Music

Metric Remix

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One of my favorite newer bands is Metric. “Help I’m Alive” is one of their biggest songs.

I follow them on Facebook and recently they had a contest where you could remix this song, and could win a grand and a chance at some sort of record deal. The remixes are nothing short of amazing. Take a listen here if you are interested. I am blown away at how talented some of the people are that remixed this song.

“Cameras,” Matt and Kim

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my water comes straight from the tap
and those bottles are all just for show
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I see that we’re made of
more then blood and bones
see we’re made of
sticks and stones

don’t forget to breathe
need locks for your keys
don’t forget to breathe now
forget to breathe now

The Matt and Kim song “Cameras” is everywhere and good thing, too, because I like it. Definitely dance-around-your-room-or-tap-your-toes-in-line-at-the-store time. Here’s the YouTube “official version” (can’t figure out the embedding url) and here is their fun and vibrant website. Posted on the website is the following observation from the Matt and Kim Twitter feed: “This guy at the pharmacy made it very clear to me that snow is a four letter word.”

Do I have to Twitter now? I generally don’t like it. It makes me feel like a stalker with ADD. (Full disclosure: I used to Twitter. Twitter microfiction I called it. Deleted it. May revive it. Who knows? And, yeah, I know you can’t recover an old account. I saved my microfiction on – wait for it – PAPER….)

Don’t forget to breathe now….no time for cameras we’ll use our eyes instead….

UPDATE: Okay, maybe today isn’t the best day to express my sentiments toward Twitter given Charles Cameron’s post below. It’s definitely a cool technology but I don’t know if it is for me.

An Iridology of the Sciences?

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

I for one am delighted to know that we can now play around with the iridology of the sciences, using the software available on the Science-Metrix Ontology Explorer site to view which fields have journals which cross-link to journals in other fields…

Seriously — that lower image is of the Field Citation Wheel that you can find, suitably enlarged for easy viewing, on that site.

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And it’s heartening for me to know, for instance — taking a closer look at the segment of that image that’s roughly east north-east — that scientific journals do have some links on their pages to works of theology or philosophy:


Engineering, you’ll notice, has more links than history, philosophy, theology, the social sciences (even counting them twice), economics, business, the arts and humanities combined.

My own field, theology, has to share its thin segment with philosophy, and you can guess how small the number of links to articles on Islamic apocalyptic probably are…

Which is, in part, why I wonder whether a project like the ETH’s Living Earth Simulator will really manage to map such things as, well, a possible outbreak of global jihadist Mahdism and its consequences.

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But then I look at another gorgeous graphic from the same source, focusing in on a part of the network of knowledge that interests me, and I can just faintly make out, lower left, entirely isolated, the field of music…

What splendid isolation! That’s all of Bach, mind you and all the Beatles, too.

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Seriously, though:

  • It’s fascinating to be able to see how the various branches of knowledge cross-reference each other.
  • Visual data representation is a gorgeous, fantastic, field.
  • Mapping the all-of-everything is an irresistable lure for keen minds
  • I’m betting the humanities will prove to be at least as good at it as the sciences.
  • And I recall, not without a pang of regret, the time when my beloved Theology was Queen of the Sciences, and one might converse with Abelard on the streets of Paris…