Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Quite mesmerizing

Another short video by Cristobal Vila, this one about the ubiquity of the Fibonacci Series and The Golden Ratio in nature:

Wouldn't you wish your work space looked like this?



So would M. C. Escher.

(HT: God Plays Dice.)

Copy/improve/paste, part 5: But he just kept right on...

If someone did a scientific survey on this I would probably be in the minority, but I like Lauryn Hill's cover of Killing Me Softly much, much more than Roberta Flack's original. Which I like a lot.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

I am whatever I say I am

When someone says "I am an X kind of person," the value of X is usually a lie. Oftentimes, however, it's informative as to what the truth is. For example, sometimes it's wishful thinking, in which case if you ask yourself "What kind of person would want to be X?" you'll be on the right track.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

A sentimental journey back in time

Any time I visit a post office to do anything more trivial than buy a book of stamps, get checked at the airport by TSA officers, or deal with the immigration office in any capacity, I get a visceral reminder of my childhood days. Seeing as I grew up in Poland under communist dictatorship, this is not a good thing.

Friday, May 18, 2012

LaTeX fail

From the mathematician Jeff Shalllit:
One problem with the proliferation of "open access" journals is the decrease in quality. A good example is this "proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem by a guy who seems to specialize in rather eccentric papers. This paper was passed around to great laughter at the van der Poorten memorial conference in Australia.
Now I am completely incompetent to judge the content of this paper, but I think I'll take Shallit's word for it. The atrocious quality of its LaTeX formatting is, I think, strong Bayesian evidence that Shalllit is right. The LaTeX code in the paper is hilariously bad. It's just fireworks of insanity. To any of you who have ever compiled a paper in LaTeX, taking a look at it should be good entertainment.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Overheard in Washington Square Park

"And then you become your own Goebbels."
Fuck me, that would be a horrible fate indeed. To all my friends: if you ever notice me muttering strange things to myself and if in my ramblings you can distinctly recognize words like Herrenvolk or Lebensraum, please let me know I need help.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Copy/improve/paste, part 4: In the name of the father

This is part 4 of the little series about great songs with even better covers. It may blow your mind; I guarantee you it will be the most incredible music story you have ever heard.

Since about the early 90s, I was a fan of the Polish rock-punk-ska band called Kult, established in the early 80s and led by a singer-songwriter-saxophone player Kazimierz Staszewski, famous in Poland as Kazik. About that time, the band released a record called "Tata Kazika" ("Kazik's Dad") consisting solely of covers of songs written by Kazik's father Stanislaw Staszewski in the 1950s and 60s. The songs were incredible. Their lyrics were (still are) the very best I have ever heard in either of the two languages I know well. Kult's music was also very good. At the time though, as pretty much everyone in Poland, I had no idea who Stanislaw Staszewski was or that Kazik had a dad who was himself a musician.

During World War II, Stanislaw Staszewski was a soldier in the underground anti-Nazi Home Army. As a participant of the Warsaw Uprising, he was arrested by the SS and shipped to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Germany. While in the camp, he contracted pneumonia. The camp guards mistakenly thought he had died, and threw him into the heap of dead bodies that were to be burned later. However, a package addressed to him had arrived at the camp, which prompted one of the inmates to go look for him. That's how it was discovered that he wasn't quite dead. He had managed to survive until the camp was freed by the Americans. He then returned to Poland, became an architect, got married and had a little son named Kazik. He also started writing songs that he would perform at house parties for his friends. Exiled from Poland by the communist, he and his wife left for France. He left his family though, and went on to live by himself in Paris, still writing songs, God only knows for whom. He died there in 1973.

His son Kazik grew up without a father, and, for most of his life, passionately hated him for abandoning his mother. That's part of why, even though he knew his music and was a musician himself, Kazik never touched his dad's songs until the 1990s. Another reason for this reluctance was that Kazik was at the time a deeply religious man (a Jehovah's Witness, though not baptized), and his father's lyrics were dark, depressing and quite vehement in their denial of the existence of God. They were exactly what you would expect from writings of someone who once lay dying in a heap of naked bodies destined for a crematory furnace. They were also magnificent.

At any rate, at some point Kazik changed his mind and his band made two records with covers of his dad's songs ("Tata Kazika" and "Tata 2"). Some time later he also changed his mind about religion and became quite an outspoken atheist.

Below the fold are two versions of the song Celina, which is a story of love, jealousy and murder, set in a poor and crime-ridden neighborhood of pre-war Warsaw. The cover isn't actually the official version from the "Tata Kazika" record; rather, it appears to be a private performance by Kazik, but whatever, it doesn't matter.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Clever words about stupid words

The stupid stuff is this essay by Stephen King. Of which Mike Munger had this to say:
So my man wants the government to both "fix global warming" and "lower the price of gasoline". Nice work there, Steve. Your political economy is way scarier than your fiction.