And not just Battle and Marsalis. The whole ensemble is Battle, Marsalis, Leonard Slatkin, The Boys Choir of Harlem and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. See/hear:

Greatness.

Silent Night – Kathleen Battle, Wynton Marsalis – YouTube

Now you may be in the mood for one of his books, and they have a list of those too. But if you want to read a sample of some of his many great works online, see this article: Christopher Hitchens: A Reading List : The New Yorker.

R.I.P.

I posted this last year, and I am happy to say there is a 2011 version too: Longform’s Best of 2011. Of course don’t wait until December: Longform.org has good long reads all year long. Bonus, now it is integrated with readability.com. Two great things that go great together.

While I am hesitant to make any claims for or against the subject matter in this photo spread, Black Americana – Vogue.it, I do think that the photos by themselves are great. I love this one in particular:

As fashion photographs, they are wonderful. In the context of social statements, their value is debatable. (I use that word in a neutral way, for I think there is room for a good debate over whenever or not these photos that attempt to portray the life of black Americans in the 1960s is a good thing or not.)

Take a look and decide for yourself, here Black Americana – Vogue.it

Because according to this, Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up) | Wired Science | Wired.com, if you are eating pastries and cookies and other sweet things, you are likely feeling tired afterwards as a result. You then compensate by drinking too much coffee and hence get on a vicious circle. If you are going to be snacking on anything, make it proteins like nuts or low fat yogurt or a bean salad.

Snack smart. See the wired.com article for more of the details.

Prince is still selling out big concerts, and he has become refined in many ways. So what I love about this video is that it reminds me of how raw and exciting he was back in the early 80s. Here he is doing “Uptown”, the great track from his breakout LP, “Dirty Mind”

As it says in wikipedia,

“Uptown” is the album’s (Dirty Mind) high point, with Prince singing about a utopian paradise where everyone is free to express themselves regardless of age, gender and skin color. This album was to set the scene emphatically for Prince’s chart domination later in the 1980s. It fused black and white musical styles in a seamless fashion and showed that Prince was not afraid to push boundaries. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times described the music from the album as “confident and highly danceable blend of post-disco funk and tasty, hard-line rock”.^[19]

We take Prince and his music almost for granted now, but he and he music was anything but at the time. It was fresh and original and raunchy and set to accomplish something unique in the world of the popular music.

The incomparable John Coltrane on tenor with a cast of great musicians performing the classic Billy Strayhorn song.

Hear, here: John Coltrane – Lush Life – YouTube

A beautiful song by the late, great Dobie Gray.

R.I.P.

Dobie Gray. Drift away – YouTube

Yes, if you signup before January 15th for this year’s Sporting Life 10K that will be held in May, it will cost you $40. But you will get a $50 gift card for Sporting Life. You will also get a great race T shirt. Much more importantly, you will help Camp Oochigeas, a summer camp for kids with cancer.

Hey, if you are going to be making New Year’s Resolutions to get fit, save money, and help others, this offer helps you hit the sweet spot.

So that it will look like this:

Scaffolding is a necessary part of city streets, and if you can’t hide it, why not feature it? For more on this, see: Coming Soon to the Sidewalks: A New Look for Scaffolding – NYTimes.com

I was excited to see three of my favourite things come together: the writer Adam Gopnik giving the Massey Lectures on the topic of Winter (all rolled up into this book). I haven’t started to read it yet, but I am looking forward too.

While not in the same league as Gopnik, last winter I was inspired to write about winter as well. If you can’t get enough about writing on the joy and beauty of winter, you can read some of what I wrote here:

Some thoughts on memory and winter

The quality of darkness and the luminosity of winter nights

One of my favourite weeks: the mild weather week in February

The joy of the cold and the dark (some thoughts)

On light at night (some thoughts, random)

If on a winter’s day you board the wrong train…

I love this. It reminds me of classic Stax, though Omawumi is Nigerian. Supremely catchy: it’s been stuck in my head all weekend.

Omawumi – If you ask me (follow link for lyrics) – YouTube

The above is by Donwood, found here, Thought You Should See This, where you can see a much better representation of it, as well as find out more about it.

Here’s Fairey’s, remixing his classic HOPE poster:

Found here: Occupy HOPE – OBEY GIANT

Here’s a taste of the visualization:

But if you want to see the original, go here: The Top 0.01% and Top 1%’s Income Share: 2008 — Visualizing Economics

It’s 2008, but if anything, it is still relevant (although the top 1% are even richer, relatively speaking, to the rest.)

Here’s Tenere Taqhim Tossam (Official Video)

and

Groove In G as part of Playing For Change

Every year, the Toronto gallery, art interiors, holds their annual event whereby they sell small pieces of their artists’ work for very reasonable prices. (For example, this great painting by Peter Andrew, from his Highway Series). I highly recommend that anyone interested in wonderful works of art check out their web site and pay them a visit here: Affordable Artwork / Canadian Art / Gallery / Framing / Canvas / Art Interiors – Toronto, ON

Paintings are going from $55 to $250. You can’t go wrong. Canadiana at its best. (And Peter Andrew’s paintings are fine examples of 21st century Canadiana.)

Are clearly not urban legends, based on this photo:

From Sachin’s Space. Sachin Agarwar parked next to Steve Jobs’ car on the day he went for an interview at Apple, years ago, and he took this photo.

His sculpture remind me of Tim Burton, with their sinister and gothic look. They’re quite remarkable, as you can see from this example:

You can find more examples and links to other work from him on the always great blog, Colossal.

I just bought this Phillipe Starck watch. I’ve been a big fan of his for years, and this is my second watch I’ve owned that was designed by him. While I love the look, I hate setting the thing. The best tutorial I found on how to set the time is here: Gadgets Page » Ask Laura: How to Set a Phillipe Starck Watch. I am going to extract the key point from her post, because I am half afraid it will get dropped and I won’t be able to find it again.

The button on the bottom left controls the mode. When you push this button one of the four modes will flash (TIM 1, TMR, ALM 1, or CHRO). Push the mode button until TIM 1 flashes. Now, you are in Time 1 Mode. You should be able to see the time, seconds and date on the face of the watch.

Hold down the mode button until the hour starts flashing. You can now set your time. The top right hand button will move you from hours to minutes to date, etc. The bottom right hand button will change the digits. When you have set it correctly, you can press the mode button (bottom left hand button) and it will start acting like a normal watch again.

In normal time mode, you can switch to TIM 2 by pressing and holding the bottom right hand button and set the dual time in the same manner.

Thanks, Laura!

P.S. If you have this site worthwhile and you’d like to buy me a coffee, you can do so here. Thanks! That’s awesome!

Through the blog Cup of Jo I found this blog, Color Me Katie. It’s filled with lots of warm and wonderful blog posts.

This one in particular, lalalala love, has a series of photos of people being photographed. Except the photos we see are like this:

As she says:

The next time you see a bunch of people getting ready to take a group picture…stand behind them. That’s where all the love is!

There are lots of good posts on her blog. Go to Color Me Katie and see.

The ING New York City Marathon is this weekend! I ran it years ago and it was one of the best things I have ever done. The organization was superb, and the New Yorkers that came out to cheer were exceptionally good. If you want to run a great race and have a great experience, I highly recommend trying to enter it.

This race in particular will be interesting because Deba Could Be the First New Yorker to Win the City’s Marathon.

She is originally from Ethopia, but she now calls New York home. If she were to win, this would be a huge boost for running in the United States. I hope she does — it’s always great for the home town representative to win — but it will be tough, for the NYC Marathon is very competitive. Let’s see! Go Deba!

There’s been alot of buzz around the work being done at Boston Dynamics on robots. Previously there was their video of BigDog

And recently this clip has been getting alot of attention, of PETMAN:

I was alarmed when I first saw this video. I don’t imagine the scientists at Boston Dynamics are blind, and they can likely see a lot of uses for PETMAN besides testing clothing. (Watch the way the man pushes the robot to show stability, for example.) If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it doing a similar support role that BigDog with the U.S. military. The first “man” into a fire fight would be PETMAN.

After being alarmed, my second thought was to think of the funders of this, namely DARPA. DARPA also was instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and needless to say, the first purpose of the Internet as DARPA saw it was not to be able to exchange cute pictures of cats on Facebook. But that is where we ended up. Likewise, I could see a similar thing happening with robots, and they could end up being domesticated, just like the Internet is. The robots will become appliances, just like all the other smart devices will be in our homes. (And very soon everything will be “smart”, be it your fridge, oven, washer, etc.) They will be an appliance that moves. They’ll carry in groceries. They’ll paint things. They’ll even vacuum. (Wait, we have that.).  We’ll end up complaining that our robots are too old and can’t do the cleaning tasks that the brand new robots can.

Will robots be used in war? Of course. But if one soldier is accompanied by a PETMAN and his enemy is accompanied by heavy artillery, my money is on the enemy. They will still be effective in many ways, but like any weaponry, armies will adapt to meet the challenge.

Before I close, I want to add that this is a really under-reported story. There are lots of stories out about the latest mobile device or the latest laptop, but the rapid advancement of robotics in the 21st century is going to be a big deal.

I used to use cURL to interface with the Twitter API, but after they changed/restricted it, that became harder. However, with a bit of investigation, I can show you how to use them together still, at least for queries. (If anyone knows a simple way of doing updates, please comment below).

For example, if you want to get my timeline, you can use

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.rss

If you want to get 200 entries, you can use:

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.rss?count=200

If you want to get 200 entries and use JSON instead of RSS, you can use:

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.json?count=200

If you want to play around, replace “blm849” with your twitter handle or someone else’s that isn’t protected.

For more on various formats and parameters, see GET statuses/user_timeline | Twitter Developers. Also make sure you check it for limits.

Here’s another option. If you want to get the statuses for the entries in my FAVS lists, you can use:

curl http://api.twitter.com/1/blm849/lists/favs/statuses.atom

If you go to the REST API Resources for Twitter Developers page, you can see other options.

Essentially you need to play around to take a command you send to the REST API (e.g. GET lists/statuses) and learn how to turn it around to a commend you can pass to twitter.com/api.twitter.com.

If you say: hmmmm, some of this is inconsistent, etc., I confess I have just started experimenting. But I wanted to get something down before I forgot about it, and I will build on it later.

Good luck!

Not to study, but to talk to students at the University of Washington. You can find highlights of the talk here: Ask Bill Gates Anything: Being a Billionaire is Strange, Microsoft Co-Founder Tells Students in Xconomy.

It’s a good read. And I suspect being a billionaire is strange. I like what he has to say about books and statistics, too.

The folks that came up with this are brilliant: ZOMBIES, RUN! (A running game & audio adventure for iOS/Android by Six to Start and Naomi Alderman). As they say:

Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base – all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones.

If you find your running routine is getting stale, this could be the perfect way to reinvigorate it. I haven’t tried this yet, but I am thinking about it, especially for winter, when running becomes that much more challenging.

Even if you disagree with me when I say that Tim Moore has a great project up on Kickstarter and you should support it, you should support it anyway for the following reasons.

If you are trying to get your own iPad magazine off the ground, you can spend alot of effort learning how to do that. Or you can take a short cut and pledge $200 or more to Tim’s Kickstarter project and you will get Xcode sample project that shows how to make everything that’s in Letter to Jane Magazine, so you can learn to make your own iPad magazine (some knowledge of Xcode required). And if you pledge $450 or more, you get the source code + full page ad. If you work for an ad agency or some communications firm or in communications in a larger organization, that is not alot of money. But it will save you alot of time, and time is money in this case. The business case is a piece of cake.

Go here and pledge: Letter to Jane Magazine for iPad by Tim Moore — Kickstarter.

Do yourself a favour: kickstart Tim’s project and you can kickstart your own  as well.

The folks that came up with this are brilliant: ZOMBIES, RUN! (A running game & audio adventure for iOS/Android by Six to Start and Naomi Alderman). As they say:

Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base – all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones.

If you find your running routine is getting stale, this could be the perfect way to reinvigorate it. I haven’t tried this yet, but I am thinking about it, especially for winter, when running becomes that much more challenging.

Paul Krugman has an insightful blog post regarding blogging and it’s effect on the study of economics: Our Blogs, Ourselves – NYTimes.com. It’s worth a read even if you are not interested in economics, for it deals with something bigger. The bigger thing is that blogging and social media is changing the way we develop new ideas. As Krugman points out, things had been changing for sometime. What blogging has done is accelerate that change and make things more open. I don’t think this is limited to blogging: any field of academic study is being affected by this. I strongly believe that.

In IT, open source technology has allowed people to create software any other technology that would not be possible otherwise. This openness made great advances possible. It now looks like social media is doing the same thing in the world of ideas. Maybe we need to change the term from “social media” to “open media”.

The Catholic Church approaches the modern world in fits and starts, it seems to me. One leader of the church that did approach the modern world and attempt to reconcile it with the Church was Pope Leo XIII. As it says in Wikipedia:

As soon as he was elected to the papacy, Leo XIII worked to encourage understanding between the Church and the modern world. When he firmly re-asserted the scholastic doctrine that science and religion co-exist, he required the study of Thomas Aquinas[16] and opened the Vatican Secret Archives to qualified researchers, among whom was the noted historian of the Papacy Ludwig von Pastor.

Leo XIII was the first Pope of whom a sound recording was made. The recording can be found on a compact disc of Alessandro Moreschi’s singing; a recording of his performance of the Ave Maria is available on the web. He was also the first Pope to be filmed on the motion picture camera. He was filmed by its inventor, W. K. Dickson, and blessed the camera while being filmed.[17][18]

Leo XIII brought normality back to the Church after the tumultuous years of Pius IX. Leo’s intellectual and diplomatic skills helped regain much of the prestige lost with the fall of the Papal States. He tried to reconcile the Church with the working class, particularly by dealing with the social changes that were sweeping Europe. The new economic order had resulted in the growth of an impoverished working class, with increasing anti-clerical and socialist sympathies. Leo helped reverse this trend.

While Leo was no radical in either theology or politics, his papacy did move the Church back to the mainstream of European life. Considered a great diplomat, he managed to improve relations with Russia, Prussia, Germany, France, England and other countries.

Pope Leo XIII was able to reach several agreements in 1896, which resulted in better conditions for the faithful and additional appointments of bishops. During the Fifth cholera pandemic in 1891 he ordered the construction of a hospice inside the Vatican. That building would be torn down in 1996 to make way for construction of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.[19]

His favorite poets were Virgil and Dante.[20]

A simple illustration of this is his appearance in this film in 1896 (1896!)

Remarkable video of a remarkable man.

Skateboarders roll across Indian cities. Beautiful in different ways.

India : Oxelo Skateboards on Vimeo

Here’s a recent study blogged about and presented by the directory of Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in the U.S. on Trends in the Distribution of Income.

Notice the focus on the 1%, including here:

What is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere is a focus on the inequalities (and more) between various economic groups. The inequality is not new, but the focus is new, and it is a result of the efforts of groups of people striving to highlight the financial difficulties that they are having. If people say it doesn’t matter, they are wrong. The ability to shift the focus in a culture matters is a big deal. It’s a big deal that the Occupy movement and the We Are the 99 Percent people have managed to achieve.

If you are having a problem with your hard disk and it is removable from your computer, one thing you can do is freeze it! Yes! Here is the method my manager used to recover data. It’s not 100% foolproof, but it will allow you to recover data you might not get otherwise.

As for mobile devices that get wet and stop working, once trick is to get a container of uncooked rice. If you have an iPhone, bury it under the rice. If you have a Blackberry or some other device with a removable battery, remove the battery and any other removable parts and put them aside while you bury the device under the rice. Leave it there for a few hours (or overnight). The rice will draw the water away from the internals of the device and may allow it to recover. (Sometimes it does: other times, it will be too far gone). After you are, throw the rice in the garbage.

The classic song by The Shirelles never gets old. The latest cover I know is Lykke Li ‘s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Here it is

P.S. 50 years ago The Shirelles were the first African-American girl group to top the Billboard Hot 100 with this wonderful piece of music. Something to celebrate, for sure.

MAS DES DAMES LA DAME 2008 was given 91 points by Wine Spectator and rated number 1 in terms of value for money for wines from Languedoc. It’s made up of grenache, syrah, and cariginan and while some of these reviews talk about it’s spice and fruit, what I like about it is its earthy/peaty qualities. It wouldn’t appeal to everyone, but if you tire of excessive fruit forward wines from places like Australia, try this.

How awesome is that? Truly awesome! Go buy one here: ThinkGeek :: pi*z*z*a

So good….

Neko Case – This Tornado Loves You from Letterman

Well, this chart provided by Matt Yglesias (99 Percent Inequality Sign Occupy Wall Street) sums it up neatly:

Who are the 1%? The rich, of course. The 1% get richer, and the 99% does not.

This is a brilliant mashup: Ian Wojtowicz
overlaid the NASA map of the world showing where people live (in yellow) with Facebook usage (in black). Brazil is a big user of Orkut, so not surprised about that. Eastern Europe and most of Asia also use other social networks, as I suspect is true of Africa. For a bigger version, go to Station: The UnFacebook World