Today, as “they” (being a group of scientists from around the world) announced two new elements for the periodic table, I am adding yet another online-only resource to learn more about it.
On Slate.com, Sam Kean provides some interesting, sometimes offbeat, context for each of the elements with his “Blogging the Periodic Table.”
Between Kean’s blog and the University of Nottingham’s YouTube series, you’ll be surprised how fun high-school chemistry can be.
I never learned the periodic table. I’m not proud of this, but I can’t go back in time to high school and change my course load now, can I?
What I can do, though, is watch the University of Nottingham School of Chemistry’s Periodic Table of Videos on YouTube and atone for my irresponsible educational decisions. Now I know what Strontium is.
I tried listening to songs about the periodic table, but they didn’t help at all.
Thanks to openculture.com for pointing the Periodic Table of Videos out. If you’re cheap and like smart stuff, openculture.com is for you.
Craig Ferguson weighs in on Coldplay’s new song (starts at two minutes in):
Thanks to my friend Joe Lehman for this. See who Coldplay’s ripped off now here.
Coldplay made a point of crediting Peter Allen on their new song “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall,” but this
doesn’t sound like this:
It sounds like this:
Congratulations Sacados! You’ve won the who’s-going-to-sue-Coldplay-now sweepstakes.
Don’t feel bad for Flip founder Jonathan Kaplan. Cisco may have killed the digital video camera he created, but he’s not looking back in anger. Instead, he’s moving forward with a chain of grilled cheese restaurants. David Pogue’s got the information.
If you want a primer on what’s so great about Schoenberg–and what’s so bad–you can do worse than this:
Schoenberg scholarship has only recently started addressing the problems that Gould and Menuhin brought up here over five decades ago. It just goes to show you how theorists’ focus on post-tonal coherence, and musicologists’ obsession with finding links to the classical-music past, has held us back from really getting at how this music sounds.
The open-mindedness that Menuhin displays is striking. So is the clarity of both performers’ descriptions of the music; their no-nonsense approach lets their insights shine through. This is a master class on how to talk about “difficult music” without pretension and with depth.
After a six-minute debate on the merits of Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy, they play it. Look who’s got his part memorized:
Ann Powers complained recently that a popular-music critic has never won the Pulitzer for criticism, but with resignation:
This snub is par for the course for those of us lucky to do a job that’s long been derided as extraneous AND self-indulgent,” fumes Powers, “a substitute for the real mojo musicians possess. Marginalized within most newspapers as neither money-making (film critics bring in ads) or enriching (get thee to the symphony, philistines!), and scorned by many living the ‘rock and roll lifestyle’ as overly pointy-headed, pop critics are caught in a hallway between the high and the low.
If she doesn’t like the nods for criticism, she should look at the music choices. This year, Zhou Long won for his opera Madame White Snake (it’s not what you think) based on a Boston performance that received lukewarm reviews. This in a year that saw some pretty amazing rock albums (not Contra; see Pitchfork’s list, or NPR’s).
Although the Pulitzer committee has given lifetime achievement awards to Bob Dylan and Hank Williams (and Milton Babbitt), no popular music has ever won the music prize.
Wynton Marsalis did win for his jazz oratorio Blood on the Fields. But even that piece was within the bounds of a concert-music genre. (Last year, by the way, Jennifer Higdon won for her violin concerto.)
This isn’t about the Pulitzer people getting hip or loosening up. It’s about them acknowledging that as concert music grows less and less satisfying intellectually, rock and popular music is picking up the slack (and has been for a while).
On Monday, Zhou Long won the Pulitzer Prize’s music award for Madame White Snake, his epic Tawny Kitaen bio-opera.
Next up for Zhou: an oratorio based on Loni Anderson’s life with Burt Reynolds.
Last weekend, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s board voted to restructure under Chapter 11; now, the New Mexico Symphony in Albuquerque is closing up shop.
One musician called out Board of Directors Vice-Chair George Boerigter, saying that less than two weeks ago the musicians were told the symphony was headed toward Chapter 11 reorganization.
Talk of financial trouble dates back to 2008, and board member George Boerigter claims that the orchestra didn’t even have the funds available to restructure under Chapter 7.
Earlier this month, the Syracuse Symphony also folded, citing an inability to raise money for even the rest of the season, and the Detroit Symphony, while avoiding bankruptcy, ended a strike that saw musicians’ salaries cut to offset crushingly large debt.
The company specifically calls out Google for withdrawing Grooveshark’s App from its Android Market. In a brilliant rhetorical move, it compares its service with Google’s own YouTube, both in its relationship to the DMCA and in its business practices to avoid piracy.
The letter, available on Digital Music News, was probably cover as Grooveshark released its own third-party Android app on Monday.
Clearly, David Pogue’s a disappointed fan of the now-defunct Flip video camera, as am I. In his column this week, he revealed some inside information that makes the shutdown of Flip even more disappointing: apparently, the company was preparing to launch FlipLive, a new camera that would allow you to share video over the internet in real time:
Think how amazing that would be. The world could tune in, live, to join you in watching concerts. Shuttle launches. The plane in the Hudson. College lectures. Apple keynote speeches.
Or your relatives could join you for smaller, more personal events: weddings, birthday parties, graduations, first steps.
The most plausible reason is that Cisco wants the technology in the Flip more than it wants the business. Cisco is, after all, in the videoconferencing business, and the Flip’s video quality— for its size and price—was amazing. Maybe, in fact, that was Cisco’s plan all along. Buy the beloved Flip for its technology, then shut it down and fire 550 people.
Recently, I used a Flip video camera to shoot this:
And this:
Flip cameras are popular with journalists, and I can see why: I use ours to share the familial goings-on with friends and relatives all over the world. I’ve recorded ballet and violin recitals, trips the to the Met Museum and Prince Edward Island, and uploaded them all to Facebook or YouTube.
We got our first Flip video shortly after they arrived on the market, a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. The video quality was underwhelming, but it became our go-to camera (period) because it was just so easy to use, and so relatively easy to share clips online. Vanessa even uses it to document her performances and rehearsals.
David Pogue reported this week that Flip was readying a camera that would stream live to the internet. That’s amazing, and it’s not going to happen. (More on that here).
Last Christmas, we gave my son his own Flip video. He should hold on to that; it’s a collector’s item now.
Mark Likes Music 
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