ISS Symphony – Timelapse of Earth
An evening pause: The music’s good, but the visuals are the reason to watch.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: The music’s good, but the visuals are the reason to watch.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: I especially like the simplicity of the music, combined with the interplay between the guitarist and the singer.
An evening pause: My only comment: This is insane!
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
An evening pause: Time for some more silliness, but in a classical form.
An evening pause: Stay with it. The last bits of dialogue are worth it.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
An evening pause: This SpaceX video taken by a camera attached to the fairing of the Falcon 9 rocket is cool not because of the video itself. Cameras on rockets have become routine, even for NASA. What is cool is that they have unveiled it using the same Johann Strauss waltz used in the move 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It shows that SpaceX is aware of the cultural impact of what they do.
Hat tip Tom Wilson, Tom Biggar, and others.
An evening pause: I love it when the performers are clearly have fun!
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman
The competition really heats up! A porno company has started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise $3.4 million so it can shoot a porno film in space by 2016.
This project is even sillier than Mars One and a bigger publicity stunt. And I think it probably has a better chance of happening!
An evening pause: Tonight’s pause is a bit different, in that it has a newsy aspect to it, illustrating the uncertainty of knowledge that makes science so difficult. It is also incredibly entertaining and funny, almost like the 1960s TV show Candid Camera. Would you be fooled like these people were?
Hat tip Phillip Oltmann.
An evening pause: Mary Elizabeth Bowden on trumpet and Naomi Woo on piano.
Hat tip Danae for suggesting the music.
An evening pause: For anyone who has ever listened to NPR, it will be hard to distinguish the satire here from reality, since the skit so well captures public radio’s often empty-headed blather disguised as profound intellectualism, framed by a strong desire to promote anything the government wants done.
Hat tip to John Harman.
An evening pause: From the 1983 reunion concert.
An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar, who wrote, “As one of the comments said: ‘You know that fine line between bravery and stupidity? Well, you passed it up about 5 miles back.’ My question is how did he get it on the planks from that narrow pier?”
Though I always approve of having the courage to push the envelope and take risks, this is not an example of that. They get away with it, but not because they used their brains. They were merely lucky.
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Hilarious video on the banality of much of youtube and our modern culture from Akilah Hughes.
Fascists: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has proposed that racketeering charges be considered against fossil fuel companies who express skepticism about human-caused global warming and dare to disagree with any environmental regulations imposed based on this theory.
As he writes today in his Washington Post op-ed:
Β The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industryβs dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute.Β A memoΒ from that meeting that was leaked to the New York TimesΒ documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise βquestions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.β
Gee, industry skeptics of global warming wish to use their first amendment rights to debate the issue! How dare they! Worse, they might use money to finance their effort! (I wonder why I and most other skeptic bloggers never get any of this cash.)
As noted at the first link, the idea that any disagreement with global warming advocacy should be criminalized is not a new thing, and has increasingly been advocated by that leftwing community. Whitehouse is now tying this to the criminalization of the use of money to express that disagreement. Tie that to the effort of the Democratic Party to rewrite the first amendment to allow government to restrict speech, and you have the basic outline of a fascist movement intent on squelching freedom.
An evening pause: Here’s Steve Martin, Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, and Brittany Hass playing a song written by Steve Martin.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: For a long time I tried and failed to find an original performance of this song by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys, but could never find it. Carrie Underwood, however, does a great Ronstadt imitation at Ronstadt’s 2014 induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Time again for some silliness.
An evening pause: Performed live at the 2014 Netherlands Military Tattoo, their version of Great Britain’s annual Proms.
Hat tip Danae.