppose you’re looking forward to whupping England’s backsides?”
“Hmm,” he inhaled, “I don’t know. You’ve got some good bowlers with you. You could give us a run for our money.”

As I said to my dad later on, he neglected to factor in England’s seemingly infinite capacity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m turning the radio off now.

08Dec08 — 2

Jumpers For Goalposts

[UPDATE: For the hordes arriving here after searching for the comedy catchphrase “Jumpers for goalposts”, you’d probably be better off reading this.]

Yesterday afternoon, I interrupted some desk-bound consulting work that, even if I weren’t prevented by an NDA from doing so, would put you to sleep instantly if I told you about it, to listen to the second half of Aston Villa’s five-goal match with Everton. I’m glad I did. Briefly: Ashley Young overturned a late-injury-time equaliser from Everton with an even later winner.

It was an extraordinary thing to happen anyway, but, watching afterwards on the Internet, there was something about the desperate joy of the goal that almost brought a tear to the eye. And Young is so small and so fast and so, er, young, with his little gloved hands fanning back and forth looking like they were hidden by oversized shirt sleeves, that he could have been a schoolboy winning a game on the local recreation ground. The cameras also caught the moment afterwards when Martin O’Neill, Villa’s manager, grabbed Young and shouted at him: “You’re a genius! A genius!”

It must have been maddening for Everton supporters, but all the neutral commentators I heard loved it. As the team in the studio on Match of the Day afterwards said, the whole game was like a journey into the past—in a good way. The ref let the mostly English players play, and they played mostly English football: it was furiously fast with benign but fierce tackling that was fairly policed and wasn’t marred by diving.

Fab facts:

  1. Villa against Everton is the fixture that has taken place more times than any other in English football and, until today, each side had won it seventy times.
  2. Martin O’Neill has never lost at Goodison Park, either as a player or a manager.
  3. Ashley Young went to school with Lewis Hamilton. Who would you back to win a race from a standing start over fifty yards—with Hamilton in a car?

Right. Back to work.

05Dec08 — 0

Always To The Swift

This is a neat little article that sketches out why your skin colour doesn’t determine your chance of growing up to become an elite sprinter; but your genetic make-up might:

There are no sprinters of note from Asia, even with more than 50 percent of the world’s population, a Confucian and Tao tradition of discipline, and an authoritarian sports system in place in the most populous country, China. No white sprinter can be found on the list of 100-meter sprinters; the best time by a white, 10 seconds, ranks more than 200th on the all-time list. … All of the 32 finalists in the last four Olympic men’s 100-meter races are of West African descent.

Note the distinction: West Africans dominate sprinting. East Africans do better at distance running. So already, the evidence points beyond race toward a more precise category: population.

As Fray poster Njuzu puts it:

“Race is a very inexact and unreliable proxy for genetics.” Race is not a causal unit [But] the salient level of analysis [is that of] genes. There’s no such thing as having fast-twitch muscle fiber because you’re black. The causal unit is a gene, or a network of genes, or a network of genes and environmental factors. Being black only makes you more likely to have a genetic variant that makes you more likely to have extra fast-twitch fiber. That’s a lot of “likelies,” not certainties.

04Dec08 — 1

Great Moments In Music Pedagogy, No. 2 980

The guitarist in the band I’m in has a diploma in (popular) music performance and his music theory is pretty good—certainly better than mine—but he was never taught any music history and he’s only just turned twenty-one. So when, during a discussion about the scores the sax player had written1 for himself and the trumpet player yesterday evening, I made a casual remark about how individual instruments used only to sound right in a few specific keys and even now wind instruments compromise with equal temperament, he asked me what exactly I meant about “equal temperament“. It took about five minutes of pity rays bouncing off the side of my head during my fumbling explanation before I remembered that our new keyboard player is a piano tuner by trade and left it to him.

  1. with the nifty Finale [↩]
04Dec08 — 0

An Apology

I’d like to express my profound regret to everyone reading this post for any offence I might have caused by thinking of writing this post while listening to Radio 2 in the shower at the same time as rubbing my naked body with shower gel. In mitigation, my Webcam was switched off at the time—and in a different room.

03Dec08 — 2

Directors’ Cuts

I went to see Quantum of Solace1 yesterday evening. The plot revolves around a secret global club of financiers that’s infiltrated the highest levels of governments and their intelligence agencies. Every one of the movies—The International, Valkyrie, and Angels and Demons—depicted in first three trailers shown beforehand also centres on a conspiracy. Obviously this is a clever double-bluff by the Jews running Hollywood.

  1. It was too short, but in a “let’s have some wit and reflection like the last one” way, rather than in a “let’s have some more action sequences” way; and, for the first time in years, I sat in a cinema wanting them to turn the volume up—it wasn’t only that the theatre amps weren’t cranked; it’s a surprisingly quiet action film. The editing was interesting, but will date faster than that of The Thomas Crown Affair. [↩]
02Dec08 — 0

Clash Of The Titans

From a letter to the Halifax and Calderdale Evening Courier by Jason Smith, the Bradford Chairman of the UK Independence Party:

GREEN’S ARREST SHOWS WE ARE BECOMING DICTATORSHIP
As unaccustomed as I am to defending Tory MPs, I feel I must speak out about the arrest of Damian Green, who was apparently held for nine hours and his homes and offices searched by counter terrorism officers.

…

I would also question whether the police need to utilise nine counter terrorist officers when I’m sure they could actually be countering terrorism instead.

Obviously the government deny any knowledge of this, although this whole situation has the stench of the Neo-Labour party at work.

And the first reply online, from “Missbehave (Princess Fiona)”:

Damian Greens arrest clearly shows that not only are the tories soft on terrorism, they are now building havens for them to opperate.

Green was arrested under anti terrorism laws, he passed information of a sensitive information.

don’t dear tories bang on about law and order when you wish to be appart from the law of the land.

02Dec08 — 2

Tall People Got No Reason

If you’re over six feet in height, squeezing yourself into an economy seat on a plane can be torture, but if you’re seriously overweight and on a domestic flight in Canada, you get another seat:

The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a regulatory ruling requiring the country’s airlines to provide an extra seat — at no charge — to obese passengers and those with certain disabilities. Failing to do so, the court said, is discriminatory.

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