The world’s just bringing me too much good stuff right now. Here Bobby McFerrin, responding to a comment about expectations in music, gets a crowd at the World Music Festival to essentially read music. Beautiful. Thanks and big fat kiss to Jennifer Ouellette for relaying this via G+. K gotta get backtowork bye. See Also: “It's […]
Continue reading →‘Twas an aural month at the blog. Here are October 2011’s biggest hits at Neuron Culture: Listen: Hemingway’s Short, Moving Nobel Prize Speech I have read the speech a few times before. Yet when I listened to it today for the first time, at a time when I am re- reading his stories now and […]
Continue reading →Can you use the music of Led Zeppelin or Franz Schubert as models for writing? Of course you can! So I argued this past Saturday in a talk about structuring long nonfiction pieces at ScienceWriters 2011, the meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, held this year in Flagstaff. I hope to post a […]
Continue reading →The fine writer Steve Silberman has posted a collective homage to good teachers at his blog NeuroTribes. The loveliest is his tribute to his husband Keith, who holds a PhD from Berkeley and teaches science in a high school. Lucky be his students. Steve asked several writers to answer the question, What’s the most important […]
Continue reading →I should just set up a direct feed from Biophemera, where I found this. Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo. Alexander Chen’s Conductor turns the New York subway system into a string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the program tracks and models actual train departures, accelerating the whole business so that a […]
Continue reading →I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into pitching and then beginning work on The Orchid and the Dandelion, I spent a lot of time […]
Continue reading →You take an LP album cover and hold it up in front of someone so it looks like your buddy is, say, Huey Lewis. Has to be in a library. Voila: You have a site called Library Sleevefacing, hatched by librarians at Bowling Green State University, god bless ’em. I know it’s extremely nerdy. But […]
Continue reading →Searching YouTube for a performance of one of my favorite pieces of music — and something to offer my readers while I try to finish a big feature about schizophrenia that’s been keeping me — I came across this mashup of Bach and an airport rain delay, and it took me only a few seconds […]
Continue reading →The Onion, picking up the news that Ozzy is having his genome sequenced, got an inside line, managed to get early results, and reports them thusly : Last month, the Cambridge, MA company Knome began mapping the complete DNA sequence for heavy metal singer and former reality star Ozzy Osbourne. Here are some of the discoveries made so far: His DNA contains vast sequences of mumbly code that are almost completely indecipherable Subliminal genes that must be unraveled backwards Brain unique in that it possesses not just opiate receptors, but powerful transmitters as well Gene responsible for making Jack Daniel’s unappealing in any amount less than a fifth Shares a close genetic link with no other living creature and so on.
Continue reading →Good times never seemed so good, indeed. I would never have imagined what an impossibly infectious, joyful thing that could be. It was the most incredible large-group social event I’ve ever been a part of.
Continue reading →